senescence raze "it is remarkable that after a seemingly miraculous feat of morphogenesis, a complex metazoan should be unable to perform the much simpler task of merely maintaining what is already formed." — george williams every camera has a telescopic eye and in it the trees lean to the left all those skinny necks marking the path ahead and the path behind the density of darkness and leaves with nothing left to light the way each step another cellular refraction wire on mylar soft shuffling the rivets that support this tensile load buckling beneath the strain iron oxide stains marking the cylinders lentigo senilis spread out across the landscape of each small soul letting life leak out from some soft place below the heart holler if you hear me help me orient myself in the muddle of my mind 210815 ... unhinged i curl up in my bed immobile 210815 ... unhinged i was reading the chapter of homewaters about the kelp forests in puget sound and the author talked about the 'senescent' pieces that break off of the dying kelp and feed the bottom dwellers in the sound the pieces i leave behind potential food 210826 ... epitome of incomprehensibility Senex was the name of a farandola - imaginary microscopic creatures inhabiting human mitochondria - in Madeleine L'Engle's A Wind in the Door (the most Magic School Bus-like entry of her time travel series, though more serious). His species had to grow roots in order to "Deepen": they couldn't move as much, but they could do a sort of mind-reading, deeper than mere movement. I guess it's all tied into the age = wisdom idea. Which isn't always an exact equation. I think you have to work at it. But there are general costs and compensations of aging. I'm 33 and physically able, so mobility isn't a problem now, but there are some areas where I don't have as much energy as I did ten years ago. On the other hand, better self-knowledge makes up for a lot. I know now why - and sometimes how - to work around my attention regulation issues. But that's just being organized, which isn't the same as being wise. I'm still far from practical, generally. Maybe being committed too much to practicality wouldn't be wise. It would need to be balanced with other values. Eh, I'm a bit out of my depth with philosophy. But I was thinking about what unhinged wrote here and what tender_square brought up in the_education_of_e_o_i (virtual waves of encouragement to you both). 210831 what's it to you? who go blather from