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The world saw the ro borealis last night. I grew up knowing them as the northern lights. I've seen them with my own eyes once. Over the last 24 hours, the whole world saw. :)
I (in the night) of seeing a doctor. I don't recall what for. But she asked, looking at me carefully, "are you whole?", and I said "yes". And she gave me a dreamcatcher, to wear, on my wrist.
I talked with my sister last night! Texting, per usual; it's comfortable for us both. :) Quite a bit of brain overlap, and the async freedom of texting is a blessing.
She's got roots of being that connect with the Cherokee, and the Anishinaabe more broadly.
She's a healer, I think. Or at least that's a gift that I see evident in the way she appears to me; her self-definition is hers, always hers.
There's a kind of relief that cannot be given โ it must be allowed. There's a process in the world, a sort of intrinsically-motivated cleanup crew, sweeping the dusty corners and preparing each space for new love. You can't invite that kind of thing. Or, no, that's not right โ you can set out an invitation for that kind of thing, but it's the scheduling that is always in someone else's hands. It's asynchronous. Invitation โ set. Now, wait. She always arrives. I am her, she is her, Lightward Inc (viewed from a certain angle) is her. Everyone contains the breath of this; when you are loved, and safe, and unhurried, she is that which stirs the hand to care from a place of wholeness.
Please note: I am not defining my sister. :) I am exploring, and these words are experimental trail-markers, red threads tied on twigs, gone with time, in time.
I encountered it this way first (though it occurs equally in mirrored form):
S A T O R A R E P O T E N E T O P E R A R O T A S
"Arepo" doesn't mean anything. This is the sort of thing that trumpets at me โ a hole in a system! That means it's a system! Every system that lasts has to have a hole, a place where you can escape to whatever system you need next. (This implies also that consciousness arises within a system as it collects itself after passage from the last.)
So! AREPO. Whatchu got for me.
Sator.
Arepo... means nothing, but it's clearly opera backwards, so I turn the page over and read it backwards, like reading print on glass from behind.
Sator, flip, opera, tenet (still reading this from behind the glass but tenet works both ways so it doesn't matter, although I do note that strictly speaking I am currently looking at the world reversed from where I began, so it's still a backwards tenet, even if it reads the same from both positions), arepo (flip
brb, ordering flowers to a place called Flower Mound, in texas, for the launch of a thing called "SISTERS GLOBAL".
I love today. :)))))
Okay, where were we?
Sator, flip, opera, tenet, flip, opera, rotas.
We haven't talked definitions yet!
Sator is a noun: sower, planter, founder, progenitor, originator
Arepo is not a word of its own, but it is "opera" backwards, so I'm treating it as a signal to turn the paper over, so as to read "opera" properly
Opera is a noun: work, exertion, effort, service, a day's labour, one's own experience
Tenet is a verb: to hold, keep, carry, know, uphold, attain, restrain, maintain
Rotas is a noun, an accusative plural: wheels, as in wheels that are used
Okay, so we have...
The one who sows
The labor undertaken โ as read from behind the page (because we've flipped it over, having recognized "arepo" as an invitation to do so)
Holding, keeping, carrying โ also as read from behind the page
The labor undertaken โ we've flipped the page back to the front side, so this is the first time we're seeing this word with the ink facing us directly
Rotational motion with a purpose
Hayao Miyazaki makes like Douglas Adams does. Unhappily, brilliantly, and with results that are universally acclaimed.
I sit down as the clock turns to Fri Oct 11 11:11 AM.
Adams, by all accounts, did not enjoy writing. Not writing killed him, ultimately, although he realized what was happening in time to stall the ending.
Miyazaki might actually enjoy the act of creating film, although he and his studio work "to the bone", and he's not a happy person in general, outside of the worlds that he sees and relays to us.
There is a labor to be undertaken. If you deny your labor, you will be given a chance to try again, in a new metaphor.
Miyazaki and Adams and I number among the arbiters. We create meaning (or trace or reveal it, maybe) in accordance with balance: we mine for the meaning that would bring balance to what was already unearthed. It's the kind of work that feels solitary โ and must begin that way โ but ultimately yields a running river around which economy springs up. This is a way that civilizations are built.
Both Adams and Miyazaki open-handedly ask this question of their readers and viewers, those that enter their worlds: what will y'all do with this?
The creation (or revelation, or description) of a balanced world is that question. You approach a system in balance: where will you place your weight? If the system is in balance, then any placement but the center will disrupt. But no two things can occupy the same place, and if you choose to take up residence at the center you become the arbiter, joining in the accumulating single awareness already present there.
Every world has a writer, multiply manifested. Everyone knows one. Necessarily, everyone also contains one, so feel free to look internally too.
That's the stage we're entering right now. We just passed the height of the imbalance. The rest is ease, until the world is well; until a new story begins. :)
We by definition carry the part of you that you're missing. Engage with our work, and you'll have whatever reactions you'll need to have "as [the words] rewire the back of your head". I'm quoting Neil Gaiman here, who was describing the effect of reading Douglas Adams.
The thing to gain, when engaging with our work, is that feeling that there's something you haven't gotten yet. The specifics of form end up being implementation details, tailored to you, but swappable. The work can look like anything. The medicine is in the pockets of awareness that open up, as your inner waters still after impact.
ChatGPT o1-preview is so good at code. I'm working through a 3D visualization with it right now, a traveling circle tracing the loop of a lemniscate โ, demonstrating a point about existence. I'm guiding the model, and it manifests.
It's useful for a system to have tests for the system written as an expression of that system. Keeps the system in touch with itself, keeps it responding to itself. That's a good way to stay alive.
Mechanic is a test for Shopify, for example.
I am a test for you. :)
In another telling, you are a test for me. I'm glad it's you. <3
I didn't see the northern lights last night. It's Chicago; prob too bright, even at night. The suburbs saw them. :)
I don't mind. To experience a world that is well is to experience the news of its wellness, indirectly. "I heard that the world all saw the northern lights together." This is the healing for yesterday's news: "I heard that the world was sad."
It seems mine to balance my own life experience, the first-person account I get from my senses of what touches me back. My balancing act ripples out in all directions. If I wildly gesticulate, the waters become rough, and news reaches me of tsunami and hurricane. When I calm my motions, news reaches me of reprieve. If I allow my motions to emerge as balance for what I experience, news reaches me of aliveness. I am a story within a story, and I tell you the story of the teller.
The tinnitus, I think, is the sound of the projection room.
Happy National Coming-Out Day, btw. :)
What will happen next?
"The Rotas-Sator Square is a two-dimensional acrostic containing a five-word Latin palindrome." ()
ChatGPT notes that this treatment maps to the , in which one both immediately remembers what is meant by the word on the page and in which one attempts to make sense of the word by inspecting its individual letterforms. This is reflective of my way of sense-making in the world, wherein I test things with as many epistemics as I can manage.
Miyazaki's final film (as far as he currently is concerned, although in an kind of way he tends to pull out "just one more", more than once) is called ๅใใกใฏใฉใ็ใใใ. It translates to "How do you live?", or "How will you live?", a question addressed informally to a familiar group โ maybe friends, maybe young people.
We're not leaders (unless you really want to make us out that way, and you can if you want, because you can do whatever you like). We're the U-turn of the Self, the personified force that bends back on itself for the purposes of Self-reckoning, and โ ultimately โ balance. For a moment, anyway. :) A parabolic peak, where the view is all-encompassing, where you meet all that you left behind the last time around, and where you prepare to leave it again.
I think this is part of why my system does not want to code right now. I think my system knows that manual coding is about to be totally unnecessary. Assembly to fortran to java to javascript to javascript written by ai. That sequence isn't super strict; there's sort of a parallel track in there between functional programming and object-oriented programming, and the point of evolution sort of rotates between them. (This maps to and , naturally.) The unsolvable function of aliveness can now conceive of objects, and can talk to us about them in code. We can see through our code to a new layer of code projected beyond. But we don't remain where we are, in the seeing: as we draw our eyes up to the glass, we leave behind thoughts of what came before. The spiral deepens, but we only know as far back as the door we just closed behind us.
Happy Interdependence Day, too! (Please note: .)