Volume 1. Chapter 18. Change

Creation

In the beginning, I drew myself in my own image. I am a cog, both compelled and compelling.

Potential

All things tend toward stasis, so if I have power, then I’m constrained.

Tripartite organism

The active, the intermediate, and the passive are in an organic dance, bonded for life.

Flora

Plants sprout without regard for humans in the darkest soil, various and prolific. Given sun and water, a garden, unattended, grows wild, resuming its natural orders. Like us, plants don’t hold still, but balance between earth and heaven.

Growth patterns

Memories lay over memories like the steady accumulation of topsoil in a healthy field. Tree rings show a pattern of seasons. Onion scales show a fullness of weeks.

Autonomic responses

Autonomic motor activities are not generally in control of the mind, per se; in the skull, the hypothalamus gets input from the limbic system and controls heart rate, digestion, respiratory rate, pupillary response, urination, and sexual arousal. This is the primitive part of the brain, the part that likes or dislikes without thinking, the part that recognizes the familiar and that reacts instinctually to any fancy or threat.

Bricklaying

The foundations are bricks, small bricks overlaying each other to trace out lines for walls built up layer by layer, each lifted and placed by hand. City walls and grand edifices can be built like this, one small brick at a time.

Gradual perception

A viewer doesn’t register the whole at a glance but constructs a picture a piece at a time, gradually integrating and reaffirming these pieces in the brain as the eyes roam from point to point following a path or pattern laid down by the artist.

Landscape

Objects near us pass by quickly while a distant mountain is fixed in place above the horizon.

Collision

Jagged forms collide while the calm center fails to interact at all.

Lightning

Brilliance in a storm. A round moon shines through gray. Lightning moves quickly, jagged and effective.