Chestnuts roasting over an open memory

I don’t have a lot of rituals. I have a few patterns, like my morning routine, but they aren’t filled with any meaning. They are functional patterns, designed to take me from initial State A to End State B with an efficient number of steps, established through many years of practice and slow, gradual, mostly subconscious modification.

But tonight I picked up chestnuts. Honest-to-God, 100% edible, roastable-just-like-the-song chestnuts. And I will roast them, probably Thursday night, and I will eat them. And it will be ritual, a welcoming sign of the Christmas season approaching. Continue reading

Movember update: mighty fine stache

Once you have broken the overwrought pattern, the ends of it wave back and forth, madly trying to connect to other things. New patterns form, weak and unsupported, very tenuous and temporary. Strange insights may be had at this time, as the patterns are formed in your mind, and it feels freer than ever, frighteningly, exhilaratingly, intriguingly so.

The interesting thing about a spiral — even one that you are out of control in! — is that it comes close to the point where you were before. You can see it, just over there. If the spiral isn’t regular and smooth, the points may even cross over, intersecting but with trajectories in opposite directions. You can linger at that point, but the movement won’t be in the same direction.

Life seems like that, sometimes, composed of moments that are similar to the past, occasionally repeating but never quite going the same way. Continue reading