Eternity in each.

There are mugs on our desks and atop our drawers. Empty mugs, but enough to keep these things weighed down. They held tea or coffee or something, held over a good novel or an essay or some conversation. Held over to augment and reflect a goodness that can be felt beneath an accompanying blanket, and there is such goodness there. I have this collection of mugs now that I am almost keeping to know that the odd, dusty residue at their bottoms still lays low to show the warmth that was transferred into moments. I'm keeping them down here and adding more.

What we see is what we are.

Perhaps I don't know much about photography.

Some of the photos I like the most are those where the figure within is blurred in motion. Where what we are looking at, now pinched between our fingers, is the capturing of two separate moments, gnawing at and into each other.

Perhaps I don't know much about time.

The way forward is sometimes the way back.

To celebrate, my workmates and I became Secret Santa's for one another. We would prepare gifts and leave them behind in the back room for their recipient to open the next time they might come in to work. This is an odd thing, because it is best to open a gift when with the person who is giving it, but the rules of secrecy do not allow it, not until the gift has already been opened.

Mine came in a handled paper gift bag, stapled shut with several dozen efficient fasteners to prevent a getting in and a getting out. I left those and tore the bag, choosing another entrance for myself. And I withdrew a Labyrinth. I small game in which I have to balance a shiny orb across treacherous holes along a shifting platform. A labyrinth, with no accompanying note from whomever I was receiving it. Given to me anonymously. Hmm, I thought.

Hmm. I think it is a dangerous thing to open. But, I am sure, I owe it to the benefactor to try, though rickety, and keep balance enough to reach the end.

If you hold a cat by the tail.

Someone I know was telling me about someone they know who believes that all things learned should be self-taught. The only things worth being educated on are those you do yourself. Learning through doing, the only way to be taught. Experience. That most brutal of teachers, as someone else has once said.

But there is instead a person, the quietest, who deigns to avoid such brutality. This one sits in a comfortable, aged chair with a warm mug, listening to every story told about activities never personally partaken. These stories and their secondhand characters, gathered only through such tales, are the ones come to love or loath, who are emulated, who are repaired. Watching the lives of others swirl in a swift vividness, never noticing the passing of his own sun or the changing of his own moon. All of what he learns comes through thoughts and imagery, from hearing others' events, shouts beyond his walls, and wondering at how he himself would act while never doing so. Such a wondering, it is supposed, determines his outlook in case of application. This is a person who sits still, skin grown taught with inactivity, but feels a weathering windburn to have travelled lifetimes. Feeling without doing, but a life, the same vehicle, permitting such similar brutality.

Here, perhaps, whether one does or does not makes no matter. What comes will come as it may. Perhaps, perhaps, that person there, sitting secure, should stand and step into that what is coming. Its waves are breaching nonetheless. That step may be an entrance into a fatality or into a rejuvenation, where both might ease the creak in those bones. To be wondering in the dark keeps them creaking all the more.