It’s past noon before I emerge from my lair in Heddernheim, where I reveled in the mundane tasks of laundry, eating, writing, and just hanging out for the sake of relaxing for a minute. When I finally jumped aboard a train, I had been already entertaining the idea of just staying put, but that option would have me miss an opportunity to experience something that I would regret once I returned home. I wonder why I so easily take for granted where I live in Phoenix, but maybe I don’t take that city for granted after all. True, I’m no longer inspired to photograph it and justify that by telling myself that the repeating patterns of conformity offer no novelty for my eyes to explore, but I do still like being there for the incredible winter climate and being well-positioned to explore places beyond our desert home.

Motion where old meets new and motion where we move within and without versus standing in place staring at the same shadow theater in our homes that replaced the cave. The world is not so black and white that all of reality can be gleaned by witnessing it from afar. Our ancestors and contemporaries have left, but there are countless artifacts telling us where they’ve been and giving us clues about where they might have gone. Engage yourself on a path of randomized branches where you discover things that have always been there but remained unseen, or maybe an object right before you change your path as you navigate obstacles. Of course, if you are more comfortable finding the hidden landmines in your head, sit still, do not move, convince yourself that you’ve seen it all, or at least know it all, and you will be sure to fall off the ledge into your own madness.

A piece of fabric that stands between sanity and empathy has been able to divide peoples of various lands in a way that fascist thugs and religious zealots have done in the past using violence and coercion, not for the sake of public health but to cleanse a people of thoughts deemed poisonous to various regimes. How this small article that temporarily shields the nose and mouth has been equated to those on crusades, purges, holocausts, and persecution can only be a testament to how few enemies people have aside from the demons of insecurity that live within their heads.

You are not the lonely “Ferkelkraut” living alone outside of society and culture unless you removed yourself when you found the world intimidating to your limited knowledge of how the world should operate in a perfect state. Life is not a vacuum where you choose the exotic elements that you deem worthy to enter your universe. You are, for a moment, alive in the chaotic soup of constant motion compared to this weed that will never stand up and make choices that benefit itself and others in its proximity. You may choose to be a noxious weed, but should your raging fear and anger about lacking the means to participate on a group level cripple you, maybe you should choose to live the life of a plant fixed in place.

You will never see these paving stones where I have seen them. You cannot know if they were hot or cold or exactly what the color of the plant life was between them. You can only make assumptions, not based on reality, but using your bias to infer some value or other. This is the mistake of those who cannot move across and through the fabric of reality as they attempt to define this constantly moving plane of perception for others. The stone we see today is not the same stone we saw yesterday, and to reference it as the never-changing archetype that should define all other stones must certainly be a sign of man unhinged.

This is where we humans go when group psychosis afflicts a simple majority. We stumble over the stones that once guided us into reason, empathy, and compassion at a time when progress was hailed as all-important. Tripping over our better selves, the angriest among us snatch those who attempted to flee to safety, as what happened here with Hermann Lismann, who at 60 years old in 1938 fled to France only to be held outside of Paris in the village of Drancy until he was transferred to Majdanek Concentration Camp in Poland and murdered for his desire to live and believe the way he saw fit. We flirt with these kinds of insanity when we start to believe that external forces are the cause for the conditions we’ve inflicted upon ourselves through our fear of what we don’t understand.

You mustn’t understand me nor desire to define me. That I don’t fit your limited ideas of what and how reality has shaped you doesn’t offer you license to demand my conformity. It is not the immigrant, gay person, atheist, black, brown, or other among us that drives your fear; it’s the small and petty little animal within who is afraid of the beasty stealing your life or nest. You require therapy to fit into a fluid world that moves with the seasons, years, and the endless march of time that only goes forward.

What lies ahead is not the edge of the world where you will fall into nothing at the end of the trail; the nothing you fear is where your mind falls into uncertainty because you’ve convinced yourself that what might be ahead would certainly change you beyond recognition.

But what if down that path you find an incredible restaurant packed full of those others you think you abhor, and instead of stealing your identity, gender, orientation, rights, or culture, they welcome you to their table and share a story that has you laughing at how their uncertainty also gave them anxiety about joining the party. After a glass of the local favorite drink, you find yourself understanding that this person doesn’t have the power to destroy every belief system you have grown crusty in but instead offers you the chance to let down your guard. To be among strangers and sharing will most certainly leave you with impressions that move with you bending the path you believed you were on.

You know nothing about this man, nothing. Okay, you know he’s balding, bearded, middle-aged, with eyes that require help to see things clearly, but what else do you know? Will you like him or hate him? Should I tell you anything about him, it is my bias and personal filters that will tell you those things I want to believe him to be, but the reality is that he may well be someone altogether different from you. Not to say he won’t still be himself, but you bring yourself to this party and only you will ever know the things shared with him that might be exchanged between you two.

Now, head back into the night. You’ve crossed a bridge that offers you a new view of your former certainty. Maybe you’ve started learning that being stuck at the bottom of this dark river in the mud is not the ideal place to be when you could be in the brightness of sunshine, rowing in the flow of those enjoying the opportunity to find these special places of discovery, awareness, and acceptance?