I am not one who looks back, longing for what was, or what might have been— that way of seeing sets me up for self-criticism, which dims my spirit rather than lifting it.
Nor am I inclined to prop myself up with false images, finding them equally damaging to the essence of who I am, and what I have to express in this short span of a life.
Still, it feels natural from time to time to cast back in memory, to long for a simpler era— which, for me, would be the mid-twentieth century.
Then I shake myself awake. How could the 1950s or ’60s have been simple?
I won’t insult your intelligence by rehearsing the broader strokes of that time. It’s enough to say this:
In retrospect, it’s easy to long for what we label innocence— a time before life felt weighted with adult responsibility, before decades of accumulated knowing, before facts and figures revealed the depth of our impact on the Earth, on one another, on other species.
And I find myself wondering: was there ever a moment when ignorance was truly bliss?
What puts a smile on my face, causes my heart to leap, are encounters with the wild.
Whether face to face with a mountain lion or pressing my nose to a tuberose flower, a warmth spreads through me like liquid honey, waking every circuit, bringing my best self fully online.
Encounters with human beings can be joyful, too— especially when that person meets me heart to heart, light shining through their eyes, as if the moment is far richer than a simple greeting.
It asks something of us: that we drop the armor, allow the vulnerability of babies, of small children awake to the world— looking out while simultaneously looking in.
That spark of recognition, of re-membering parts of ourselves we have defended against rather than softened into.
The world we have created together— the collective field we live inside— can feel fraught with unresolved trauma because it is.
For centuries, we assumed dominion over environments too vast, too complex, to fully understand. We stiffened. Resisted interactions that might have healed us. Fear was sent to the back room of the house, a place no one entered, no one dared explore.
We shrank the world into something manageable, something we could function inside, rather than honoring it as a living, breathing organism— like ourselves, only larger.
We forgot her gifts in the rush to defend our ground. We spread outward until no frontier remained.
Perhaps the last frontier is to loosen the self-imposed strictures, cut the ties that bind us to repeating old ways and habits, and welcome what we have long denied.
Perhaps then we might discover blessings everywhere we look.
Meeting of the elementals ~ photo by Chris Johnson 2025
Again and again, I read these prompts and shake my head: Are you a good judge of character?
I’m not entirely sure what that means to most people. It seems to assume that we meet another and almost immediately sum them up— as if character were something visible at a glance, a feature to be assessed and filed away.
I would hate someone doing that to me, though I’m sure it happens all the time.
I’m not easy to know. I don’t even fully know myself. I’m regularly surprised by what arises in me— thoughts and responses that fall well outside the tidy boundaries of who I imagine myself to be.
So no, I don’t believe it’s fair to judge another on first encounter. What I do instead is observe. I notice physical cues. I listen for tone, for what hums beneath the words. I register the background noise of a person’s life.
All the while, I’m gathering fragments— not conclusions, but pieces of a picture that slowly forms in the mind. A kind of puzzle I may feel drawn to, or not.
To take those fragments and force them into a neat summary feels both unfair and unrealistic.
It takes time to begin to know another. Don’t we all reveal ourselves gradually, as questions provoke answers and situations demand responses?
Over time, people change. Each day presents us with innumerable choices. If life feels like moving through thick woods— as it often does now— there are countless crossroads and pivots, moments when we choose this way or that.
I know I’ve ended up far from paths I once felt certain I was on. Because of this, I remain a student— trusting that others, too, are making and remaking themselves over the course of years.
Seen this way, it’s something of a miracle if two people meet again on the same road months—or years—after a first encounter.
So yes, in the end, I suppose I am a good judge of character— but only because I allow character to form, dissolve, and form again over time.
Sometimes the relationship holds. Other times it fades away. Choice and change are the constants we’re given, and paying attention—without rushing to verdict— may be the truest measure of judgment there is.
As I awaken to this atypically gray day, I wonder about too many things to sort into neat little packages of script; there is chaos, to be sure— though is it me? Or have these conditions always persisted, unperturbed by human minds that never thought to record them?
We live in magic, where it’s easy to wonder whether a thing exists because we regard it, or because it is fixed—temporarily— into changing landscapes, though even those are constantly in flux.
Rivers rise and roil, casting mammoth chunks of steel and asphalt from bridges built decades ago. When forces move beyond us, these human-created appendages become toothpick structures, perched briefly in pristine places, inviting more settlers who are no match, in the balance, for unpredictably rising waters.
Does beauty exist because we behold it?
If there were no highways, would the true tenders of wild landscapes be raptors and bears, with migrant tribes the only observers of our kind— noticing patterns, not recording them, but sharing what they know with visitors, with relations?
We wonder in our time why so many lived in movable colonies, though perhaps it makes more sense now, as we come to realize nothing is forever, nothing stable or static.
A friend rushes to her husband’s bedside in a distant land. Another loses her home to wind-driven fires. Someone else swims a bit too far offshore, currents inviting him out and out.
And don’t I remember— feeling like the Little Mermaid, body weightless as I flipped and turned, a castle in the coral below, colorful whatnots beckoning me farther?
I could be spearfishing, spotting something I wanted in those vague, lilting waves.
It’s easy— easy to lose one’s way when what we desire hovers just beyond reach.
We go down to the ocean’s edge each evening, and sometimes I am so tired my inner filters slip, and I can see beneath the waves. I don’t mean this metaphorically. I mean I can quite literally see— the mounding lava rocks, the mountains of structures, cliffs rising just beneath this roiling, north-facing sea.
I cannot stay in that visual mode for long. My nervous system isn’t built for it. I know this now, though I think I have always sensed it. There’s a gentle tug at my navel, and I snap back into the miracle of this human form. Then I wonder why I cannot see more— and perhaps one day I will. But not now.
When the Mystery lies this close to the surface, the mind grapples with its whys, hows, and wherefores. Are these the limits of consciousness for the remainder of my days? And yet the Mystery keeps offering itself in pieces small enough to be borne. I still long to feel more, live wider— a natural extension of awareness once it has tasted the edge of the infinite.
But for now, though perhaps not for all time, this will have to be enough.
belas bright ideas 