Beautiful Moments

Beautiful moments is a concept that I've stolen and kept close to my heart. It's my reason that keeps making me want to write despite meeting my own inadequacies as a writer every time I sit down. I've seen so many beautiful moments over the years that I have greedily devoured and horded for myself. They fester down in my guts, glowing and burning, my most prized possessions. I can feel them all running together, melting into each other and forming a single soft glow inside my soul. I feed it, throw fuel on it and fan the embers hoping to turn it into a fire. Maybe someday, it will grow and I can pass it to someone else.

Pendleton Ward is the creator of the popular animated show Adventure Time on Cartoon Network. A lot of people like it, and a lot of people hate it, for a lot of different reasons. I have my own feelings on the show and my own reasons, but that's a story for a different time; before I even started watching his show, I read an interview with Mr.Ward, and one part of it stuck out to me.

"Pat McHale and I (Pat's my creative director), we both like nice things a lot. I'm a big fan of Miyazaki's Totoro. It's really beautiful and it makes me feel really good inside to watch it and I want to recreate that feeling. I'm just inspired by that feeling. I often times try to make things like that. We try to have moments like that."

I'm a long time fan of Miyazaki's films. Totoro was a movie I watched a lot as a kid. His movies stand out in my mind as not being simply entertainment, but having an element of poeticism that touches something human deep inside me, stoking that inner flame. Ward strives to put that into his own creation, like little jewels that aren't obvious at first glance, that you have to dig for. I realized I wanted to create my own beautiful moments, because they're so precious to me and I don't think there are enough of them in this world.

Civilization: Heart, Hearth, Earth

Civilization is an organism.
It's made up of walls, buildings, plowed fields, books, laws, ideas, people.
The objective of an organism is survival, for self and kind.
Civilization spreads.

At it's heart, civilization is our attempt at controlling our surroundings.
It starts out with ignorance: we don't know where the sun goes at night, where the stars go after dawn, why it rains one day and is sunny the next.
From there, we start to wonder, we come up with ideas for why things are the way they are: storms are when the gods are angry, the sun dies and is reborn every day, and the stars are the souls of our ancestors looking down at us.

That's just how we work. Observe, look for patterns and meaning, then adapt. That's how we, as a species, survive. You have to know what lies over the next hill, because whatever is over there could be the difference between life and death.
But there's always another hill.

So we build walls to keep the Outside out and the Inside neat and tidy. We build houses to shelter us from the environment. We till the earth so that it will grow, or lay down stones to build roads. Animals are tamed, plants are bred and grown. It's a game of control as we eliminate variables.

Observe, find a pattern, form ideas. You have to understand the world around you before you can master it, so civilizations exists in a metaphysical space, a division between the known and unknown.

Sometimes, civilization sprout up beneath an individual. A monarch, a tyrant, a despot, a leader. These civilizations are extensions of the individual's will. Anyone that resists is removed from the equation, like how an immune system reacts to a foreign body. It's all about control. You have to remove the variables.
But these organisms don't last. Once the head dies, so does the body. Or what if the head loses the favor of its body, to find it has turned against him.

So you create things that last. Longer than walls, longer than roads, something that will be passed on. Laws. Boundries. A code. A concept. An idea. A nation. A flag. You draw an invisible line in the sand so that everything is either Inside or Outside.

Laws are the ageless walls within the realm of ideas.
Think of traffic laws for a moment. Everyone agrees that we will drive on the right side of the road (or left, depending on where you are). Follow the laws. Draw withing the lines. You'll be safe. That 2 ton steel death-machine that you're driving? Don't worry about it. As long as you follow the Rules of the Road, you'll be safe.
We know that's not true. We know unexpected things happen. Machines break down, weather changes, people make mistakes. But deep down, don't we think that as long as you do what you're "supposed to" that you'll be okay?
Nothing MAKES us drive on the correct side of the road. It's a choice that we each make. A series of individuals. You have no certainty that someone will decide to drive on the Other side today, you know... just for a change of pace.
Is it a system now? Is it orderly? No, it just takes that one stray element to create chaos.
It's amazing that we can get anything done.

So... Why? What's the point?
We know that if we all agree on the same laws, we will all be safer for it. You give up the freedom to drive on the Other side for safety. That's smart. That's what keeps us alive, the ability to act as a larger organism.

Laws only exist when people follow them. We keep them alive. We pass them down from parent to child, teacher to student.

And so the organism lives on.
We see more, we learn more, we build more.
And so the organism thrives.