Dear Diary, 12, (A)part of the Flow?

Dear Diary,

I am write this entry from a backyard that is not mine. It is a place I inhabit for now, but I will never feel ownership over it for many reasons.

All around me the entire world lives, owned by no one but the present.

I watch, hear, and feel flow of cycles—liminal space between decay and entropy; the arrow and spiral.

Am I (a)part of it?

(A)part of the life?

(A)part of the Flow?

A part of me nags that these are the wrong questions; that they are as irrelevant as my existence. I suppose questions of connection, space, and being possess the undertones of what makes nature writing so problematic, mainly, bifurcating the world from the self while searching for a way to reconnect to it through force or domination.

But I do move through the flow. I am connected to it.

I breath in the flow then out again. My vehicle and lifestyle spits carbon into into the atmosphere, I and others breath. My daily act of living injects plastic and all sorts of pollutants into the flow where it goes somewhere beyond my reckoning. My pollution haunts others—human and non-human alike—as their—human and non-human actors/personas—create effects haunting my own senses, shaping my reality.

Yet, the flow churns chaos and beauty, love and danger spirals into the next cycle.

Spirals—clusters of cycles—churn until the arrows of gravity, time and other forces renew them into something else.

Spirals stack on spirals stack on spirals. And I only observe a fraction of it. My observation is an attempt to savor as much of the world living around me as I can in my limited capacity, my limited scope. The world before and the world to come is shrouded in secret. The present is mysterious as ever. The world before my eyes holds no answers, just the potential to experience an experience.

By observing, I act.

But it is an act that sets me apart. Being apart makes me a part of the flow. Yet, by observing myself as a part the flow, I make myself apart from it.

Life is exhausting.

Life is pretty cool, too.

More to come, promise.