What does it mean? That is a question that I find myself asking more often than not, when I sit alone on the porch swing as the sun begins to dip below the horizon and throws forth its last orange rays across the verdant hillsides that frame the place that I call home.

Of course, it is never so simple as those four words, every single time like a record on repeat. Sometimes I ask myself about the weather, for instance. What does it mean to rain? Why does it rain, why must it rain? I find myself asking this question sometimes, even though I have first result on a Google search memorized… “As more and more droplets join together they become too heavy and fall from the clouds as rain…”

It is not so much about the nature of rain as a meteorological phenomenon that I am searching for, but more so the essence of rain, its metaphysical qualities. The coldness of the droplets on my skin, the light pitter patter on the roof of the house, the patterns that it traces on my window as the drops form little rivulets that run down the barely perceptible screens that prevent insects from entering the house when I open the window.


There is a beauty to straight lines and piles that build upward from largest to smallest and yet there is also beauty to piles that have no organization and objects strewn at random. Yet there are piles that build upward without beauty and there are haphazard piles that incite some deep-seated anger within me that seems never to be fully quashed even when that pile is arranged into a

Thus, it may not be the organization of the items that lends it beauty, but the items themselves, or rather the collective items. But that of course invites the further question of whether the collective beauty of the set of objects is simply determined by the individual beauty of the objects within that set, or if there is a more holistic approach to seeing—like a Gesamtkunstwerk where each object is its own art form and while each object may or may not be beautiful in its own right the totality is something greater than just the sum of its parts.

Or perhaps it is a quality of the set itself separate from the beauty of its parts or how they come together, the number of objects within the set, or the height of the pile. The eye works often in proportions, such that even though some parts of a person may be desirable, too much of a good thing is in itself undesirable. A tall, thin pile of books looks rickety, a pointed object rising from the ground like a fragile stalagmite, ready to be snapped off at any moment. A short pile of books is squat, strong, grounded, massive.

But then, consider the short stack of books that are all aligned and also consider the stack in which these selfsame books are set at jaunty angles from one another. Which is prettier? Surely the aligned ones, one might think, yet there are some angles that the books have that perfect curated haphazardness and there are some angles where the madness overtakes the method.

All in all, a zero-sum game.


The smell of coffee drifts up through my nostrils from some faraway source, perhaps imagined, perhaps real. I hope it is real, for I know that imagined smells can often be a warning sign of larger health problems. A quick check of the clock is both alarming and relieving: 11:53 pm. For no one should be drinking coffee at this time, yet who is to say that one cannot drink coffee at this time—perhaps a late-night work session for someone who wishes not to fall asleep just yet, or someone who simply wants a warm drink for their cold body. Coffee, admittedly, is a questionable choice for that.

Yet who am I to say what others can or cannot do.


Inspiration is a tricky bitch. Sometimes it hits when you least expect it, and the very next moment it’s gone like a flash, like nothing ever happened and you’re sitting there with your pen in your hand and your paper sitting gently on your lap and suddenly there’s nothing left for you to grasp onto, thin strings that just wisp away in the wind of your mind. And the sentences that ran through your head are gone forever, those words that you loved so much…gone.

But I refuse.

I refuse that way of thinking, because then there is never inspiration, only fake inspiration, ideas that never really come to your head but rather pass through, as if they aren’t your own ideas, but some cosmic ideas that occur to everyone in their path. What shape do they fly through the air? Must they pass through a very certain part of someone’s brain to register, or is it more of a sort of general touching? Do they touch at all, are they waves?

Yet, perhaps there is no inspiration ever, there never was, the word “inspiration” only having been invented by those who wanted to put some word to that fleeting feeling they were experiencing. Consider even the word itself, “inspiration.” In-spiration. Breathing in, a mental inhale that connects to some sort of collective consciousness shared by all humans everywhere. And like breathing, you can only hold your breath for so long before you have to let it go back to where it came from for somewhere or something else to use it. Some can hold their breath for longer than others. And no one realizes it’s going on, only that it exists and that we are all affected sometime somewhere.

And just like holding our breath, we all use it differently. Some try to calm their beating hearts, drawing very little of its life-giving force at a time so that it may last longer in their lungs before they must release it again. Yet others use it all as quickly as possible, trying to get everything done before it inevitably runs dry and they must wait for their next breath.

And inspiration can take those in strange directions, an unguided push down an untreaded path. Some things that were planned are now gone, lost to the collective consciousness to be picked up by another or maybe never to be touched again. And try as you might to recall it, like a already-lost puff of air blown away by the wind, it never returns.

Just breathe.