It’s been a tough two years. My life does not look like it did back at the start. It feels like little piles of rubble that I have to walk around or dig through to find what I used to take for granted.

Can I rebuild yet?

Hold that. Rewind. I don’t wait for permission to get what I need. Not anymore. I will get things back to working order. For me.

I’m not the first to live in the wreckage of what used to be. Lots of people walk around and through ruins. Needs must be served.

Things that once were can be made anew.

It’s time to start building. I’ve done it before.

The good news is, I don’t have to do it alone. As hard as it is to believe, there really are people who can help. There are people who want to help.

It was in my acting Improv classes I learned how to trust other people who were there with me. I’d been writing my stories alone for a long time. It turns out to be a lot more interesting—not to mention more fun—if other people pitch in.

I am a people. I came to build a scene. And there, on that practice stage, other people came to build too. We looked at each other—Can we do this? Shall we try? I had the desire but not much else to start with.

‘Bring a brick’ they taught us. Speak up. Say something that gets things started. Maybe it will be a mistake. But we are all in this together, and someone has to start it. Make a decision. Make a big choice

“This way!” I can say. The other guy might take it in a different direction than I imagined, but if we stay in the action together it keeps moving and it becomes real.

I need it to be real. I need the help. I know things can be fixed. We can rebuild it better than before.

I’m going to start.

Things are always moving towards chaos. It’s a law.

Not just a law from a government, it’s a science law. Like Gravity. It is not appealable. It is as solid and inevitable as fate.

I know my life has felt like chaos during for the last two years. But this law in its proper language doesn’t call it chaos. It’s called entropy.

I just encountered that word in Flow—Csikszentmihalyi used the term “psychic entropy.” What a combination of words! It sounds like a name for a super villain. But the term is used to describe negative mental efforts—a chaotic state of mind.

To be more specific, the opposite of psychic entropy is controlled attention. The ugly head of a pandemic has captured my attention. It seemed to control my attention in a way that was hard to escape.

But it did not add to my life. Flow put a definition to this “If one chooses a trivial goal, success in it does not provide enjoyment.” The goal of getting through a pandemic alive is a very trivial goal. The kind of experience I’m trying to get back into—what is called flow experiences— “are just as real as being hungry, or as concrete as bumping into a wall. There is nothing mysterious of mystical about them…the self that is part of it expands its boundaries and becomes more complex than it had been” (pg 65)

I am hungry for this expanding soul. And I am running into the wall of entropy. Devolution. I really want to grow.

But I can change the direction of the entropy. I can take the psychic energy at my disposal and shift it towards expansion. I’m supposed to be complicated and I love it.

This stupid narrowing of all attention on one topic squeezes me out of my interestingness and enjoyment in life.

I did not come here to go small and rigid. This life is too rich to shrink

Walking in nature, in a forest or the desert, there is a beautiful balance apparent. The sun on the leaves are food for the the trees so they grow. The leaves in their turn fall and drop, feeding the insects in the earth below. The brittle dead leaves become fresh dirt through the process.

Butterflies, birds, bees, mammals and lizards all have their place. And I find my place when I walk among them.

There are cycles in the balance. Thing sprout, grow, bloom and die.

Sometimes disaster strikes and everything dies at once.

When I was a kid in Alaska, the flower most common, that was an everywhere flower, kept us company all through summer. It sprouted and bloomed and went to fluffy seed and then summer was over.

It was called fireweed. The story I heard is that this flower was tough, and it could survive very harsh conditions.

That’s probably why it did so well in the short-sun North.

But other, kinder environment had this flower too. After a fire swept through a forest all plants are dead. Blackened trees and scorched earth left behind.

Until the next rain. Then the plant pioneer would march up from the decimation. The cycle of rebirth would continue in stalks of purple flowers.

During the last two years I’ve had five jobs. Seems like a lot of disaster maybe. Somehow though, beauty has emerged every time.

Rebirth is what life does. It is subtle when the rebirth is in the midst of thrumming life. The tragedy of a consuming destruction is more dramatic.

And the beauty of the green leaves and delicate flowers growing on the black field is unforgettable.

This. This is the resilience of the balance. The cycle will go on. The seeds of our rebirth have been there all the time.

As an American I take some pride that the American Wright brothers Orville and Wilbur Wright. These Ohio brothers invented the airplane. They were the ones with their bike shop and their stubborn trial and error. They experimented and worked hard and made the airplane happen.

We learn in America that anybody can grow up to be anything they want—even president!

The Wright brothers were actually the ones that won the race. At their moment in history, there was a crowd—dare I say a horde? —of scientists and inventors working on the problem.

When the brothers did their first flight on 1903 at Kitty Hawk, they were not the favored ones to win.

Samuel P Langley was supposed to be the one to invent flight. He was the favorite. It’s funny to talk about it this way. Inventing a flying machine was not exactly a prize fight. This was long before Vegas was giving odds. How could there have been a favorite?

Most of my life, I have known and resented of the people who had the right to be heard. They had the right to be right.

I have been sitting at the table, joining the conversation and my contribution was blanked out. Then that contribution which could not be heard was presented by another person who had the right to be right. NOW the idea was valuable. NOW it could be accepted.

Or maybe it never got repeated by the right person and a harmful course of action was taken instead of the one I proposed.

It was my idea. Therefore, it was unacceptable.

America is supposed to be the place where everyone has the right to be right. Orville and Wilbur were right.

But even in my egalitarian America, this Langley guy was overshadowing the Wright brothers. Langley was a scholar, and he’d bopped around all over doing academic things on the east coast, Chicago and then becoming the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institute.

He was in charge of the Smithsonian while he was doing experiments in flying machines. President McKinley gave him a grant from the war chest to make it happen.

Except he didn’t. All the best people, all the experts knew he was going to be the one to invent the airplane. They knew it so hard that they wouldn’t accept that he didn’t.

The Smithsonian tried to re-write history to say that he actually would have been the first except for a few trivial bits of circumstantial things that didn’t really count.

The British have this phrase “in the event” which means “actually” …it could also mean factually, or empirically.

What actually happened, in the event, was the Wright brother flew their plane. Langley never did. The president and all the academic hoi polloi were wrong and bet on the wrong inventor.

Instead of doing what scientists do and admitting the truth, “Smithsonian officials displayed one of Secretary Langley’s “Aerodromes,” as Langley called his airplanes, with the label stating that Langley had constructed a machine “capable” of flight before the Wright Brothers successful flight, Orville was not happy. In 1925, because of this, Orville loaned the 1903 Wright Flyer to the London Science Museum, promising that it would not return to the United States until the Smithsonian renounced its claim”

Sam, Sam the poor loser man. This is your legacy? This is what your acolytes are posthumously protecting? Science, experimentation and learning lost for appearance’s sake.