I’ve been meaning to write for some time now. There’s a lot to share, ideas and thoughts and concepts and simple ponderings bouncing around in this head of mine.

But, it’s a struggle to make sense of them all, to conjure sufficient mental clarity to give form to the amorphous, to make sense of it all.

Maybe it’s the reading that’s the problem. I’ve been digging deep into some philosophical works, writings that serve up more questions than answers: In My Time of Dying by Sebastian Junger, Quantum Questions edited by Ken Wilber, The Firmament of Time by Loren Eiseley. All three, while quite different, hover around the same subjects, the same questions: who, and what, are we humans in the context of the universe? What is life, what is existence? Where are the boundaries - if any - between the physical and metaphysical?

Reading brilliant thoughts by these and other great minds, and then witnessing the spectacular buffoonery wrought domestically and internationally by our supposed leaders, seeing the depths of human callousness and greed, breathing acrid air heavy with the smoke of flaming forests…it all makes me hopeful that the quantum possibility of the multiverse is real, and that somewhere, through a different wave function collapse, a better reality is taking place.

But, as my rudimentary understanding of quantum physics tells me, it’s all about observation. Observing a particle creates its reality; observation, consciousness perhaps, creates existence. Similarly maybe in this here and now, my own observation creates a certain existence, a certain reality, and the choice is the eternal one: focus on the good or the bad, the brutal or the beautiful.

So, with few coherent thoughts to spill forth, some beauty instead from a recent trip with my son, Ryrie, along the Peaks of the Balkans trail through Montenegro, Albania, and Kosovo.