THE BRAVE NEW LAND

Racing down the freeway on the wrong side of the road with an Afrikaner at the wheel, who happened to be grumbling about the other drivers and the poor state of affairs that the country had fallen into, was an interesting, to say the least, introduction to South Africa. We had just come out of the Botswana bush, visiting Zambia and Zimbabwe to see both sides of one of the natural wonders of the world… named for Victoria. We had just camped in the bush of Botswana with elephants ripping trees, hyenas sniffing, badgers digging, and lions roar-mumbling through our camp of dome tents. It's hard to recall every experience, but, while in Zambia, I do recall a large group of baboons robbing a train of its tubers and fruit while it waited. They just ripped open the plastic tarpaulins of the open cars and feasted upon what they found. I remember the falls, too. Even with low water-flow due to drought they were magnificent. I remember the French tourists with fancy luggage that didn&#

Seeking perfection in the world can get very myopic, in the sense that perfection itself is one of the most simplistic ideas there is. All we really have to do in order to arrive at so-called perfection is to let go of our ever-present, preconceived notions of what we think the world needs in order to be perfect. I know this is circular logic, but a perfect loop 'is' the closest thing to perfection that we can mentally muster. With this in mind, all we can do while we have the honor and privilege of visiting this chaotic world, with all of its darkness, love, and it's beauty, is to try our best to live big, making as small of a ripple as we can while we do it. Before I left for Africa, I felt I was making so much random noise that I forgot what the world even sounded like. It's hard to filter through the egocentricity that inevitably surges when given the chance. It took some time, as well, after landing in the bush of the Botswana wilderness

I finished it. It started as fecund air seeping under the door of my mind, and it grew. The air inside it held it up from the earth and floated the whole thing skyward, past the atmospheric event horizon and beyond. The world I had known was only a memory, and what I found myself staring at was the glass that bent the light from above. I'm not kidding. If we understand that we are beings that exist in time, then we know that the world we envision to our right and left is only an illusion. Our world really exists in the fourth dimension, in time. Wait … not really in time, but … that the world we can see and understand is represented by what we 'call' time, here, in our little corner of this vast, vast universe. Funny enough, I found myself staring at a fish. Then I noticed a bull barreling in from above. A pitcher, not of baseball … but of water, urging itself up into my frame of vision, the whole time being acutely aware that something was aiming an arrow at my heart, pi

More artwork at doronoll.com Much has happened, most of which having disappeared unceremoniously into the fourth dimension. My last post was months ago, before I lost my day job working for the German factory, advertising their gas systems and baked goods to the world. It was before my night job started its journey on 'its' self-absorbed path to supernova, eclipsing my day job with naked abandon and a flick of a finger. It was before my youngest left on his cosmic journey to illuminate the dark, magical corners of his mind, while testing his body's limits, and then pushing those limits beyond the conceivable with what he had found lurking there. It was even before a forbidden, but courageous creature followed us home one night, making his way into our lives and becoming fat. But, was it actually courage that this creature possessed, or was it a lack of sense as a 'lack of sense' can sometimes make us believe? Most likely, this forbidden creature followed