the pursuit for knowledge

the sudden urge to learn and explore

Something I wrote about at night. This is an addon, a part 2 if you will, from my last post.

I don’t know when I should post it - hopefully tomorrow. If all goes according to plan, I stop my alarm at 5:30 or 6 A.M, put on a jacket, preferably a slip on, and head out among the trees. There’s a whole bunch surrounding our neighborhood in rows and bundles. Some stand by themselves, tall, and blessed with branches as roads to the surrounding trees. Others, like ceilings.

I like to observe them now. I don’t know what changed and why, but I’m liking the new part of me - a me from I’d say 4 years ago, when all what family had going for were forests to valleys of flowers and flowerbeds, and tiny streams we’d set up for an afternoon camp. I remember those streams as cozied up as a bed in a one room wonder. It was the clearest substance, clear enough to drink and wipe out any disturbing thoughts. If I had such a river next to my house, I’d wade through it everyday. The best I can do is grab a hose, and watch the water run down our driveway and funnel into the crevices - roads to the sewer. I suppose I also take the sidewalk to the trail nearby, but would I even consider such a thing a river? In the future perhaps…when humanity has forgotten the language of nature, and views irrigation tunnels as “rivers.” I hope we never get to that point.

But back to the river, I absolutely adore those in Makoto Shinkai’s anime Your Name. People talk all about the story of it, the romance, the place, but I’m here specifically for its portrayal of nature. Any flow of water catches my eye and the film does exactly that.

These thoughts remind me of the story of humanity’s “river,” when the roar of the cars down the highway, or the streets, mimic those roars of the rapids. I wrote it down somewhere in the “untitled doc,” but lost it with all the other jumbles of my thoughts. From the best I can remember, this world is one where the scribes of nature are long gone as ancient artifacts. The remaining of the natural world, come from the machinery, which had taken it over. Highways, as rivers, houses as forests. Humanity’s infrastructure begins to speak the language of the trees.

These little thoughts and notes here and there, hadn’t done much in terms of progression. But they had fueled another part of me. It started slow. But once I had my rhythm, I craved. There was nothing better to do than to dive in, figuring out myself slowly over the years.

What is the pursuit for knowledge? To answer that, I have to first explain my journey here - a one day journey. That’s all it took.

This pursuit of knowledge is an obsession, it’s a craving. You feel it like the moment your stomach growls, or how your mouth waters for a spring of coconut water after a dry, 5 mile run. I didn’t need anything special. I didn’t need an “environment,” or the right moment. I observed. And simply, I asked myself, what do I like? What do I lean towards, what do I subconsciously ponder about? I always failed to say these things as I did those tasks, so finding what “interested’ me at my peak was difficult. That was until one day, when it all clicked. I caught myself, or rather the holy Youtube algorithm caught me. It was a video of a bushcrafter named Joe Robinet.

While my attention span has dimmed down the satisfaction of finishing a 55 minute vid, my heart hasn’t forgotten about it. Suddenly, everything made sense, and everything clicked. If I can write a script without looking back every sentence, every word to analyze its structure, its prose, an obsession over correction, I’ve made it. I’ve found it. My rekindled fire has spread to my writing. I obsess over wanting to create my own “voice,” to tell these stories of mine in coherence and clarity. The pursuit for knowledge has begun. My pursuit for knowledge, begins with my obsession over nature. I don’t where it came from, but I’m sure glad it had.

So catch yourself in the moment of obsession and you’ve found yourself a golden spark.