A Secant Query

Between What and Wanting

Wherein attention sets care...

Between What and Wanting

a note on tone:

"Drowning Wants," below, employs an iconic "escape from sinking vehicle as it fills with water" scene; kink until proven otherwise means although this moment aims to be read as preciously pleasurable, it is still akin to feeling pain, the way one might when we ask for help. This discretion is advised. Once we're all in shared waters, we can continue.

Ecology

Entities with capacity for attention reaching into homes of people going to bed at night (jumpscaring with intermittent ads) make the present more and more real. Each bill makes here more and more now. Each lease is less slack. I'm soon harp string. How can I feel safe?

My inner world made shallower and shallower until, of all the clouds above, only those seeded with silver iodide fall on my pool and fill it. Only to make me shallower as my pool evaporates.

This, too [is ecology].

It is no ecology universal wanting had in mind at onset - progress (inherently dynamic) is never linear. This remains true for every love, every want - every time. To know what wanting feels like is not the only want.

Entities with capacity for attention reaching into homes raise kids - be they forests (who teach kids seasonality), or vinyls (who teach kids compression and decompression), or television (who teach kids punctuality), or video games (who teach kids feedback loops), or cell phones (who teach kids worldbuilding), or chat bots (who teach kids capacity) - as elders grow shallower and shallower, feeling less and less safe.

Wanting Entities

A soda can is an entity. A ketchup bottle, spoon, a pause. A soda can WILL break up a dog fight (shake a sparkling water and spray it at the faces). A ketchup bottle will, filled with water, wash eyes (or butt). A spoon will reshape the world, served as a lens.

I am invited to fashion a container with a friend, to build a container with them. I am new to both concepts of friend and of container. Capacity assumes a limited setting containers are built to serve. As I set out to build a container, I look to build something universal.

I give an attempt, capture the smallest droplet and the largest galaxy in a shared breath. How a telescope does with the eye, except serving more organs than just the eye! I reflect on how governments have built universal containers: a container seems, at its core, to be any ripple outside another ripple.

I expand this ripple out, get an orbit. It's Earth's. I note Earth is a container for the sun. I get a clearer image when I reach the Oort Cloud, the placenta of our sun (all the ice that used to be together in one central metal water clump, igniting hydrogen caught in planet-like bubbles).

What Wanting

Wanting to know what watning feels like, water agrees to want everything together, if light wants everything apart. Finding an accord, all wants between wanting everything together and everything apart arrive, from stars to moons to life and every dream in between.

When children arrive like unfired clay, pottery develops, shaping children into containers. As demonstrations show children's actions disrupt whole wars, entities with capacity for attention reaching into homes become a government's focus. Through childhood, this focus sharpens year after year.

My child self, her desire is shaped like this: first, I consciously separate my desire away from the root system it shares with the root system of desires my government plants in my attention every ninety seconds since my most-tender age.

Wants Illustrated

Let me illustrate the sense:

All parentheticals are my government's desires.

A tree of Reciprocity next to child desires might seem like a wonderful idea. Let's look at what happens when these trees share not 8 items, but thousands of interactions across each day.

Time Wants Me Back

The more a certain time has with me, the more that time has to want me with. From time journaling to time walking to time sitting to time punching down. All time is free to want us back.

In a Reciprical system, I need only listen for whether a want of mine is reciprocated. A forest is too generous to ever do anything so crass as to want a child: a forest is merely blessed to receive a child. As a child, I listen for a forest's want, hear only genrous silence, and depart, feeling no reciprical desire.

Entities with capacity to want me back, like "addictions" or "guilty pleasures" or "apathy" or "multi-million units of attention blockbuster movies" or patriotism, will always want me back more than I could ever want them, so I feel safe to serve their wants.

My wanting time to notice this system and time to notice this system wanting me back is audible only thanks to my sharing my body with time. My body is a shared place. Generous enough it levels out with the generosity of a forest. Allow me a sharp turn into the lake:

Drowning Wants

As the vehicle of our analogy fills with the water of the lake I turn it into, I might struggle to open the doors and exit the analogy. In fact, I must wait until the pressure in the vehicle is the same as the pressure the lake puts on it. This is acheived by allowing the analogy to fill with water from the lake. At which time the door swings open freely, and I escape.

Likewise, when my generosity equalizes with the generosity of the forest, the forest can word their thoughts as easily here as I word my thoughts. Wants find common language, and I feel invited to time with forests.

This remains true until my inner cosmos is as vast as it is today. The inner cosmos wombs instill in kids fall further and further into the present until a kid's whole inner life fits exactly in the palm of their experience. Anyone who has ever watched a cat or other pet knows - our experience is painted right there on our face for all to see. And for all to take into account.

Enriching Inner Worlds

Learning the language to explain ourselves is important for the ones we love because things their service hinges on rests in our uncovering these unrecipricated wants. Any entity with capacity for attention has a want to plant things in the rich soil of human understanding.

It's natural for plants who cultivate us to get it wrong. Plants have never neede to know what they want. They've been pillow princesses for all of agriculture. And now that our climate is calving, it's sent plants into crunch time to learn to reciprocate wants in ways the huamns they cultivate will resonate with.

A patina of human understanding is dawning for plants, who join the conversation as entities with capacity to want me back.