Feast or Famine

It occurs to me that so many of my blogs include complaints. Apologies. Yet I notice that so often I'm either feeling as blank as an empty bowl or else my brain is swarming with so many notions I can't start fast enough to make notes so I won't forget them in the dry times.

A friend recently commented to me that life is always cyclic. He wasn't speaking only of seasons, but of broader repetitions.  Not a new idea, I know, but one about which I hadn't thought in a long time. My suggestion to anyone who might be looking for a spur to invention would be to consider that apparent fact of life.

Remember the prehistoric ages running from flood through gradual drying out, from tropical to ice and back; and seasons, naturally; el nino and la nina years; that odd repeat of perception of spans of time--from childhood when a year is a long time to maturity when ten years isn't much, to old age when a year is a long time again; from one generation to the next and the next; from fashion of one sort or another to a repetition or at least a reference recurring years afterward...you could go on at length. For me, each possibility of comment as one circumstance leads to another to be eventually repeated (in one form or another) suggests so much...I'd like to live long enough to develop every example that springs to mind.

From nothing or a barren planet to whatever will make that planet barren again, it looks as if there might be something finite in the universe, after all. In between, there's only a temporary famine of ideas that will burgeon into a feast again--if we can make ourselves wait patiently enough.