There are places in the mind which so drift that sometimes they become suspiciously vague.  Those who live busily in the present might think I am referring to Mondays.  But what I refer to is a shadow.

   In Plato's allegory of the cave there is an understanding of process.  In this understanding there is that possibility that all we ever see are shadows in a process of getting closer and closer to true. 

    I have long accepted that 'true' is a moving feast.  We sit at the table and eat and talk.  Some listen more than they talk.  Some talk more than they listen.  When we rise at the end of the meal something usually gets done.

    The study of process becomes necessary to successfully formalize the social, make those changes to the word 'justice', allay the fears of the potentially dangerous, feed the hungry and to every dream a person could have.  But the study of process remains insidious.  It is necessarily nihilistic, otherwise it would produce no wisdom.

    Then there is skill, that relationship between practice and the material world which produces a shadow, a vagueness in which the process cannot easily be explained but it can be seen.  This is the shadow, the vagueness that makes things precious, or important.

    But take this shadow to that table of the moving feast and more often it gets lost, it becomes something else, it becomes part of process so the nihilistic can destroy it.  And here, I think I would be called a cynic, until I begin to enjoy it enough to want to try harder. 

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