So over the last few days, I’ve just been writing out all the ideas I’ve had in my head. I figure it’s good practice! You probably noticed I have a bunch of recurring metaphors: inner fire, scale and patterns, big and small, infinity.

Why these motifs? When I was little, in the room I slept in at my grandparents’ house, there was a motivational poster on the wall. It said “The world truly belongs to God, for his fingerprints are all over it.” The picture in the middle was a mountain range, maybe the Himalayas. The idea is that, if you shift your perspective enough, the ridges of your fingerprints might look a lot like mountains. I pictured a gigantic hand coming down and impressing itself on the Earth when it was young and malleable, like leaving your handprint in play-doh. The idea of scale has fascinated me ever since! If I have religion or spirituality, it’s somewhere in here.

One of my friends from college, a geology major, said that he was studying “roughness” for his final project. Interestingly enough, the concept of roughness is entirely dependent on the scale you’re looking at! The roughness of an enormous cliff, if you take the whole cliff face as your frame, can be the same relative to a smooth surface examined up close. I love this idea still, and I wedded it with my favorite hobby of rock climbing to write about it in “Bits and Pieces.”

I tried looking for that poster, but unfortunately only came up with one billion shitty fake-motivational poster memes. If anyone finds it, let me know! I want to link it here. In the meantime, I thought I’d offer a little explanation so my posts wouldn’t come off as too obscure. =]