SageGreenJournal.org

voices out of the West, mostly poetry, personal to planetary

Gerritt Rosenthal

Tualatin, Oregon

Multiple Threads

by Gerritt Rosenthal

A graduate of Reed College, Gerritt Rosenthal holds a master’s degree in biochemistry from the University of Minnesota, and a master’s degree in hydrology from Cornell University.

He currently serves as chair of the Democratic Party of Oregon’s 

Platform and Resolutions Committee and works as environmental coordinator for Onward Oregon, an online network that connects political advocacy groups and which distributes “progressive action alerts and informational alerts regarding things of Oregon interest.”

I have spent my life among numbers

primes, medians, means

sigmas and standard deviations

bimodal and multimodal distributions

standard deviations and skewness

using numbers to guess a meaning of reality

using number theory

to define some hidden truth

I love higher mathematics in a way

that comes close to faith

I trust its ability to apply principles and rules to discover worlds we hadn’t guessed

I have lived among numbers and their authorities

as a peasant

barely understanding

the complex integrals that composite all experiences

into a common thread

or a single point of experience

hardly grasping infinitesimals and differentials

that predict the transient states of change

and the potential rates of change to change

I believe in numbers

and the logic that links them

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I also believe in the ONENESS - writ large

the becoming and the being

which is beyond the doing

and is captured in the states of transcendence

of mysticism

or of psychedelic release

from the boundaries of rules

and structure.

I believe

in the breath of the cosmos

exhaled by infinity

and inhaled

in small breaths

by corporeal beings,

the intelemotional matrix

that is the particular of ME -

this breath

consisting of the stringy tendrils

of energy and information

that permeate us.

I believe in multiple realities

that cannot include each other

and so

what am I to do?

whom am I to becomes?

what arc of the heavens

can I aspire to see beyond?

8/29/2018

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