Friend, have you not seen that it’s the edges that are the most blossoming,
The most burgeoning and eccentric?
That the sun-warmed rock pools (neither ocean nor land) are where transparent shrimp go all frenetic?
That it’s the melding of French and African and Redneck folk and food and music that make New Orleans buzz with jazz and pizzaz and magic?
That the formless frontier of forest on the crepuscular cusp of darkness is where furtive animals feed and mate and mingle and play at Peaceable Kingdom prefigurative politics?
It’s the edges, friend.
The centres are established and self-assured and stagnant.
No reactions spark there, no flint strikes steel to birth bright fire, no vinegar fizzingly faces soda, no Vesuvius wakes, no earthquake shakes at the navel of any great tectonic plate.
No sulfur-engulfed steam-belched artesian wells fulminate.
No, friend, it’s the awkward edges,
The frigid and sweltering wastes, the sizzling Nordic saunas of deeply-felt qualia that stretch us from clenched defensive clams into beings more expansive, more comprehensive, more enchanted;
That force us to foolishly pigeon-talk exotic languages;
It’s the withered wilderness and God-haunted isles that spawn prophets and sages.
And the wildly spinning world always changes
On the hinges between the ages.
Love the awkward edges.
precisely so.