My shadow's shedding skin

Tool's albums now playing on the LCD television with its five-speaker system, while coaxing this sluggish mind to compose again for this blog.  This old and weary soul has often found heavy metal music quite to its liking these past few days, with all the stresses at work and my parents' place.  Those strong hypnotic beats, deeply layered rhythms that sounded like they could go on and on, those lyrics that tackle transcendence and personal change by coming to grips with one's dark side (yes, pretty much like what a Jedi master had to go through), and some weird sounds thrown into the soup - all contributing to get one through the long hours.  Perhaps not so different to the effect created by Mozart, Chopin, Bach, Beethoven, Handel, Vivaldi, Wagner, etc. when their creations allow the mind to block off the outside world for a while, dive into the depths of one's being, and bring forth a life-sustaining nugget of wisdom.

This existence is aching once more for some change.  Maybe out of fear about what the future might bring, in this age of mindless surrender to new tyrannies.  And there's still that brooding thought of one's failure to create a better world for the next generations, or at least of being responsible for the peril that life is now facing on this planet.  Perhaps some side-effect also of reaching one's half a century on Gaia.  Struggled to sustain one's interest in new things these past few years.  Imagined building a small virtual community of solitary individuals across the globe, discussing science fiction novels, Japanese films, music, Nietzsche, space exploration, literature, zen, environmental activism, running.  But then the era of short status posts came, and this blog was set aside for some time.  Tool's song, Forty six and 2, has this line which served as the title for this blog post.  It talks about change by digging through one's shadow - representing all the confusion, delusions, insecurities - and coming through to the other side, consumed with this will to live and grow.  So here we are again, back to this old online journal, with all the anxieties and ramblings and belly-crawling that we could muster.  At a recent birthday celebration for a dear teacher in college, this former colleague told me how while volunteering abroad, this blog served as his only link (and kept him grounded) to the old realities here at home.  Well, here's hoping that resuming with the blogging will help keep such will and sanity intact.