Just one Haiku today

Search and, sadly, see
joy, pain, mirth, ecstasy, ache.
Some see a wasteland.



***Update***

I have this really good friend that I go and visit occasionally. Every once in a while we've enjoyed lunch together. He's such a nice guy, a great conversationalist, and he's fabulously brilliant in a neat, analytical way. One thing that he's great at is very quick-witted wordplay, which I get a huge kick out of. It's just fun to throw things back and forth and I am always challenged to make sure I'm not missing any zingers that he's hurling past me in our conversations.

One time I asked him, "Do you find it hard to find people who can follow you?"

And he replied, "It's a freakin' wasteland out there."

I visited with him on Wednesday, and something else came up. He repeated the same thing: "Man, it's just a wasteland!"

I stayed up all night working, then had to deal with a sick 6-year old at 4:00 AM. I was pretty worn out and finishing up my project and his words kept haunting me as I worked away at my desk:

"It's a wasteland."

Or is it?

I never wrote out my thoughts from reading Shogun, because I felt a little silly rehashing ideas that were fictional (albeit likely based on good research) and also probably was read by all the rest of the world (although this directly clashes with the "wasteland" idea). But here was an idea that I liked: The concept of the 3 hearts. One is the heart you wear in your mouth for everyone to see. The second is a more private heart for family and close friends. The third is the heart that is of utmost privacy with yourself.

Many of my friends whom I have told about my blog have mentioned to me that they felt a little uncomfortable reading my blog since there was a lot of private information in it--I think they are used to seeing heart #1 and it freaks them out to see heart #2, sitting there in black and white.

The "public heart" is the front that a lot of people put out there for others to see. Some have it heavily armored and never let others beyond the surface. I've been frustrated in the past with trying to move beyond trivial conversation and talk about "real" things, but then again that type of conversation can't be contrived-it has to be sincere.

It made me sad to think of all these wonderful and sometimes sad things happening to people that I'll never know about. It also makes me sad that sometimes I lose faith that there really is something spiritual inside these people--they aren't soulless zombies.

There it is--mystique demystified.