Lost and found

Have you lost your mind? Recently? Along with your investments or your pet? Or your identity? Is that like the loss of dandelion fluff or bubbles on the wind? Have you lost the keys to your treasure chest? And did you lose your lap when you stood up? Or have you lost your lunch as you lost your vision of the movement of the waves of the sea? Are the boys of Neverland still lost? Have you lost the flames of candles lit and blown out to celebrate or pray? Have you lost your youth or a love or your purpose or pleasure?

I have lost what I no longer know. I have lost what I no longer possess. I have lost what is beyond reach, or insensible, or hardened. What I do not understand or appreciate is lost on me. What is lost is hopelessly unattainable.

Yet in the midst of all this experience of loss science tells us that energy is neither created nor destroyed. This law of the conservation of energy affirms that the total energy abides continually. Never lost, energy is merely changing form continuously.

Humans struggle with this from their very beginnings. We see it in the human fascination with peek-a-boo games that bring out the ingenuous in all ages. It is fascinating to experience with the very young child that the face which enters and leaves the visual field actually enters and leaves existence. This is the experiential case until, at some point, there is the attainment of a developmental realization. The child creates a paradigm which psychologists refer to as object permanence. This is the paradigm that imagines the world to be strewn with rigid objects that are continuous in time and space, even when unobserved. It is one of the earliest and most deeply made acts of faith.

It is a mode of perception interpretation that is so ingrained that we must struggle hard even to notice it. Questioning it is an even tougher enterprise.

Yet we can come to realize that this assumption of permanence is a developmental position that we must go beyond. We need only see the continual death and birth of the cells within our bodies, the continuous flux of our thoughts, the changing waves of our emotions. In seeing this, we begin to realize that the assumed enduring entity of our self is created by our own minds, brought into being by our primitive human creativity that longs for and grasps at an independent self extended in time and space. We name ourselves into existence. We play the peek-a-boo game masterfully.

We must begin to remember we are playing. The face that disappears, lost, becomes found. But we must aim beyond modern scientific rigor toward post-modern face becoming found art object. We become found like the ready-mades that shook the twentieth century art world. The positioning of the frame changes and challenges conception. An object that exists for some other purpose becomes an object of art.

A urinal lifted out of the men's room becomes in a new context a completely new object of wonder and social commentary. Like a rock found on a road that becomes a keepsake because we say it is, we can shake the fundament of meaning by our point of view.

All the world, even our very selves, becomes found in the original sense of the etymology of the

word. The Latin fundere

means poured, melted into new being. What is found can only manifest out of profound embrace of what is lost. And what is lost makes possible a new finding.

Two sides of the same coin, lovers in embrace, changing into other, concretizing and releasing: This lost and found dancing wind empowers the sails of my pirate vessel, never aground. I have lost and found my never mind.

All ways.

— Rx is the FloridaW eekly muse w ho hopes t o inspir e pr ofound mu tiny in all those who care to read. Our Rx ma y be wearing a pir ate cloak of in visibility, but emanating fr om within this shado w is hope that readers will feel free to respond. Who knows: You may even in s p i re the muse. Make contact if you dare.