I’m just a leaf. I’ve lived all across the United States, border to border, coast to coast, and can’t really call any one place home, I even ran away with the circus for a time. Perhaps that’s partly why I find the concept of home so captivating, we are all captives of both our heart and our mind in one way or another, and it’s somewhere at the intersection of those two functions that home exists after all.

               Some have called me an artist, a painter, a photographer, a philosopher, a poet, a musician, a failure as well as a success, even a bit of a scientist among so many other things, and while all accurately describe, none describe accurately. In theory, I generally believe Einstein’s theory of General Relativity which tells me that it is all relative, everybody is all of these things in some aspect, it just depends on your frame of reference, such is the gravity of being. To the scientist I am but a philosopher, to the philosopher I am but a poet, and to the poet I am but a scientist, though in all things, I know nothing compared to that which there is to know, or as Socrates so eloquently once stated, “ὅτι ἃ μή οἶδα οὐδέ οἴομαι εἰδέναι,” (Plato, Apology 21D). So, I find myself often the amateur, occasionally the pro, a Jack of all trades, master of none, but I always aspire to do better, and my real passion lies within the congruence of even juxtapositions. I am all of these things, and I am none. Finding the points of (dis)connection is the Ace up my sleeve, if not just a magic trick.  

               One might say that is reflected in both my love of nature and technology. We create technology from nature, and I believe that it’s fundamentally important to utilize technology to better coexist with nature, it’s also vital to remember that this is another cross-section at which home exists. To forsake either one quickly brings survival into question–we live in nature, and we use technology to do so–it’s as simple as that. Personally, I find freedom in the messy chaos of nature and stability within the sharp organization of technology, and while they are so often put in conflict with each other, I find that they do much better as compliments to one another. Besides, at the end of the day, I find the bright lights of my computer that much more compelling when contrasted by the dark silhouette of the living Monstera siltepecana vines that adorn it, a cold fire in a fabricated jungle, a modern twist on an instinctual feeling as ancient as civilization.

               So here I blend technology with my own nature in order to create a little home on the digital web, a place to share my reflections, as flawed as they may be, because they are me, just as much as that being in the mirror that I am so familiar with despite its subtle symmetric differences to the reality. This is what I see. So, I am just a leaf, a kaleidoscope of thoughts, feelings, experiences, skills, and existential quandaries that-are-probably-just-more-thoughts-and-that’s-redundant-but-now-I’m-over-thinking-it-this-must-be-my-anxieties. And we are all just leaves in wind, natural equations of repetitive patterns mixed into the chaos of quantum uncertainty, microcosms of cosmic proportion, or perhaps just Fools in a play.

-Aleaf Inwind