The Baser Desires

The colour of desire.

The past few days have had me frequently at frustration as I struggled to balance my need for food against my need for learning and productivity. It was not until I spent a good three hours hiking through a park absorbing what nature has to offer did I realize that I was missing out on opportunities to harness the necessary stimuli that the human condition gives us. Rilke in his Letters to a Young Poet phrases this most wonderfully:

"Bodily delight is a sensory experience, not any different from pure looking or the pure feeling with which a beautiful fruit fills the tongue; it is a great, an infinite learning that is given to us, a knowledge of the world, the fullness and the splendor of all knowledge. And it is not our acceptance of it that is bad; what is bad is that most people misuse this learning and squander it and apply it as a stimulant on the tired places of their lives and as a distraction rather than as a way of gathering themselves for their highest moments."

Indeed, as postmodernist philosophy goes, a lot of reality or at least reality as we know it is dependent on our own subjective perceptions. If we are able to tweak that for our own personal development, then we would be that much more powerful.