Vermiculate Patterns

But I go by Nate these days. Almost 20, 3rd generation Berkeleyan. I hate labels and being an ist or an at or a can. I lived in Japan for half a year from 2006-2007 and I lived in Minnesota for most of a year from 2007-2008. I think the world is a terrible and beautiful place. I believe peace is a worthy thing to strive towards – both personally and globally. I believe people who think peace is impossible are like the stunted, stretched out white tendrils of a sprouting potato in a dank cellar. I think the purpose of our myriad senses and intelligence is to allow us to see perspective, discern objects and concepts at relative distances and realize what is petty and what is utterly important. Any of the tools that aid us in this quest – nature, science, music, art, literature – are for me the true essentials of a full human existence.

The title of this blog is taken from the final paragraph of Cormac McCarthy’s “The Road.” It is excerpted below but I recommend you read the rest of the book before the final paragraph. Because it means a whole lot more in that context.

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Once there were brook trout in the streams in the mountains. You could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of their fins wimpled softly in the flow. They smelled of moss in your hand. Polished and muscular and torsional. On their backs were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again. In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery.