Warmth

The windows are wide open. You wear shorts and a t-shirt and your feet are bare. Mid-November Chicago is warm and damp for the second day running. For that you are grateful.

The clattering of the keys on the manual typewriter sound good to you. You pause frequently to drift and dream. You wondered if days like these would ever arrive. They almost seem too pleasant.

Your mind works for you, unnoticed, unbidden, and not thanked. Your mind is as much your blood, bone, muscle, and gristle as it is the wet mushy lump in your skull.

You think in metaphors hidden from view. The metaphors are born from your basic and primary experience of being in the world. What you call reason is the imaginative manipulation of metaphor. Disagreements about abstract concepts arise because each concept has many metaphors.

Art, religion, philosophy, science, and language miraculously began all at the same time when the modern brain started thinking in metaphors. The metaphors are a shared heritage, yet people imagine new ones every day.

The books on the shelves, on the floor, and on the table comfort you like a great library. The pages you write make a pile beside you. You do not know what will come of them, if anything at all.

There is nothing more you want today than this unseasonable warmth on your skin and the words in your head finding their way to paper.