Isn’t it extraordinary that your mind can travel anywhere, independent of your physical location? 

Through this keyboard, I am about to spill the contents of my mental musing, the result of an hour on the fire escape. 

heart to heart, and mind to mind, we are the ones who will travel through time

Ask a coach, ask an athlete. Is x sport more physical or more mental? The response: 100 percent more mental than physical.

The most proficient participants in the most physically-demanding human activities declare that their activity is more mental than physical! How strange! Inquire further.

Why is this? The mind is the efficient cause of the body. Each bodily system is controlled by the brain, consciously or subconsciously. Even the seemingly automated flick of a nerve traces back to neural pathways. Yet the mind is not constrained by physicality. Materially, of course, the brain is a three-pound hunk of organic matter plunked in a little bone tub filled with fluid. But we all know that it is so much more than that. 

In each one of us, there are permeable boundaries between the mind and the heart. The physical brain and the heart are organic mechanisms, but the experiential mind and the heart are altogether different. 

Our brains calculate and our hearts pump, but our minds wonder and our hearts desire. 

I wanted music, but I did not want words. Words cannot express what music can. 

I wanted beauty, but I did not want persona. People cannot express what beauty can. 

Flicking the leaf-print lighter, oxygen flows through the lips, the tobacco leaves ignite. The leaf-print lighter replaces the black lighter. Black: the color of confidence and the color of loss. The color of New York and the color of funerals. 

The color of night before dawn. 

Puffs of smoke travel through the leaves on the trees before disappearing into the blue hue above. Small wisps on their way to join their brethren in the heavens, the almighty cumulus. 

Who dared to fashion a sky so beautiful? It humiliates the artist, it humiliates the rich. 

Undeterred viewing reveals movement: the shadows shift, the clouds collude, and the palette pivots. The imitations of man pale in comparison. An oil-on-canvas landscape in the Louvre waxes eloquent of the artistry of man, yet outside the horizon laughs. A ballistic against the bourgeois. 

I leaf through bound treasures of civilization: Born before I, remaining after I die. 

If the mere presence of the text in my hand was not enough to humble me, the contents baited my breath. 

“I am that am.”

Could the intellect and the wisdom of old exceed that of modern man? It cannot be: we can build spaceships!

But a mere machine tells man nothing of himself. It merely extends the length of his stride. One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind, still a small blip in an infinite universe. 

“I am that am.”

Who, then, am I?