You call that #suave?” she asked, smiling like she already knew the answer. “If I’ve earned any at all,” I said, “it came from weather, not mirrors.” She nodded, slow, like the line told her more about me than I meant to give away. Can’t figure dames, but they can sure figure me. #vss365

Shen-hsui writes: The body is the Bodhi Tree; The mind like a bright mirror standing. Take care to wipe it all the time, And allow no dust to cling. Hui-neng writes then: There never was a Bodhi Tree, Nor bright mirror standing. Fundamentally, not one thing exists, So where is the dust to cling?

Searching for real love is like hunting for your car keys. Finding it in the second-to-last place would be insanity. It only ever appears in the #last place you look, because once you’ve found it, once you know it’s real, where else is there to search? #vss365

Reading Alan Watts reminds me that the stuff we swear #matters is usually just mental static pretending to be signal. The Way of Zen drops this gentle bomb: the moment you stop narrating your life, you start actually living it. #vss365

If language were sufficient, love would be simple and fully explained by sunset. But words fail, and silence too offers no answers. What’s left then is the only proof of it. Love exists only in our actions. It is as it does.

The revolution won’t be televised. Not now, not ever again, not with AI turning our screens into guessing games. What’s real still waits outside, in the open air. Find me there, in the streets and the public squares where our voices carry.

Maybe it’s the Merchant Marine roots, or being called to active duty in the Navy during the war, but drip black coffee from a Folgers tin in a stained second hand mug still feels like the first true taste. Everything after is only a variation on that morning truth.

Class over, they sat on the step. She confessed that #history was a waste; dust and longing. On the new Earth, love was a relic too, archived under “obsolete custom.” He asked what “𝑏𝒾𝓈𝑜𝓊𝓈” meant. She smiled, leaned close, and whispered. He touched his lips, confused by the ache. #vss365

Ferns tall enough to walk beneath, dew drops falling, cooling her skin, the air thick with loam and morning pulse. They moved where no path existed, feet sinking in soft earth. He whispered something about #geography, but she didn’t hear him. The forest, in silence, stole away all sound. #vss365

The listeners gathered in the agora, the last seated in the dust as quiet descended. #Education drew light from darkness for the few remaining citizens. He said, “Before clocks, time was kenning, the sun, the wind, the hunger.” She learned it daily. The sun taught thirst and darkness mercy. #vss365

“What will become of my spirit when I die?” “I don’t know, you’ve been to sea, you’ve felt the wind in your sails. What becomes of the wind, when the wind dies?” ~ Gene Wolfe - paraphrased dialog from “The Knight” Chapter 24 @rereadingwolfe.bsky.social

I have shed purpose, meaning and #business, a once distracted man parting with his imaginary friends, each one waving from the boardroom of my mind. What’s left is quieter: a radiant purposelessness of the now expanding until the idea of success forgets itself amid the morning birdsong. #vss365

A friendly critic (family) said of my work recently: “He writes in the quiet language of return. Restorative, elemental, and unguarded, where tears aren’t tragedy but an ebb tide. His prose doesn’t demand belief; it invites you home.” #RestorativeWriting rickmarriner.com/poetry/

She’d said she liked him, and that was enough. It felt good to be liked, statistically. His Banshee class drone sped across the lunar sea, rocket fire blooming late. Frustrating, these apt light-speed delays. The math of #terror tactical; still, both light and meaning find their target. #vss365

“Through Glass Darkly” She tuned the nano-lights to flicker like real flame, the ships sensors logged the photons scattering in the thin atmosphere. Across the table, she’d programed his image and it held her gaze; #unseen behind digital eyes. She ate in silence, orbiting the idea of him. #vss365

The mission lead’s reflection #hovers in the panel glass, steady as the orbit I plotted. We’d promised not to cross the line between data and desire. Equations don’t tremble, but my pulse does. We already proved we can stop. Now I want to understand what choosing feels like. #vss365 #scifi

The distance wasn’t arid, but the waiting was. Beneath the quiet, something green gathered strength and learned to bloom without rain. #vss365 #arid

When I look back, the moments that haunt me aren’t when I was wrong, but when I was harsh instead of tender; when I could have chosen kindness and didn’t. #reflection #writing

MoonSea Log Entry Day 251: Our automated reef-bots keep the kelp clear as we prep the divers, their lensed eyes shimmer in the dawnlight. 0630: Bridge watch noted, unexpectedly, the bots rising higher, circling the pontoons, blades glinting. Someone joked #piranha, the name has stuck. #vss365

The stranger stepped from the shuttle, haloed in steam. He bowed low before the dome colony’s lights, unwrapping a relic spun from materials born under Earth’s forgotten sky. When the afternoon later turned to rain, we finally understood, he hadn’t brought a gift. He’d brought a #raincoat. #vss365

Who did he think he was? He was an #associate, mid-tier transfer clerk routing freight between Earth, Luna, and Mars. She’d never notice him. The shuttle hummed; stars drifted like paperwork. He wondered, could a cybo feel loneliness, would she have protocols for the condition? #vss365 #scifi

Her words, small gusts against my canvas, teasing out shapes from stillness. Now and then they filled the sails on a broad reach; mostly I rowed through calm, chasing the shimmer where hope forms brackish water with doubt. She’s testing if the sea between us might yet let her drift closer. #poetry

The diplomats spoke the vocabularies of neutrality, words bent like plasma in artfully manipulated magnets. No one mentioned the mines under the moon’s surface. When the Admiral smiled the envoy sensed the need to #advert, too late. Courtesy, in space, is often just slower form of ordnance. #vss365

The universe doesn’t wait for consciousness to resume each morning after sleep. As far as I can tell, it keeps breathing, humming its soft machinery of light and dark. Our minds surface together, blinking at the same infinity, choosing to notice, to care, to rejoin the world, and to call that hope.

The sound of thunder is a rumor; lightning is what actually speaks, the air screams, expands, collapses and then we hear the echo. When we say we hear the sound of thunder, we should mean silence; the instant after creation when everything waits to see if it survived. Thunder, the sound of light.

2030: artillery shells still tore steel from the sea, but the CIC AI just laughed: “fire again, 62% chance of narrative symmetry.” The officer of the deck spat blood, realizing history wasn’t written by victors anymore. It was arranged by algorithms with ironic code. #vss365 #militaryfiction

Errands, chores, tasks, projects, initiatives… it all multiplies, hours fray. Then your smile : “Hiya! I’ve looked forward to our chat all day.” The hour, an #oasis, no map, no measure. For a spell reconnection outweighs arithmetic, and quiets the cacophony of life with our day dreams. #vss365

I’ve spent my life waiting for the tide. Age teaching patience, and patience teaching calm. The list of lightly grounded hulls I’ve skippered is too long, but sail we must. I know the tides come as clockwork, surely, lifting what waits long enough, carrying those who navigate safely to deeper water.

Rereading 𝑮𝒓𝒂𝒗𝒊𝒕𝒚’𝒔 𝑹𝒂𝒊𝒏𝒃𝒐𝒘: the page itself flickers, hymns beneath jokes beneath palinodes of ruins and … a carnival atmosphere. Equations chant, desire coils, paranoia flowers from ash. The rocket waits, omen or machine or key in a lock. To turn it is to be turned. #Pynchon #GravitysRainbow

The Archives smelled of vellum and cold stone; in its hush he lifted the vessel, vapors thinning to a #blur across his gaze. A glossator’s crabbed hand had marked it “parva cervisia”; small beer. Was it the draught that was weak, or the vow itself? He drank, the thin brew folding into him. #vss365

Ontological Warfare Inertial frame drifting microns, in that math lived extinction. The #conundrum: … fire coils early, lose concealment; wait, lose time. The fleet’s banter flooded: “All vectors collapse to one.” The captain wondered. Is she hearing calculus or canticle or myth. #vss365 #scifi

Δv drained with each failed sublimate cycle. Frost bloomed, spectral arcs refracting a rainbow he couldn’t see as God’s grace. He was a Pynchon footnote now, paranoia embodied. The engine coughed louder than the men locked within the din and smoke filled ship spiraling towards the planet. #vss365

I write one sentence at a time, for one reader at a time. They may never know they’re the reader. It’s broadcast, yes, but aimed like a private beam of thought. Others overhear, but my hope is in that single line reaching a single soul. That’s writing for my muse. #writingcommunity #muse

By the glacier she rested from the journey, frostfire tangled in her hair, the low sun casting her eyes a deeper blue than the ancient ice itself. Her #scrutiny unspooled me, thread by hidden thread, yet offered no clues. Archive me, melt me, or free me: all futures lay silent in her gaze. #vss365

Gene Wolfe = genius! In “The Wizard Knight”, he slips in a line: a man runs “as fast as two hares.” In old Greek we’re warned, «ὁ δύο λαγώ διώκων, οὐδένα καταλαμβάνει» he who chases two hares catches none. Wolfe inverted the proverb, gifting us a myth where the impossible briefly becomes true.

He walked a path rumored into being by monks who’d lost faith in the roads. Each step folded time: one world peeling off, another stitched on. Shadows fountained east. Quietly the forest began to chant, low and #sonorous, he knew then there was never any map he’d be able to follow to her. #vss365

The ship’s corridor itself bent to her lyrical #caprice, exotic alloys vibrating in modes he hadn’t heard since before absence became his atmosphere. Her words threaded in the hum, a reprise, a measure hidden in complexity until all blurred, and he felt himself written back into time. #vss365

Seven days of near flatline static, him compulsively re-reading the graphs like maybe patience could conjure a signal from the noise. Then: blip. Not random noise. Pure, absurd and cosmic. He laughed, he worried, he rebooted the link for better audio. The deepest truth: she was still out there.

We was at the Somme, so we were, sky sagged like wet canvas an’ the barrage all done. Tommy swore loud that a rat wore our colours, Alfie just give the sarge a look. Mud’s in our boots an’ in our heads now. Cook sez, “No fate left in the pot, lads, only the #eventuality come the morrow.” #vss365

They kept the beige #bellwether on an altar. It never spoke. Men and women prayed. Elders and children wept for time made quiet snd brittle. Priests preached of an empire consumed by the promise of connection. In silence they believed. In silence they stayed. In silence they waited. #vss365 #modem

Did you know philosopher Henri Bergson believed time was unmeasured, a living tide rather than a march? In his vision of duration, silence turns mystical, like a breath without words, lingering past reason, dissolving in the quiet yet never quite gone. (I did NOT know, and so I am sharing.)

The physicist studied two proofs. To #reinvigorate the lattice meant acknowledging silence; angles snd magnitude confused, vectors keened. But wait, perhaps the cosmos longed to be unpicked, the loom weary of weaving, a hush when equations forgot their purpose. No. The silence was safe. #vss365

Hunger anoints my compound bow. The razor sharp arrow gleams like a shard stolen from the sun. To miss is exile, to strike is all. The stag is as quiet as an oracle, ribs flaring with cavernous breath. Focus is my liturgy: the prayer that the gods will let us eat tonight. #poetry #hunting #hunger

I longed for the dual luxury of time and options; to point and say “this”. Yet the path is paved, single track and unbroken, here hidden for a few meters ahead. I walk it anyway, convincing myself each step is chosen. Fate chuckles, but I still feel today was mine to decide. #poetry #fate #choice

The dark grey sea can not instruct with kindness. The midshipman labors in silence in wind, hands torn, eyes salt-stung. The waves, steep cliffs, each whitecap a lesson. To become worthy of the sea is covenant: to flow over her surface without breaking, to rise when summoned. #poetry #ocean #sailor

The road swallows the careless general. A great field marshal keeps his host moving yet never destroys it with mindless haste. He measures the miles, feeds the hunger, guards the night. And when dawn comes, the army is a coiled storm, furious and fed, eager to break the day with fire. #wisdom

“Can it be fixed?” the boy asked. The keeper whispered “#perhaps,” quieter and deadlier than the raging storm. Lantern gears crusted in salt, whale oil slicked his palms. Beyond, a forlorn brigantine clawed closer to the shoals, its survival balanced on the sighting of just one more light. #vss365

Adam Smith once wrote: “Man naturally desires, not only to be loved, but to be lovely.” A reminder that worth is more than applause, more than likes. Long-form Essay at link below. #Philosophy #Economics #Love #Virtue #FutureOfWork

A #catastrophe, I thought at first, her quiet on the hill. But the wind in the Scottish heather sang of bridges still standing, hidden in distance. I carry the little canary claim slip, worn and small, a talisman of passage; of potential, deniable in detail, but as real as memory. #vss365

#Extrusion calculations again? A torus pressed through four-space, its shadow writhing on his screen; a holy scroll half-burned. The ship waited for orders, patient, cruel. He knew the numbers solved themselves, but only if he surrendered the part of him that still believed in Euclid. #vss365