An Invitation onto the Floe

Most questions are asked in expectation of answers. Where are my glasses? Who won the World Cup? What time does the last train leave? Such questions are useful. They keep us fed, punctual, and able to find our spectacles.

Other questions are useful precisely because they cannot be answered.

What if imagination is not an escape from reality but an instrument of creation? What if everything ever imagined exists somewhere—or exists because it was imagined? What if life and death are merely local names for conditions we cannot see beyond? What if the world we share is a negotiated arrangement, sustained by our collective willingness to treat it as real?

And what word describes our relationship with the whole bewildering business? Love? Worship? Kinship? Mystery? A longing for communion?

These are not riddles with solutions concealed at the back of the book. Nor are they propositions I intend to prove. They are exercises—stretches for mental muscles stiffened by certainty, habit, and the practical demands of getting through the day. I wish this were a seminar and I could toss these and other questions onto the table over coffee. I’d enjoy knowing what you think.

Our world is a small platform of agreed reality. It feels solid beneath our feet, and ordinarily it is best not to question that solidity too closely. But the platform is moving, and its edges are uncertain.  A floe, in other words.

Beneath it lies an abyss: something deep, dark, and completely unknown.

From time to time, I intend to walk toward the edge and send back a dispatch—sometimes in the form of a parable. I offer no assurance that what I report is true. I am not entirely certain that truth, in these waters, is a fixed location. I ask only that you leave a little room for the impossible—not necessarily to believe it, but to examine what becomes visible when disbelief is suspended.

Bring a warm coat. The ice may be thin, the water beyond fathoming.