Passion and Fascination: Coolwaterworks Style

“Find your life’s true passion and follow it, follow the path that is no path. “Follow your bliss.” When you have the unmistakable experience of the Aha! then you’ll know you’re riding on the mystery.”

This is Joseph Campbell, one great American scholar on religions and mythology, in his teaching mode. The guy was unemployed for 5 years after college. Then got to take care of a dog for one year to support himself. From there, teaching and writing books became his bliss. He found his.

I’m into blogging for one year now and any blogger knows that posting regularly demands some time – from collecting and collating information to reader interaction. The question that often bugs me is: is it worth the time, even if given the nature of my job affording me to bask on some? My blog seems to ask me also in turn:

DF: Why build me in the first place?

dFish: Aha! This is getting philosophical. You need to know your genesis? Why don’t you scan your About DF page?

DF: It’s been getting steady there. It’s you who need that post-it note!

dFish: Okay fine. So what’s the point of reading it over and over besides your screaming?

DF: I like it – you’re thinking and acknowledging my emotion. Let me get back to the rhetoric of blog-building – don’t you think a lot of the highs and lows in hammering and nailing have to do with purpose, passion, and fascination plus time?

dFish: I like purpose; he’s not as morose as passion, although fascination is a lot more playful of the two.”

DF: Whatever!

Coolwaterworks and the WordPress Year That Was

Yes, that gravatar guy in a blue shirt with his backpack and baseball cap on – that’s Coolwaterworks, engineer and proprietor of the blog Nooks and Crannies. I have known N and C only for a number of months but the mind and passion behind it, as if I’ve known beyond those numbers. (Lotto bettors also know better how long is long.)

Coolwaterworks is a careful, refreshing writer to read, seems always mindful of the difference in usage between a colon and a semicolon, between a chicken baticolon and Calle Colon. Dive through to his every entry and you sense a man who knows well, or perhaps a signatory, to the subject-verb agreement of 1898. If there are grammatical slips, I like to harbor those against some hurried time, like toothbrush left behind from the packed items out of haste to catch the last submarine to Spratlys. Coolwaterworks simply has the habit packing for excellence, for a total package, for perfection without being rigid and imposing, in contrast to being settled with a half-cooked crab, the mediocre, the semi-broken backpack or a pants’ zipper.

Perfection is the field of science and no doubt being an engineer himself, is shaped by this field. If those high-selling fishball vendors are also learning the science of concocting sauces of different flavors, likewise with Coolwaterworks. He blogs. He works. He travels. He makes shots. He writes. He prays. With the consciousness of a man of science, most likely mindful that one neutron in aberration could lead to a different material configuration. Engineers and physicists take no visible matter for granted the way Mother Ricky Reyes pays attention to every hair contour of her customer.

From science, let’s move to art because our guy is really that ambidextrous in my strong opinion (I am sometimes as opinionated as Secretary Raul Gonzales may reklamo?) Art is a different field the ground is not precision but playfulness; the fertilizer is less our capacity for logical thinking and more, by our capacity to play with the colours and textures, the heights and depths, the lights and shadows around us. Children know this capacity better with their coloring book or excursions to the Lower House Zoo.

Feast on Coolwaterworks’ photos, his picturesque travelogues and his countryside ecstasy and you see less an adult man of science at aim for Strunkian precision and more a child living and playing with his sense of wonder within. That’s Coolwaterworks. Parang si Mommy Dionisia lang minsan – dancing, going to the parlor, happy with her Louis Vuitton bag. From N and C, you can sense how he frolics with time and with those that fascinate him and he is passionate about. He may not own a Louis Vuitton bag for grannies but at least, he has WordPress. This is his virtual bliss. Happy Anniversary Mark!

—————–

Photo Credit: Nooks and Crannies