1) I come back and everything is suddenly so quiet and calm and clean, neatness abound, and I am momentarily awed by how this is possible. How is this possible? How do systems come into manifestation, so fully, so overwhelmingly?

1.1) The exclamation I make is more like: The fact that everything is so overwhelmingly different everywhere makes you understand the scale of the world, the force of climate, "culture", people, geography, forces, the earth this immense globe of a thing. Like in Hong Kong, thinking - how on earth are these buildings built? How does capital swarm together to create this, at this scale? Is it part of the wonder of an architect to be forever wowed at things (supposedly) within one's boundary of revisualization, reconfiguration? Always making something, setting it loose, and then being dazzled, blinded, stupefied by it?

2) It strikes me during a lull in the conversation at a coffee shop that the logic of physically building things (food, clothing, buildings, projects, etc) is like making a clearing in a sand pit, digging with your hands until you reach the sandless solid bottom, actively constantly pushing against entropy until you've painstakingly increased the degree of order. A luxury condo in a huge city somewhere just requires massive amounts of effort, gargantuan movements in order to transform the world. And it is done by money, not architecture, speculation and narrative, not science.

3) Questions always turn back to ethics, goals, endgoals. Why are you doing the things that you do? What percentage of it is one's extension of one's bodily self and tender psyche onto the world -- and the subsequent desire to make things better? How much of it is the pure joy at flexing one's intellectual muscles, dolphins jumping in water?

4) TBD