Try this at home when alone, and fully alert.
Sit in a chair, or stand purposefully. At the same time – clap your hands loudly together and sternly and sharply speak the words wake up out loud.
I hope it works for me.
Posted in Psycho-Bubbles, Reflections on the everyday | Tagged consciousness | Leave a Comment »
The seasons turn faster, the days run shorter, each moment sinks deeper.
Autumn.
Posted in Reflections on the everyday | Tagged autumn, time | Leave a Comment »
This morning I paused at my son’s school to look eastward. The sun rose, a butter yellow disk through lifting fog.
Partial wetlands blanket the school campus and a tributary runs directly beneath a light walking bridge to the school. Slimmed by meager rain, the stream itself wandered between burgeoning banks of seasoned flora – echinacea, aged goldenrod, grasses, stream loving plants.
From the bridge, such colours – deep browns, licks of purple, gold, red, green, grey, chartreuse, puffy, stiff, dispersed seedheads of every kind – an autumnal cloak the likes of which I have never seen. To hold, to wear such a thing, to be a plant among such company, a sensuality far beyond a crisp summer day. A fine mist blurred the colours, just as age blurs my own eyes.
Later I spoke with the school secretary, mentioning the autumn finery — she spoke exuberantly about trees just hinting of the show to come. In time – yes, the trees will seem gaudy next to their shorter competition — but for now, my attention is to the ground, the carpet of cooling, pooling, passionate colours that lay as gifts around my feet.
Posted in Nature | Tagged autumn colour, streams | Leave a Comment »
Mr. Saturday Night is no longer — I miss him already.
Mr. Saturday Night was an adventurous monarch caterpillar given to escapist feats. Placed in a jar for his own protection against winged predators, he had a penchant for wriggling out air holes and heading on down the highway, or at least the end of the shelf.
Big, striped, and saucy, that boy had a way about him. Nobody could put down a milkweed leaf like he could.
And he is gone.
Yesterday, after hanging upside down for about a day, he sloughed his skin and disappeared into a jade-green chrysalis about one-third the size of his formerly formidable caterpillar form.
The root meaning of metaphor is to transfer, carry over or across. Metamorphosis is to change, or transform. Metamorphosis has always been a florid metaphor for human transformation.
We all know the story of the caterpillar and the chrysalis – monarch butterflies are beloved for their beauty, their shape-shifting, and their migratory bent. To me, they represent a life-long interest. When young myself, I witnessed the same journey I now see again in Mr. Saturday Night and five of his closest friends.
Everyone sees what they will. After years of troubling divorce and continuing instability, the permanence of the change in Mr. Saturday Night – his reduction to goo, his sturdy reliance on unshakeable instinct to lead him forward – leave a deep impression on me.
Prior form is utterly gone – we have the shed skin to prove it. Yet he survives, interior, contained, and changing. His instinct, our faith, he needs only to endure and follow his path to the sky.
At their age, my children are saddened by the disappearance of these beautiful caterpillars, they wonder at the change – and wait to see if nature holds good on the promise. I do too.
Posted in Reflections on the everyday, Uncategorized | Tagged monarch butterflies, monarch caterpillars, transformation | Leave a Comment »
Crisp day, a turn toward autumnal.
Quiet day in the neighborhood gave way to rushing, oncoming traffic. Trucks rumble by close enough to feel their wake. To the car repair shop via sidewalk, a piece down a busy road. Attention pivots away from vehicular onslaught.
Mountain Ash…a scrubby tree with top full of orange berries reaching for light, resides on the north side of a house that has seen better days. Cedar Waxwings covet those berries when days cool further, beautiful birds.
A stand of common milkweed beyond cracked pavement catches my eye. Monarch caterpillars that grow to magnificent butterflies feed upon these plants, absorbing the toxicity of the plant into their skin – making them unpalatable to predators. You are what you eat. No leaf damage here, not a caterpillar in sight.
“Excuse me,” an upcoming runner dodged around me and took a near, and pleasant looking side street.
Two tractor trailers, engine brakes engaged, roll past too fast – what am I doing here?
Looking up for escape – an eyeful of Simpson’s clouds. Cumulus clouds bearing precise resemblance to the opening scene of the popular, but irreverent, animated television show of the same name. Meteorology, please forgive me.
Only a few weeks ago my boys and I were above those clouds looking down – cannot help but smile for the memory of family and friends seen again along the way.
Struggling young ornamental pear, half a dozen trees, planted a couple of years ago when this thoroughfare was widened, working at survival in the foreground of an empty lot.
A large old maple here, guards a pumpkin patch set back off the road. Powdery mildew is making fast work of those vines, exposing pumpkins ripened early by unusual summer heat.
Black metal bench and trash can front another vacant lot. Hidden here is the geocache my children and I found last December. Still here.
Almost there, sumac bobs in full sun, tight ruddy fruit clusters like those in my parents backyard years ago. Those seed pods always were a little too tense for me.
Rounding the corner, I spy Buckbeak, finished, parked and waiting, my time travel ended for now. When avoiding the unpleasant, a lot to be seen – and said – for things noticed along the way.
Posted in Reflections on the everyday, Uncategorized | 1 Comment »
After just posting a bog, I see it is dated “September 11,” although where I am in the world, it is still only September 10.
September 11 is breath-taking. I wish it were over, but it never shall be.
As I did ten years ago, my thoughts and prayers go out to all who lost, who lived, and who inherit the cause and effect of that day.
Onward.
Posted in Reflections on the everyday | Tagged September 11 | Leave a Comment »
Nothing ever changes, no it doesn’t – song lyric, Steve Nicks
Change is inevitable. Change is constant – quote Benjamin Disraeli
Constancy or constant change, which is it?
Of course, patterns do not change, they shift, revert, double over with laughter and skip forward in time, sometimes backward. Maybe get so big they outgrow the screen, which makes us think things changed, but really did not.
And the background that always seems to change, well maybe it is just a small something that seems like it changes, but is really a square in a much bigger quilt, along the lines of those holographic principles. Not that I know about such things.
And we who muddle and claim change, only to fall back once again. A tired story among stories.
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Waxing in the western sky, preternaturally large, the moon is dusty autumn gold.
Ahead, it peeks beyond a horizon I cannot.
Ambassador in earthshine, to what the solar world will bring.
Posted in Nature | Leave a Comment »
In life and in nature, the aftermath of a storm oftentimes becomes the defining feature of its passage.
What takes seconds to damage or destroy, may take weeks, months, or years to repair. Trauma. Loss of power, loss of place. Some damage – to relationship, psyche, or home – is irreparable.
To those I know, and those I do not, affected by the tide and tumult of Hurricane Irene, my thoughts are with you.
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Shouldn't...but Do 