Dreaming the World

A day of heavy showers and break through blue sky, unseasonably warm. Autumn color has arrived and spreads itself slowly across the landscape. Many trees are in transition while quite a few remain green and the occasional tree is in full color. In some areas, especially stands of swamp maples, the trees are bare.

Work on our kitchen has progressed slowly and we are still cooking ion the studio. I’m not sure I will know how to cook in a kitchen should we ever have one again.

This week was to have been the great leap forward in kitchen construction but over the weekend one of the crew came down with Covid so for the moment all work has stopped. The upside of that is the quiet, something we and Nori all appreciate. The downside is that the completion date for the project continues to recess towards the far horizon.

I’ve been out with a camera a few times and am reminded of just how difficult it is to take autumn photos that are not clichés. The transition from eye to camera truly tests the photographer come this time of year. Still, I am enjoying the photos posted by friends, while appreciating the difficulty of what looks like a simple task.

For the past six weeks or so I have been taking an intensive course in working with modular synthesizers, something I know next to nothing about. I am one of a handful of non-musicians in the class; most of the others are electrical engineers. To say this is a deep dive would be a considerable understatement.

After about a month I actually had developed a sense of rudimentary competency but that has fled, only to be replaced by my wondering what happened to all the knowledge I had gained. I try to remind myself that such regression goes with most new learning and will give way to greater competence and understanding, but that is of little consolation at the moment.

We are two weeks away from the off-year elections here in the U.S.. Understandably the economy, violence, and refugees are high on everyone’s list of concerns. These issues represent a major conundrum as everyone wants financial and personal security but few people seem ready or willing to begin the task of downsizing to a sustainable level of consumption that would support everyone having enough without destroying the planet. It seem the idea is to push change back to a more convenient time, even though that time will never come and our present trajectory ensures ecosystem, and therefore, social and economic collapse. No wonder our kids and grandkids are anxious and angry.

All this complexity sits here amongst autumn’s transient beauty. This is my favorite time of year and like winter is increasingly endangered by our collective consumption. It’s a lot to sit with.