[Image: photo by NASA’s Terra satellite, taken September 29, 2014. (Click to enlarge.)
See the note at the foot of this post for more information.]
From whiskey river:
Our awareness is overwhelmed by hundreds of different thoughts, feelings and sensations. Some we latch onto because they’re attractive fantasies or scary preoccupations; some we try to shove away because they’re too upsetting or because they distract us from whatever we’re trying to accomplish at the moment.
Instead of focusing on some of them and pushing away others, though, just look at them as feathers flying in the wind. The wind is your awareness, your inborn openness and clarity. Feathers — the thoughts, emotions, and physical sensations that pass through our awareness — are harmless. Some may be more attractive than others, some less attractive; but essentially they’re just feathers. Look at them as fuzzy, curly things floating through the air.
(Ngawang Tsoknyi Gyatso [source])
…and:
Fall
Fall, falling, fallen. That’s the way the season
Changes its tense in the long-haired maples
That dot the road; the veiny hand-shaped leaves
Redden on their branches (in a fiery competition
With the final remaining cardinals) and then
Begin to sidle and float through the air, at last
Settling into colorful layers carpeting the ground.
At twilight the light, too, is layered in the trees
In a season of odd, dusky congruences — a scarlet tanager
And the odor of burning leaves, a golden retriever
Loping down the center of a wide street and the sun
Setting behind smoke-filled trees in the distance,
A gap opening up in the treetops and a bruised cloud
Blamelessly filling the space with purples. Everything
Changes and moves in the split second between summer’s
Sprawling past and winter’s hard revision, one moment
Pulling out of the station according to schedule,
Another moment arriving on the next platform. It
Happens almost like clockwork: the leaves drift away
From their branches and gather slowly at our feet,
Sliding over our ankles, and the season begins moving
Around us even as its colorful weather moves us,
Even as it pulls us into its dusty, twilit pockets.
And every year there is a brief, startling moment
When we pause in the middle of a long walk home and
Suddenly feel something invisible and weightless
Touching our shoulders, sweeping down from the air:
It is the autumn wind pressing against our bodies;
It is the changing light of fall falling on us.
(Edward Hirsch [source])
Not from whiskey river:
Old Men Playing Basketball
The heavy bodies lunge, the broken language
of fake and drive, glamorous jump shot
slowed to a stutter. Their gestures, in love
again with the pure geometry of curves,rise toward the ball, falter, and fall away.
On the boards their hands and fingertips
tremble in tense little prayers of reach
and balance. Then, the grind of boneand socket, the caught breath, the sigh,
the grunt of the body laboring to give
birth to itself. In their toiling and grand
sweeps, I wonder, do they still make loveto their wives, kissing the undersides
of their wrists, dancing the old soft-shoe
of desire? And on the long walk home
from the VFW, do they still singto the drunken moon? Stands full, clock
moving, the one in army fatigues
and houseshoes says to himself, pick and roll,
and the phrase sounds musical as ever,radio crooning songs of love after the game,
the girl leaning back in the Chevy’s front seat
as her raven hair flames in the shuddering
light of the outdoor movie, and now he drives,gliding toward the net. A glass wand
of autumn light breaks over the backboard.
Boys rise up in old men, wings begin to sprout
at their backs. The ball turns in the darkening air.
(B. H. Fairchild [source])
…and:
The game of Cement Tag added a human element to the Gothic terrors of that other cement-related game: cement was no longer poison, but rather the only place where you could be pursued and tagged by It.
It was called that precisely because there were no words for it. It had no face, no name, and It was vaguely related to The Boogieman. But Its anonymity made it worse. It was It only when your back was turned; when you faced It, it became Jimmy, Steve, Richard, Lindsay, or Mouse. You couldn’t run backwards because you might trip on a tree root breaking through a sidewalk, and as you fell onto your back your last thought — just before becoming It yourself — would be, I was wrong it wasn’t one of the guys, it was It…
This morning in particular, as he rose groggily from his twin bed, placed gingerly bare feet on the icy tiles of his bedroom floor, and rummaged about under the bed for the day’s wardrobe, The Boy knew this morning something special was going to happen. It was just something in the air, something that crackled like piles of dry leaves through which shuffled a pair of black high-top Keds. What it was, see, was this: he was going to get all the way to school pursued by It, by a whole succession of Its, and he was miraculously not going to become It himself. It wouldn’t be easy. It always assumed the character, behind his back, of the speediest of his friends, and The Boy himself was not athletic at all, let alone speedy. So he would have to race especially fast, and he would have to race without hesitation or looking back; he would have to burst out the door of his house, leap across the cement steps onto the lawn, and bound like a deer — boing… boing… — all the way to school. You were always safe when you got to school, because everyone, It included, had to walk in the hallways. Running risked being tagged by a teacher, an ill-tempered janitor, or even the principal, the only captor conceivably more horrible than It.
(JES, How It Was: Autumn)
_______________________________
About the image: The volcanoes surrounding the Valley of Ten Thousand Smokes in Katmai National Park, in Alaska, have not erupted in a while. Nevertheless, ash from those past eruptions sometimes gets picked up by the wind and blown aloft again. Here, the wind is blowing to the southeast, “over Shelikof Strait, Kodiak Island, and the Gulf of Alaska.” For more information, see the page on Flickr where I found this image. You can also see the approximate area shown in this photo on Google Maps.
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