Back At It

Looking at the yearly post counts, I've certainly had one of the least productive writing years I've had in a long time. Hopefully we can finish a little stronger here. 

But there was certainly good reason for that. Or there were several good reasons anyway. You have the baseline intensity and duration of physical labor during the work season to begin with. Living between the cracks, people may discover that you're available for this or that task or project or unfulfilled function, which multiply as things continue to break down in the United States. Or that you are available to visit. And most of this is a positive and enriching side of that status. But the institutions breaking down also offload a lot more time and labor on you as well. 

This is all multiplied if the only bridge leading into your community is permanently closed due to neglect and terminal damage - a shattering event that I have still yet to full process and eventually write about - and the isolated community on the terminal side of that bridge are forced to turn inwards and come together to coordinate greater autonomy. 

Add to all this the improving by still-present baseline of Long Covid to this, and all of the work and energy it takes to work around that, as well as a couple of deaths in the family, and all of the meditation and spiritual work it takes to deal with those things, as well as the much higher baseline of ambient stress and pressure, and quickly the time and energy disappears, and the writing does not come. 

One's life is what it is. One's idealized life on the other hand begins to take on the appearance of a deflating bounce house, the power cut to its inflating blower, and trapped inside, one maneuvers to merely escape its sagging and suffocating confines. 

But now I have some time again, and I'm gearing up for the writing again. Alas, as with any sort of activity that one no longer sustains, one's faculties and familiarity atrophy. With the physical work, this principle is immediately apprehended as one resumes that work: one's muscles are quickly exhausted and one's endurance is found lacking as one gasps for breath. With sustained thought, reading, and writing, initially one's mind is blank and dull, one's head hurts; one's thoughts remain slippery and fleeting, but then gradually the duration and depth and vibrancy of those thoughts return. 

There is a fear and a reluctance to get going again. Can I still do this? Of course, the muscle memory is there. It starts to come back as one gets moving again. I feel sympathy for those rusting gutted cars that sit in people's yards, those unfulfilled fixer-uppers that gather embarrassment as well as dust. I glance at my own unfinished cars littering the yard. Time to get the tool box and get going. 

Trying to Fall

During the bulk of the warmest October on record, you could feel the fall trying to come on in the Pacific Northwest. Higher north, the amount of light in a single day drops off precipitously: the sun passes from east to west much lower in the sky, barely arcing over the tree-line like a deflating balloon, and the day ends quickly. The cold and dark come on hard. 

Yet in the middle of all this, winds kick up mostly from the south and from the offshore currents from the west, occasionally sloshing in from the east due to the geography and dynamic climate of the region, bringing warm air from unseen lands baking in the south and in the interior, which then settle underneath a dense cloud layer. This sort of pattern is to be expected in the early fall, but which has been gradually growing in intensity and duration. 

As I've mentioned before, confusion ensues in the plant and insect life. Animal confusion follows. Human confusion and consternation comes too. The seasonal labor winds down with a feeling of hesitation and frustration. 

Heading south in mid November, I passed through some of those unseen lands. The misty north of Washington and then Oregon gave way to a furnace in California, almost instantly as the border was crossed, the sun shining and the heat radiating like mid summer. The cooling happens much more gradually, ever more so. The slowing and the silence follow that same delayed descent. There is so much to do, and less time to sit.