A quiet pleasant melancholy...

Googling My Brains Out

The Week: It snowed this week. The leaves have finally given up their grip. The branches drum in the wind while the roots quietly and softly hum. The nights are getting longer, and the little lights that warm the cold nights haven't been put out yet. It's a shoulder's-up head-down wool cap kind of feeling; a quiet book in the lap, let your eyes close, dog by the hearth scene.

I think we all have those places, moments, smells, memories, imaginations, dreams that bring us our quiet peace... 

More of the Week: I struggled this week with lessons of ethical conduct and conflict of interest, free speech and slander, the roll of teacher and of regular person. I haven't figured out the best path for teaching my charges while honoring my own emotions as a person... and that brings unrest to my mind. 

The art offered here is a doodle I did a few years ago after spending a solid day surfing, searching, browsing, the internet. Although I like the aesthetic of the doodle, the chaos reflects what a day in front of my screen does to my peace. I labeled it "Googling my brains out." And yet it's amazing what can soothe the disruptions of an agitated mind...

Hearth Scene

The Week's End: I watched a troupe of actors grades 7 to 12 present a delightfully humorous and at times sorrowful rendering of The Winter's Tale by the Bard. It is like Oedipus reversed, with a happy ending save a reasonably hysterical death by full ingestion by bear. Goodness, it was nice to escape my head for two hours. And then, spending time outside with a fire doing some cold yard work, putting order to the chaos; having healthy conversations with my son like two adults, realizing that he is a young man who can handle the complexities of life pretty well these days; shooting with a friend at 40 yard targets and getting a pretty good cluster of arrows; watching my daughter play some sweet indoor soccer while remaining tough even as she was traded to the other team to keep sides balanced; sharing a caesar salad with the best wife ever, basking in the realization that we are best friends and can exist near/with each other, often without needing to explain ourselves...

From the Past: I choose to dig out a moment from about 25 years ago. It sums things up pretty perfectly for me as we shuffle out of Autumn.

Do you remember those days
when in the morning it rained
and then stopped,

and the leaves were changing their
colours and beginning to fall,

and there was a warm breeze,
but because of the wet
it was damp,

and someone built a fire,
and the wet kept the smell
down, where we could
smell it,

and we would feel tragic
yet happy in the quietness where
voices traveled across whole fields,
and the leaves sang
with the breeze,

and we felt nostalgic of that
same feeling the year before?

Do you remember those days?