Excelsior!

Well, this is discouraging!  I haven't written anything all year.  Well, here are a few neat-looking photos, at least.

I love walking in the woods, and checked out an area I hadn't been to before a few months ago.  It was pretty mneh - there was supposed to be a waterfall, and there wasn't even a brook, just a small muddy trench.  However, there were some wonderful stones with furry moss spreading over them, such a visual and tactile treat.  Here are photos of two different types of moss.  In addition, some rocks and boulders had wonderful splotchy lichen markings.  I still missed the waterfall, but there were definitely compensations.

Misery and Joy

It is a mystery to me sometimes how misery and joy can co-exist, and how joy, or happiness, can reduce one to tears.  There is so much of both misery and joy in life; the trick is to never completely lose the awareness of all one's blessings.

I know, I know, nauseatingly Pollyanna-ish statement; sorry. But it is one of my deepest beliefs, cloying or not.

Today a few simple e-mails reminded me of all I have to be grateful for, the new human connections I have formed, a reminder of the positive difference I can make in a human life, and the positive difference others can make in mine.

This is all very vague intentionally; specificity will blow anonymity.  But to say that my life has been enriched by new connections, new acquaintanceships, new community over the last several years, would be an ungrateful understatement, and the last thing I want to be is ungrateful.  So, as always, thanks God, and please keep sticking with me when I hit the rough spots.  Somehow, the line in the hymn comes to mind:  "I once was lost, but now am found" . . . I am continually getting lost, and thank God, continually getting found.

Back again, with nothing to say

I have been remiss.  

Tempus fugit when I'm not
looking!  If I had a watch
like this to keep track of it
with, I think I'd have a lot
less trouble, though.         

No blog posts in a terrifyingly long time.  

Well, I do tend to lose track of time.  Sometimes it feels as though I look down to read a page or two in a book, and when I look up again, it's a year later.  

An example:  you'd think that with October 1st the day after tomorrow, I would have caught onto the fact that it is Autumn, but out driving today I suddenly noticed that the leaves are turning!  Yes folks, it's Fall.  No doubt you noticed that, but it takes me a little longer to catch onto some things.

I used to feel quite melancholy when the first chrysanthemums showed up at the supermarkets; a sure sign of the end of summer.  It wasn't Autumn that I minded, it was what followed Autumn - Winter.  But I have become relatively philosophical about Winter; it's not so bad.  And luckily, it doesn't last forever.  It only seems that way, sometimes.  In the meantime there's hot chocolate, roasted chestnuts, snow men, crisp blue skies, atmospheric gray skies, and with any luck, snow; deep, white, sparkling snow which, now that I don't have to worry so much about getting places, I consider an aesthetic treat.  

So I am braced and ready for the inevitable:  first comes Halloween, then Thanksgiving, then Christmas, and only then, Old Man Winter.  (Why not Old Lady Winter?  I'll have to explore further.)  This coming year I am planning to dig up all the obscure holidays I can possibly find, like Mehrlicht, and celebrate them all.  

In the meantime, I am going to luxuriate in the colors of Autumn.

I have been travelling in my dreams

Some nights I sleep very deeply, and it is during those nights that I have the sense that I have been travelling in my dreams, from one dream state to another, from one dreamscape to the next.  Sometimes, I wish I could go back, and occasionally, in that half-sleep-sodden state just before or after a satisfying snooze, I wish I could live in my dreams; the non-upsetting ones, that is.

Even when I am fully awake, images from dreams past, even many decades past, can suddenly unfurl in my brain.  Some of them are frightening, intimidating images; others are warm, familiar, even enticing. Landscapes, especially;  I think of a town street seen from above, with a road bordered by green tree tops. I think of a lower-East Side-like cityscape, seen from above, but from an angle - .  Another cityscape tickles my consciousness - a remnant of a dream about buying or trying to buy a house in lower Manhattan . . . There were recurring dreams about houses in Brooklyn . . . There is a more recent (some years ago, but not decades) dream with a lush green lawn which, however, had some dubious surprises.

There are those frightening landscapes, of course; I have quite a few nightmares.  They scare me, I dread them, and yet I treasure their imagery: so rich, so strange, complex and engrossing.  There are the images that terrify me because there is a building that is too large, grotesquely out of proportion to its surroundings. The first, and most disturbing of these images, belongs to a recurring nightmare I had when I was a young child:  a lake in a barren landscape - just red mud and dirt surrounding it, and in the lake a huge, a monstrous 1800s sailing ship, incalculably too large for reality, for the lake.  I feel frightened by it even now.  I still have dreams about disturbingly large buildings, but I don't want to write about other recurring elements in my nightmares, because I want to sleep well tonight!

The Tyranny of the Vegetable

"Eat us NOW or we'll go bad . . . very, very bad!"

That phrase occurred to me this afternoon while trying to figure out what to have for lunch.  I realized that I had some fresh tomatoes that "had to be eaten," and I sighed and proceeded to carry out my obligation.

That's the problem with fresh fruit and vegetables.  If they are remotely ripe when you get them, it is a race to the finish line against rot.  I sometimes feel quite overwhelmed at all the things I have to eat to stave off incipient decay!

The tomatoes were delicious, followed by some at-peril plums.  Actually, I suddenly feel quite like a super-heroine, saving fruits and vegetables from death and destruction at a single gulp.  Hadn't thought of it that way before.  Take that, you tyrannical tomato! You would be a fermenting puddle if not for my acts of digestive heroism.

A Mneh Walk in the Woods

  Thrilling, huh?  This was one of the more exciting
   prospects on my walk.

It was beautiful weather today:  sunny blue skies and cool temperatures.  What better to do this afternoon, then, than to go for a walk?  I had passed Carson Woods many times, and Chir and I had gone for a five-minute walk there at dusk a few days ago, which whet my appetite.  Besides, the description said that the brook had frogs, fish, and turtles!  I haven't seen a turtle when walking along a stream in forever, and I love turtles.

The description lied.  The brook barely had water, and hardly deserved the name of brook at all.  When I think of Stony Brook, and Stonacker Brook, and Shipetaukin Creek, and Harry's Brook, and Heathcote Brook, and - you get the picture.  (Actually, you don't, because I didn't bother to take one.)  As for frogs and turtles - they must have been on vacation or not feeling sociable.  No close encounters of the reptilian kind (amphibian either, to be precise about frogs), although I did get bitten by some insect or other.  I do believe I saw a very small, dark fish dart away as I stepped down to the rivulet.

The woods themselves were mostly meadows, with mowed and some gravel-covered paths.  (I actually prefer plunging into the forest - damn the paths, full speed ahead and all that, but decided I wasn't in the mood to get slashed by briers or lost this particular afternoon.)

Who knows which path this was?  Not me, that's for sure!

Another teeny, tiny little problem.  The map was totally inaccurate!  Trying to follow it was like trying to make sense of things in Alice's Wonderland; can't be done, folks.  Paths that were depicted as straight curved in on themselves. Dozens of unshown paths made it difficult if not impossible to distinguish which paths were the maps depicted on the map. If there are seven right-hand turns, and only three are shown on the map,you have no way of knowing which right-hand turn is the right-hand turn you want.  Will the REAL second right-hand turn please stand up?

Well, I guess I shouldn't expect magic every time I hike.  Or even a good time.  At least I got out for a walk. And I didn't get lost.

Who has not felt in his heart a half-warmed fish?

I knew that spoonerisms were named for William Spooner, Dean and Warden of New College in Oxford in the 1800s, who was a contemporary and acquaintance of Charles Lutwidge Dodson  However, I had not run across this particular example before, no doubt due to a deficiency in my reading.

Reverend William Spooner

Evidently in one sermon, the absent-minded and somewhat fuddle-headed Spooner asked the dramatic question:  "Which of us has not felt in his heart a half-warmed fish?"  

I looked at this odd phrase for a moment or two as I was browsing a biography of Dodson aka Lewis 'Carroll,before "translating" it. I laughed on and off for about half an hour.  Half-formed wish, my dear Watson!

There are many other amusing quotes and anecdotes about dear Reverend Spooner, who evidently initially resented his inadvertent fame for verbal flubs, but later in life had a mellower outlook on the matter. I once uttered a Spoonerism completely unintentionally.  It could have been viewed as a culinary critique of the restaurant whose name I inadvertently mangled.  "Let's go to the Crusty Supper," I suggested years ago.  The seafood restaurant's name was Rusty Scupper.  I wonder if they had "half-warmed fish" on their menu.
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The biography of Lewis Carroll I was reading (with much enjoyment) is titled, appropriately enough, Lewis Carroll, and is by Donald Thomas, published in 1999 in trade paperback by Barnes & Noble.