The seasons of deception are descending on us. Halloween is almost here, a moment when we encourage people to hide their identities by assuming the physical appearance of other…people, animals, monsters, things, places, ideas, etc. Then we have Thanksgiving, when real and artificial turkeys are on display. At this time of year, pumpkins are mercilessly attacked with knives and razors, carving them into jack-o’-lanterns and placing burning candles behind their psychopathic smiles. As early as May, Christmas decorations begin to be displayed, with a focus on Santa Claus, Joseph, a manger attended by wise men and donkeys, Seven Dwarfs, Sinbad, Santa’s Elves, Christmas trees, Snow White, Cinderella, and the Little Engine That Could. Merchants, who have been led to believe we will spend more money on gifts if we detect the aromas of cinnamon, bourbon, and a wood-burning fireplace, lure us into toy stores and gun shops with scented candles, open containers of Maker’s Mark 46, and Jack Frost roasting over an open fire. Between Halloween and Thanksgiving (US version), Dia de Los Muertos is solemnly celebrated in some places, with face masks that look like skulls a favorite physical disguise. Dozens…maybe hundreds…of other holidays are available for us to openly express our superstitions without being judged as superstitious.
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Sweet mercy is nobility’s true badge.
~ William Shakespeare ~
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Time sometimes disappears, hours at a time, when I give my mind freedom to explore without insisting that it express what it finds and record it. The same thing happens when I focus my attention on what my eyes see, versus what my camera might capture. In both cases, I get lost in a world outside myself…or maybe it’s just the opposite. Suddenly, though, my interest—which had been so precisely and intensely focused—all but dissolves, leaving only a hint of whatever it was that I found so appealing. Perhaps I simply retreat deeper into myself, consuming time as sustenance. Whatever the root of it, either circumstances absorb time or time is somehow extracted from experience in some fashion. This is not something new, by the way. I may remember thinking, as a fairly young kid, that time could be “tamed” in some way—made docile and obedient through training to enter a hypnotic, almost comatose, state. But that could have been a memory created to explain the inexplicable.
Tiny pebbles disguised as simple ideas create ripples of thought. Thrown into a lake with a surface as smooth as glass, they create ripples of thought—surges of misshapen thinking—that become either tsunamis of creativity or corpses of concepts starved for attention.
Acorns litter the ground, evidence that seasonal change is afoot. Wind, rain, and cooling temperatures contribute to the transformation, as do hardwood trees, beginning to shed their leaves. Soon, more of the green canopy will have disappeared, allowing more filtered daylight to reach the forest floor—sunlight will be kept at bay for a while longer by a protective shield of clouds. The coming weeks and months will strip most of the remaining leaves from the trees, allowing every crack and crevice on the ground to be touched by the sun. The leafy darkness of the woods in the other seasons will give way to Winter, when the shady understory is bathed in direct sunlight. Daylight differs from sunlight in that daylight tends to be somewhat reserved—sometimes even introverted—whereas sunlight exemplifies an almost garish extroversion. Yet sunlight in Winter differs from sunlight in Summer, as if they are identical twin children of unrelated parents. And daylight, regardless of the time of year, seems to have emerged from the consummation of a union between the seasonal equivalents of a concert pianist and a jazz trumpeter.
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I continue to notice that my once-plump hands seem more than a little skeletal, as if they have been preparing for Halloween. As I stare intently at one of the many visible blue veins in my right hand, I notice that movement causes it to stretch just enough that I can see the tendon beneath it. And that tendon appears to hide other tendons, along with bones and muscles and, probably, connective tissues. All this supposition… for what purpose? Nothing compelling…strictly unchanneled curiosity.
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