I have spent many hours gazing into this crystal ball, and just because its images appear soft and dark doesn’t mean they are not clear.  Here’s what I think this one might say:
“Your tender spot will always need protection, but that is not the same as hiding from vulnerability.  In fact, quite the opposite.  With the proper protection, you can dance on a bed of nails.”

Or, you know, something wispy and tough like that.  You can make up your own story.  That’s what crystal balls are for.

Remember the softness inside the edges, the in-betweens where the fibers have torn – downy, animal wisps, lighter than air, drifting, coasting, alighting.  You choose your self with every word you see.

I found this leaf lying next to my car, in the parking lot of my building this morning.  Now, if you go around picking up every pretty leaf you see, you’ll never make it as far as the grocery store across the street before they close, but this one was especially pretty,  so I scooped it up.

For the last several years, my inner life has been dominated by one theme – a struggle against futility.   My world has been bracketed on the one side with the fear of losing what I have, and on the other by the belief that I can’t have what I want, anyway.  Between these parentheses, my heart has been squeezed.

There’s a part of me that really, deeply, wants you to want to look at my pictures, wants the pictures themselves to be special to you.  I want to see things clearly – see what I love in a world of my making, and in myself.   If I say your perception doesn’t matter to me, that’s a lie.  But I really can’t know if I’ve revealed enough to entice you to see this leaf.  And I’m trying, trying not to answer that question.

I know how to get through winter – books and coffee.  It’s a skill.  I don’t think about spring.  I meet the cold and dark on its own terms.  In the middle of summer, though, I worry whether spring will come again.  Autumn reassures me.  Once the leaves turn red, and I see the sky divided by grey and black veins I know:  I am going to make it.

So beautiful, I can’t even ruin the experience with a terrible pun.  ( Taken in the parking lot at work.)  (Obviously).

There isn’t supposed to be a goal, but it’s this:
unite with the fullest experience you can for the duration of just one breath.
What comes next, I honestly have no idea.

Officially it is autumn, although summer was over for me more than a month ago, the first time I left for work under a black morning sky, twinkling with stars.  It was as beautiful as it sounds.

I think I’ve rounded a corner, as well, through no more effort on my part than leaves giving up their hold on dormant branches.   Even as crisp sounds and the unmasked silhouettes of trees replace insects’ hum and washes of green wherever you look, the edges of my inner world have become softer, the shapes less distinct.  I used to remember the purpose I had here, could poke away the earth around me and reveal.  That fuel feels spent now.

When Pammy and I were little, we spent a lot of time, especially with Daddy, looking at things behind glass – jewelry and watches, stuffed birds and bison, even little rooms full of perfect scale furniture no child had ever played with.  I think I just want to go back there again, with him.  I want to ask him why we are looking, ask him what we are looking for, and know whether he sees my heart reflected back in every lingering moment.

“Oh, good,”  the lady said with fierce conviction and clear italics.  “None of that digital crap!”

Have you ever felt a room wince?  With just four or five people standing in the little gallery space, our mutual cringe was unmistakable as the social atonality of “digital crap” blew apart the melodious duets of small talk.   A tiny pause magnetized the atmosphere.  One side of the gallery was filled with lucid, graceful abstract photography, created with film, while the other side displayed a modest selection of still life images created solely with pixels.  Created by moi.  Moi.  Who was sitting right there.

I clamped my mouth firmly shut, literally biting my lips to avoid the urge to interrupt, and reminded myself of Richard Thompson’s scalding comment, “They’re worse than critics.  They’re amateur critics.”  Graciously, the film photographer  tip-toed around the scorched earth of the conversational land mine she had accidentally triggered.  She assured the lady that the unique and unpredictable qualities of the film processes she favors were integral to her artwork.  The lady seemed satisfied that, thanks to her insightful observation, the Crap of Digital had been vanquished.  Buying neither film nor pixel, but having thus had her say, the lady soon departed, proving the visual art corollary to Kenneth Patchen’s Theorem which states “People who say they love poetry and never buy any are a bunch of cheap sons-of-bitches.”

I guess what upsets that lady is the thought that pretty much anyone with a cell phone can wander down the Picnic Point running path on pretty much any Thursday afternoon, and take a picture, for chrissake, and that picture can be awesome.  Yeah, I said it.  Awesome.  (Oh, I suppose what really upsets that lady is the danger that she might accidentally like an image that someone made with their cell phone on Thursday afternoon, walking on Picnic Point Trail, before she realized it was – you know – digital crap.)

Well, next time, that lady should take all that money she isn’t spending on buying digital crap and upgrade to the cell phone with the “kick-ass picture setting”  on it.  Cause that’s what I did.

I am not feeling super-writer-ish these last several days.  I should probably bring the notebook with me on the walks.  I do think of things then.   The camera with the phone in it is handy, though  Anyway, maybe I will write more tomorrow.