With the new month comes a new postcard. This month I was inspired by the detritus I found on a local walk and recollections of Penn’s portraits of cigarettes. Let me know if you want to receive a postcard.
A selection of cigarette butts from a local “nature trail.” I look forward to a day when the cigarette butt goes the way of the pulltab.
With the new month comes a new postcard. This month I imagined I was in a city that had lovely sidewalk cafes and a rich pedestrian culture. One can dream. Let me know if you want me to send you a postcard.
The chair beckons, encouraging me to linger for a moment. Nobody is around. Perhaps I will.
Snow still covers the ground, lays piled by the sides of roads, and blocks the sidewalks. Ice covers the pond. This morning the world is still monochrome. But not for long.
Fog rises from the melting snow, growing thicker as the morning warms. At first the world seemed to be a circle of visibility moving along with me as I walked, no more than a few hundred yards across. But soon even that contracted. Shapes fading into existence as I approached gained faint color and texture only at the last minute, when I could nearly touch them. They lost both color and texture as they receded behind me before quickly dissolving into the whiteness.
A world shrouded in fog is a magical place, full of surprises and unknowns. You can neither see nor hear clearly — the fog seems to dampen noise as much as it obscures sight. The noises that do penetrate unsettle and unnerve because they seem to come from everywhere and nowhere at once. Every now and then, a tree with the remnants of last year’s leaves clinging to its branches emerged from the fog, water dripping from its leaves glowing golden brown against the milky scene.
Mornings like this happen rarely around here, once or twice a year. I feel sorry for all the people who missed this one, but am glad they didn’t invade my enjoyment of it.
Benches are so much more than merely a place to sit. Arranged around campus they seem like sentinels watching over a particular vista or guarding a quiet corner. Should you happen across one, it invites you to pause and maybe even to linger. Alone or with a friend, passionate conversation or silent observation, it matters little. Benches don’t care.
Their insistence on reflection and contemplation put them at odds with a world that celebrates busyness. Now, more than ever, we should perhaps take them up on their offer to loiter and to dawdle. We would all benefit by spending some time doing nothing. We don’t need some app on our ever-present “smart phone” to tell us when and for how long to focus. We need not regularize and formalize downtime. Just go find a bench. There are plenty out there waiting for you.
Following the lead of others requires little effort and less courage. “Innovate and iterate” while a route to financial success and often a means of improving our efficiencies rarely produces genuinely new and imaginative things. To strike out on your own requires conviction and courage. To pursue your own goals wherever they might lead demands trust in yourself. Better to get lost having set out alone into parts unknown, than simply to tread an established path to some recognizable destination. So too in things creative.
Winter has happened this year, or at least February has already been properly cold and snow-filled. We’ve had some wonderful days of blowing, bitter snow storms. A thick layer of snow covers the ice on the local pond. The storms keep people inside, and so naturally I’m compelled to be out, wandering the streets and parks and open spaces. Even through the haze of snow and the monochrome winter afternoons, the promise of spring lurks in the tree branches tinged with yellow. Soon they will explode in the fresh growth of a new year. But not yet. Today winter still rules.
Pause. Look around. Look closely. What have I not noticed every other time I’ve passed this spot. Whether mundane and dull or extraordinary and beautiful. Somewhere around me right now is a detail I’ve not seen before. Find it and add it to my “Museum of Overlooked Details.”
With the new month comes a new postcard. This month’s postcard comes from much closer to home. A maple I pass on my walk to and from work seemed to defy the monochrome of the world. Let me know if you want a copy.
The last moments of red burn brightly in the otherwise monochrome world of early winter. By now even this color has faded to dark browns and fallen to the ground.