yellow leaves

Found it impossible to do justice to this copse of gingko in Prospect Park, the camera sadly compressed everthing, shrunk the spaciousness in the depth created by the light and shadows and sadly diminished the elegant gradiant of green to yellow on the grass below the trees. You had to be there. You have to go there. It's in the Southwest.

Have you been there? Have you been in one of those night scenes that occur lately on streets lined with locust or linden, when, on account of the bright yellow leaves glowing against the night sky, you enter an infrared world? It turns you upside down, rolls you over, breathes it's yellow light into the world, makes every leaf your story of renewel.

november marigolds

more here

he cumbers himself never

safety in numbers

Yesterday I walked through Occupy Wall Street and crossed paths with a man who was audibly evaluating everyone who passed by him on the basis of whether or not they were impressively counter cultural. Somehow he's was not aware that conformity, even upended, is still the problem. I know this man doesn't speak for OWS, that no single person does, but I have to say I've been waiting for the movement to become so cool to itself that it gains a cache of exclusivity. As hard as they try to avoid institutionalization, can they? Institutions, as purveyors of conformity, always lose their souls.

I found an antedote in Emerson, again. A dangerous revolutionary so dangerously revolutionary he becomes immediately forgettable. "A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within, more than the lustre of the firmament of all the bards and sages. Yet he dismisses without notice his thought, because it is his." (Self-Reliance)

Yes, to do otherwise would be a lonely, lonely pursuit. Emerson doesn't talk about that part. Occupy loneliness?

mulcher

Last night my talent for sleeping failed for several hours so I was feeling a little skewey this morning when I passed this scene at the playground. For some reason the sight of this steaming pile of mulch, hot with decay, brought some odd feeling of relief. It's amazing to realize how much is happening in what appears to be nothing, and how much everyone changes every day without trying, modulating and striving for balance quiety and organically, as if the wisdom we can't help but accrue and the goodwill that we can't help but share has a chemical nature. Slowly, silently, so much is happening.