Recurrent Night

It's a stormy, moonless, starless Saturday night in the prairies.

Autumn doesn't start until the Equinox, but the cool air the rain brought along sure smells like it. 

It was that kind of a night--1,500 kilometers away--a month ago. And it was then that I wrote about listening to the calming sound of raindrops outside, which acted as an additional instrument to a musical recording. 

Rocky-mountain sunset.

Two nights conflate into a self-aware déjà vu, only this time around I'm only listening to the rain. But this night's eternal return also reminds me that the lady to whom I previously referred as my "Japanese mother" condensed that particular blog to a single line:

月もなく 星もなき夜は ひとり聞く 雨音にロックのリフが重なるを

I cannot be a judge of poetry outside of Russian and English. Yet apart from being surprised that my observations are worth translating--and truly impressed by the effort--I realize that I need to be less verbose! 

 

Joy

When I came upon this scene while hiking a few weeks ago, I thought it appeared too perfect as if it were a film set: a canoe called "Joy" sitting on the shore of a clear glacial lake amidst the mountains with no one around!  

Yet, it was very much authentic. This kind of cognitive dissonance--despite my living in this beautiful and low-populated area for the past two years--was the sign that the very structure of my thinking had been formed by (Post-)Modernity. 

In Can Life Prevail?, Finland's radical deep ecologist Pentti Linkola writes, ''At the heart of any viable and enduring society will always be agriculture, including all secondary sources of livelihood like gardening, cultivation, gathering, fishing and hunting. Any society that has severed the link between the majority of the population and the basic foundations of life--green leaves, soil, earth and water--is destined to collapse.'' 

Raven Ravenson

It took a ten-hour road trip, and I wasn't even looking for him, but I found Raven Ravenson! 

Fit enough for Slavic fairy tales and to be Odin's companion alike (he looked more like Munnin to me), I interpreted the appearance of this jaw-dropping specimen as a very good sign.

Of course, I'm pretty much IN LOVE with darker-than-darkest-night Corvus birds, so I might be slightly biased.

My Sunset

Tonight's sunset viewed from the mountain featured various shades of purple--my color, or at least the one that appears far too often in my clothing as of late. I think I could also see the "evening star"--Venus, my planet, if you subscribe to astrology even a bit--on the horizon.

I guess that makes it my sunset! 

Of the two images I'm posting below, I'm actually quite fond of the what-NOT-to-do exemplar on the right. Gritty and faded, quite possibly with missing pixels, I shot it at 3200 (!) ISO using a large rock for a tripod.

Of course, when the sunset is yours, you could do whatever you want!