Friday, November 03, 2017

The Darkness Comes


Autumnal

Pale amber sunlight falls across
the reddening October trees, that
hardly sway before a breeze as soft as summer;
summers loss seems little, dear! On days like these.

Let misty autumn be our part!
The twilight of the year is sweet:
Where shadow and darkness meet
Our love, a twilight of the heart
Eludes a little time's deceit.

Are we not better and at home
In dreamful Autumn, we who dream
No harvest joy is worth a dream?
A little while and night shall come,
A little while, then, let us dream.

Beyond the pearled horizons lie
Winter and night: awaiting these
We garner this poor hour of ease, 
Until love turn from us and die
beneath the drear November trees."

By
Ernest Dowson
The Poems And Prose Of Ernest Dowson


I am in a dark mood. The whole world feels upside down. Politics on an average year can be challenging to process, and almost expected, but as we approach the one year mark of the 2016 election I feel tired, scared, and sometimes it's like I am not really alive. It's so surreal to learn of the first criminal charges of the Trump administration, in what will probably end up being the first true case of treason by an American president in our history. Shrug. Who knows? I know the fall of an American presidency is nothing to cheer about, but when this mess does fall, I hope it will be a relief and not just the beginning of an even more terrifying time. 

And then there is the fall of man. No, not that fall. And I am not referring to us being in the middle of autumn, no I am talking about the almost daily revelation that celebrities. Journalists, Bloggers and all across professional spectrum exists a culture of rape and sexual assault, that I had NO idea existed. I thought for years, that I was mostly alone in the darkness in all that's happened to me, throughout my life, but no, quite to the contrary... I am far from alone. And that is just one more thing, in an already terrifying world I find myself in that is so disappointing and surreal, that I am finding it difficult to be anything but depressed most of the time.

I miss truly boring days.
I miss truly average days.
I miss my life making sense.
I miss... me.

This autumn feels like a deeper death. 
A death of not just another year, but a death of life as we knew it.
American normalcy.
American values.
Or maybe the myth.

But tomorrow, I will be out again with my camera, in hopes of holding onto the last of what makes me feel alive. Clinging to the colors, of the death of another year, which in the past, brought hope for a new beginning, but now only serves as a chilling reminder that sometimes death is forever. Sometimes things don't come back. Sometimes there is no natural corrective. And the wind and rain and snow coming into Northern California beginning tomorrow only puts a deeper chill to the whole feeling of the surreal existence of truth. 

#3 Leaf Of The Day
October 3rd, 2017
Little Farm
Berkeley, California 
Mood: Sad
~Me 

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