Things that were true last October which appear to remain true:
At this time of year, if I’m not wearing my glasses, I cannot always tell if the movements between trees are birds, or dead leaves
So often I seem to be in my own way, like a small landslide, or a knee-deep flood
If you’re lucky, you’ll be looking outside just as all the streetlamps turn on, or off, and that feels like witnessing something important
You and I, we met in a cloud
Along with things that are freshly, newly, more recently true:
Wednesday was not at all a good day and this was made worse by seeing a dead hare on the roadside
Larch trees are starting to reveal themselves in bright yellows within the evergreen forests
The new optician told me the old optician hadn’t needed to add a prism to my prescription and now it’s gone which feels oddly like a loss
I’ve taken to keeping chocolate in the drawer which contains correspondence, blank cards, passports, the address book, extra envelopes, and two unframed prints
The freezer has reached critical defrosting phase but we are both in denial about this
I seem to go endlessly round in circles of emotion and thought and even observation more often than I’d perhaps care to admit, yet feel protective about this (possibly correlates to 2)
This morning while lost in what I suppose was autumnal spirit I purchased a slice of walnut and caramel tart that is in actual sad fact an inedible degree of richness
Additionally: five years ago I said about October that it left a person “poised between a cold that asks you to breathe and a cold that buttons you up” which I stand by.
WORK-RELATED NEWS:
After my anxiety-inducing recordings earlier this month there has been much less by way of anything worth noting. Some time was taken off to accommodate a family stay and in the last handful of weekdays I’ve been wandering around trying to remember where I set things down in order that I might pick them back up.
Upcoming now are some interesting things for Orion Magazine, including the winter issue column and then something slightly different for the spring. I’m painting at least one new personally-relevant piece a week (above is a view from within a nearby area of forestry that surrounds a loch; the heathers here are rapidly losing their purples) which feels alternately grounding and distasteful, and aside from all that I should likely be doing more in terms of publicising Everything, Beautiful but wow is it difficult to talk at any large length for a long time afterwards about projects that have usually long since left the body.
THIS WEEK I FELL IN LOVE WITH:
Various this and various that by Finnish photographer Anni Leppälä.
“English autumn mornings are often like mornings nowhere else in the world. The air is cold. The floorboards are cold. It is perhaps this coldness which sharpens the tang of the hot cup of tea. Outside, steps on the gravel crunch a little more loudly than a month ago because of the very slight frost.”
— John Berger, A Fortunate Man: The Story of a Country Doctor
“It’s very difficult, I thought to myself, to know what we’re really like inside.”
— Natalia Ginzburg, The Dry Heart
"So often I seem to be in my own way, like a small landslide, or a knee-deep flood"... <3