Sunday, October 31, 2010

Return to the Land Of Autumn




I love taking the train, especially in New England and most especially in Autumn.

I become a voyeur of Nature. The trees gently discard their leaves which fall to the ground with a silky whisper of promise and rich, evocative feelings.

Winter is coming. Bare of leafy constraints the outline of the land is there to take in and there is no denial of either fault or beauty - or the rich melding of both.

So as we race through the bunched suburbs North of Boston the trees alternatively crowd and release the train; a frayed gold curtain opens and closes.

Under every tree, along each curbside, around every building Nature has taken it's sable brush to outline each in gold.

In time, I know, this trim will vanish, covered in snow or digested into the soil as a painter does who covers a perfectly good oil painting in white in order to begin again, hoping for a better result.

Unlike I, who blanks a score that isn't working for a new start that has no gaurentee of success, Nature knows that what she does is perfect now - and that what she does next will be the same.

In my life I have no such gaurentee - so I try, very hard, to love the process of living, to bring myself to laugh, even when I am most misunderstood or face my greatest loss.

Even in my moment of death, when my leaves finally fall and leave the beauty or faults of my life bare - even then I hope I will laugh as well as mourn, feeling the full measure of joy and sorrow, the same way I struggle to feel them both now.

I love Autumn.




-- Post From My iPad

Friday, October 29, 2010

A Road I've travelled before

Traveling by train, from Portland to Washington.

I'm going to the Rally To Restore Sanity, tomorrow, in DC. There isplenty I could say about the politics of the moment and, at some point, I'll do just that

But, right at the moment, my mind is taken with the journey, watching the late Autumn trees of New England, seeing the show they've put on for a thousand, thousand years.

I love travelling by train, especially on this trip. Typing on my iPad, listening to Pandora radio on my iPhone (my Piazzola channel, which, for some joyous reason, is playing McCoy Tyner ...)

The Sun sets, the train is full, almost everyone heading to a Celtics game ocurring directly over the train station at the Boston Garden.

The landscape changes to an urban quilt, inlaid with trees, all new, all grown in the last hundred years. Few of the giants from a century or more are present, I am looking at the gentrification of the remains of a third Industrial Revolution.

Look with an inquisitive eye at the stonework of bridges and embankments .... you see where old paralell tracks lay when commuter trains carried the commercial lifeblood of Boston.

I suppose it still does, but these are fingertip capillaries compared to the femoral pulse of earlier days.

The light has changed. We are now running paralell to the Charles, making our approach to North Station. Rich, late afternoon light against the elevated highways of Boston.

Time for the next stage.

-- Post From My iPad

Location:Main St,Wilmington,United States