Wednesday September 15th
The mornings are getting colder in spite of end of afternoon temperatures still reaching ninety. Each night before we sleep, I open all the large windows in the house and, for the first time in months, the house is cool in the mornings. Closing all the windows while the house is cold is one way to push back the heat later in the day and reduce the amount of air conditioning we use. It is silent this morning, the birds and insects who have such a loud and insistent language of their own, sleeping until the sun rises high in the sky. One can just see the very first sign of light coming across the top of the mountains farthest away and there is a curious flatness about the morning. There are times in the day when the sunlight produces magic in the trees, even the bare sided mountains take on a life of their own as grasses and rocks create shadows and an imaginary world appears. Late afternoon sunlight makes the deepest impression with sun turning branches and glittering leaves into a space full of delicate beauty and other worldly possibilities. Nymphs and fairies live in this world which doesn’t sit still while late afternoon breezes arrive gently at first and then pick up in velocity as light disappears.
I never get tired of living on the edge of an enormous forest that covers these mountains. Its size alone puts life into perspective, let alone one’s own role in its daily activities. Knowing that one is nothing more than another speck of life among millions of others gives enormous freedom. Today I can do anything I wish; success or failure don’t matter. There is always tomorrow.
