Hours for the Soul

"Living down in the country again. A wonderful conjunction of all that goes to make those sometime miracle-hours after sunset – so near and yet so far. Perfect, or nearly perfect days, I notice, are not so very uncommon..." – Whitman, from Specimen Days






Oct. 12


The now idle harvest of October colors seems to hold its very own personality as it sits in waiting to show itself, as if a performer in make-up, as the dulling rain hushes the lights of the cameras. To some, we are audiences here in the midwest. Some drive hours along highway 53 north to find the great outposts of autumn colors. I found the contrast once again just yesterday as I awoke and again tended to the water pumps which has been fishing the excess from under out home for two weeks now and the rain comes down intermittently and at all hours; the world becomes something of a thousand little rivulets along the sidewalks and down through the jagged gutters where the semblance of glorious leaves clutter the flow but also desire to glow like the trees themselves. Will we ever do away with such subjectivity? Transcendentalists we are, but hidden, as if underneath the detritus of history and lack of reading; who does not revert themselves to a desire of awakening of the love that is nature inside our hours for the soul? I claim here an abundance. I could rid myself of the near terror of standard brick and mortar hours; I sense an empathy, no a pure sympathy, for those of us stuck inside the clouded inner walls of old buildings and catch only the glimpse of one day's sunshine out a crack of the window. Deprivation is not how the earth whirls. Eons have crowded the first and most profound love of the blazing star and shrunk it to false galaxies of our screens; all the while, the trees explode themselves by the processes that lay technology as a dormant hoax. I drove back to LaCrosse and the rain lowed. Trees along the interstate so vivid as to rear the mind back to some confounded pulse, an essence, the origin of color itself; the cars became blurs; the people within ghosts; it takes but minutes to tip ones proverbial hat at all of that, duck out the door, say hello again to the world.