Lent 2020 - Day 22
Working from home, my routine has settled down - physical exercise in the morning (press-ups, pull-ups, sit-ups weights, plank), at the laptop and phone until 17:00, then out for some paces. Out in Jeziorki, social distancing is easy as population density is low. I can walk for 90 minutes and pass within a tiny handful of people, a safe two metres apart.
The sun sets at quarter to six, so the Magic Hour - half an hour before and half an hour after sunset is encompassed by my constitutional stroll.
Last summer, I wrote about the notion of the replicable joyful experiences. Building your own religion, what would be your recipe for repeatability - being able to get that precise sensation exactly right, that moment of joy...?
A walk at dusk was one of these. Not just any dusk; the sun must be seen to be setting, the sky marbled with thin cloud to catch the iridescent afterglow of the last rays.
I found it, just as I'd left it |
And there is a consistency linking the landscape (spirit of place) and the feeling. Digital photography gives me the tools to recreate what I saw and felt with great precision.
Crystalline and Pure. March 2018 |
The Sky and, beneath it, The Road. Summer 2015 |
Heaven's drama. Autumn 2011 |
Around the corner from home, and the old familiarity. Summer 2007 |
I am always looking to replicate the feeling so I can refine it, define it better, put it into words that will strike a chord with others. These are sensations I felt in my grey jumper'd childhood, but they squared not with suburban West London under leaden skies. It was only in Poland that I found that those childhood dreams and inexplicable flashbacks squared with what I was seeing for real.
This has triggered a search for the metaphysical links which in turn suggested a deeper mystery at play, a connecting thread between an unfolding universe and one's deepest intuition.
Can this be the basis for a personal religion?
FOOTNOTE:
This has triggered a search for the metaphysical links which in turn suggested a deeper mystery at play, a connecting thread between an unfolding universe and one's deepest intuition.
Can this be the basis for a personal religion?
FOOTNOTE:
The following morning (19 March), I had the following dream... It is Florida, the mid-1950s. High summer. There's some kinda parade, down by the beach. There's a succession of pedal-powered quadricycles with fringed canopies; ladies dressed as Southern belles are pedalling them along the boardwalk, four to a conveyance. I'm in the crowd watching. Excitement breaks out when someone whispers that Lucille Ball from the I Love Lucy show is among the ladies in the parade! However, I move on to the car park. There's a bright red 1955 Fire Department Oldsmobile, I join the guys who are moving it to the main road, the junction with the turn-off for the car park. They are going to park the car along the middle of the road, to marshal the traffic. There's a guy in Ancient Egyptian attire selling hot-dogs at the crossroads; we tell him we're going to be parked up here, would he mind moving his pitch a few yards back - he's cool with this because, he says, traffic will be moving slower... CUT!
Exactly like this one. |
This time three years ago:
Jeziorki's temporary level crossing almost complete
(Three years on, there's not a trace of it left.)
This time five years ago:
Swans, dusk, Jeziorki
This time six years ago:
Joe Biden in Warsaw for talks after Crimea invasion
This time eight years ago:
Motive power for the coal and oil trains that pass Jeziorki
This time 11 years ago:
Sleet, snow, no sign of spring
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