The Sun Is Going Away...

Yeah yeah... I know... it's been over a week and I haven't posted anything. It's been one of those kinda weeks, but then I guess it's really been one of those kind of years.

Thursday was the autumnal equinox, the day on the fall end of the calendar when the night time and the day time are of equal length. On top of that, there's an eclipse today as well. Those of us in the Northern Hemisphere won't really catch it, but it's out there nonetheless. From here on out to the end of the year, the sun is leaving us and moving down to warmer climes.

I feel a great temptation to follow it. To move, right along with old sol down to Brazil, or Argentina, or Peru. I would like to maintain an equilibrium of light to darkness; equal amounts sun and shadow, some sort of hope that the light at the end of the tunnel is not, in fact, a train.

A year ago I was right where I am now. I had just returned to Petaluma after having spent two weeks in exile in North Carolina. At the time, I expected my return here to be brief; a chance to pull some things together and figure out what to do while they were draining the water out of my city. By Halloween I was back in New Orleans fully imagining that by Mardi Gras we would be getting things, more or less, back to normal.

Not so, unfortunately, best laid plans of mice and men and all that sort of thing. Since that time a year ago, I've been back and forth between New Orleans and San Francisco half a dozen times and I have tried to find a place that feels like home in one of those places or the other only to continue, as before, living rather nomadically with little sense of permanence and less sense of direction.

I do like living by the seasons though. There's something that intrigues me in the feeling that I am tied close to the earth, connected with the shifting elements, tucked into Gaia's arms and floating with her rhythms as she crosses the heavens, hurtling through space.

It is certainly an interesting reality of the universe that while it seems we are making no progress at all, we are at the same time moving so fast, so furiously, through space and time. We are at one and the same instant incredibly important and totally insignificant.