I saw something fascinating the other day: enveloped by the canopy of autumn-hued leaves and richly scented earth in the midst of dusky near-darkness, the atmosphere of man-made naturalistic environs placed their warm, heavy hands upon my waiting shoulders. From the first touch of crisp, comforting air, leaves began to shadow the forms below them, then drain of vivid color, then curl, then, finally shed by the trees that created them, wind their way through the air to a random gentle resting place below.

I watched as they fell, one by one, around my feet; nestled on shoulders, slipping through fingertips as amorphous thought-forms do over time. All the leaves fell, one by one, then inevitably disappeared, leaving in their place the slow ascent of the moon taking cover above full, dense clouds.

Pressure changes in the air unlocked tiny pores in the stratosphere and brought forth a sigh from the barren branches bowed above me as their long arms stretched out to catch the drops and draw them down, down all the way to the root and place of peaceful nourishment... from pitter to patter to accelerating freefall, the rain began to span the sky all the way to the horizon, racing down to touch and saturate every dry, uncovered inch.

I felt something fascinating, the other day.

It struck me that one of the reasons for my wariness around certain people is the opposite of what it seemed to be.

Instead of being afraid of others, I've been too careful, perhaps, about hurting them... six years of bruised knuckles, psychological damage and steady training to become stronger, it would be interesting to know the impossible: did all of this actually mean anything?

Some of my pain belongs to someone else. All of it now belongs to me. And now I'll be glad to give it back, to those from whom I've borrowed more than my share.

Sometimes having no expectations is too mild an expectation. To expect the worst is paranoia, yet giving altruistically is to martyr one person for the exploitative causes of others.

I know how to fight. Now I'm learning when, and why.

How could it possibly have taken so long? perhaps I did know this once, and somehow, simply forgot.


audio: edit . crying over pros for no reason . twenty minutes

One of my favorite blog people wrote recently, completely as a surprise...

...personally, it was always rare to interact directly with other bloggers, even back six or seven years ago before weblogging was cool and the Web suddenly started to need version numbers (clue: it still doesn't).

So now it's been a few months since the last post, and suddenly an email message arrives from someone who couldn't possibly be a spam artist... because in that strange Internet way, we share memories. The name is immediately recognizable. Somehow it triggers a cascade of thoughts and feelings reaching back even to the seemingly unrelated real-life background circumstances surrounding our time together, connected as we were (and are) over miles of waves, wires and digital switches.

In a few days, the completion of a project that has taken over nine months to gestate will, perhaps, create more time for musing over what has happened over the past two years. Until then -- and, due to the inevitable time overrun in creating new bits of hopefully useful technology -- this, and any other lucidly non-programmatic moments will have to suffice.

This seemed to be a fitting way to respond to that entirely unexpected and completely welcome touch from a person who I've probably shared more with over time than many people who I know offline.

A song reaches me too, here, even in this place, where change is happening quietly, day by day.