The wind rustles through the weeping willow, and the sound is more redolent of fall than summer or spring. On the bank of a pond, water birds stand sentinel, their shadows only outlined silhouettes. Remnants of a hurricane echoing along the Northeast coast have drifted inland, and the boughs of trees sway and shift in the temperate night wind. 

Something spooky is in the air. Is is really there? Or is it just this time of the year, when change is in the atmosphere? Witches might be flying above the cloud-cover, or that might just be the echoes of the hurricane – who can truly tell? And if you believe the former, wouldn’t the effects of the latter simply back it up? One misguided belief leads to another. The truth, in its infuriating way, refuses to be anything but elusive. Why it should be so hard to pin down is one of life’s more unsatisfying mysteries. 

When faced with such a mystery, I find it best to set it to music, and this particular selection straddles the strange undulating border between summer and fall, when chilly nights bleed into striking days, and questions survive only in a world of blue. 

Isn’t it too dreamy? 

Watching the swaying of the willow branches, I’m brought back to those mysteries of life. In most instances they can be traced back to mysteries of love – all the stories somehow come back to love. For some us lucky enough to find escape in the stories we read as children, the wind in the willows sounded a portal to a different world. I still believe in such magic, even if the method to attain entrance is markedly different, and more a better of perspective and mindfulness than actual doors or wardrobes or ships of seedpods to other realms. When the vessel is merely a matter of mind over material, it opens up worlds not limited to the imagination. That expands things to an extent that makes many uncomfortable. 

The willow tree is no longer just a willow tree.

It’s a big furry monster that will either warm you with a big embracing hug, or devour you with tendrils studded with thorns, pulling you into a mouth that is only darkness and impossible pain. 

Fall will light it up soon enough, one way or another. 

“The observations and encounters of a solitary, taciturn man are vaguer and at the same times more intense than those of a sociable man; his thoughts are deeper, odder and never without a touch of sadness. Images and perceptions that could be dismissed with a glance, a laugh, an exchange of opinions, occupy him unduly, become more intense in the silence, become significant, become an experience, an adventure, an emotion. Solitude produces originality, bold and astonishing beauty, poetry. But solitude also produces perverseness, the disproportionate, the absurd and the forbidden.” ~ Thomas Mann, ‘Death in Venice’

This will be a strange, feverish post. I begin it without knowing where it’s going – never a safe beginning, often a riskier middle, and always an ending of doom. So many doomed endings, so many little deaths – all the deaths of a day. This blog post will suffer its own series of deaths – when it is read, when it is unread, when it is forgotten, when it becomes buried beneath other posts, when the antiquated machinations of this WordPress madness cease functioning, when this blog itself goes offline. So many ways it falls apart, deteriorating and diminishing and dissolving, like some unfinished, half-hearted sentence…

The arrival of today’s mail escaped our notice, so I ended up going out to the mailbox after it was dark, listening to the frogs and insects in the very last days of summer sing their slightly sad songs. This day dies to make way for the night, and the night will be gone as well to make room for a new day. Every day a little death indeed. 

“Only incorrigible bohemians find it boring or laughable when a man of talent outgrows the libertine chrysalis stage and begins to perceive and express the dignity of the intellect, adopting the courtly ways of a solitude replete with bitter suffering and inner battles though eventually gaining a position of power and honor among men.” ~ Thomas Mann, ‘Death in Venice’

Summer’s demise is happening as I write this. It was there in the chill of tonight’s air, and the official switch of seasons will take place on September 23. Another summer will arrive, and it will be the same, as much as it won’t. Its heart and essence will scream ‘summer’ but it will still not be the same, even as it takes the same name, even as it goes through the same motions. Summer is summer is not summer is summer… 

I knew this post would collapse into itself, and imperfectly yet impeccably designed it to do so, like those empty buildings so intricately laced with dynamite at all the right locations that upon explosion almost too neatly fall in on themselves. A million little deaths then – of doorways, of windows, of halls, of secrets whispered, of sighs unheard, of winter footprints stained into carpets, of bathroom tiles once peered into while random men found relief at urinals – all the deaths of an average day in an average building. 

Then there is space, littered with dust and debris that will be carted away, ground that will be leveled again – space that will form home for something else, something new. Space and time, both extending and continuing, bound to what came before, bound to what will come after, connecting and separating in infuriating, impossible contradiction. An infinite conundrum that something like Buddhism would only dare hint at resolving, and then it would somehow shift the perspective into something that approached mindfulness, contorting basic laws of science and nature into mere perception, and offering little in how to practically navigate actual survival. Obviously I know little to nothing about Buddhism, or mindfulness… and the last four years of meditation might not mean all that much either. More little deaths – of dreams, of understanding, of plans – and more music by Mahler. I won’t drink to that. 

Three more days until summer falls…

“It is probably better that the world knows only the result, not the conditions under which it was achieved; because knowledge of the artist’s sources of inspiration might bewilder them, drive them away and in that way nullify the effect of the excellent work.” ~ Thomas Mann, ‘Death in Venice’

The Carpenters don’t have a song sad enough for when the rainy day also happens to be a Monday, and such is the conundrum in which we find ourselves this final week of summer. Is there a more gloomy and dreary scene than a dim, rainy Monday morning? It unfailingly saps a bit of the soul when it happens, yet rather than fight and wail and rail against it, I’m attempting to lean into the gloom and doom, to let the soul feel its sadness and disappointment, to pause and hopefully to heal. 

This classic song by the Carpenters is almost too trite to post, but sometimes you don’t need to get too deep to resonate with such rawness. The Carpenters always managed to straddle that line between earnest and cloying – and today I’m erring on the side of earnest. 

Talkin’ to myself and feelin’ old
Sometimes I’d like to quit
Nothin’ ever seems to fit
Hangin’ around
Nothin’ to do but frown
Rainy days and Mondays always get me down…

What I’ve got they used to call the blues
Nothin’ is really wrong
Feelin’ like I don’t belong
Walkin’ around
Some kind of lonely clown
Rainy days and Mondays always get me down

Funny, but it seems I always wind up here with you
Nice to know somebody loves me
Funny, but it seems that it’s the only thing to do
Run and find the one who loves me (the one who loves me)

What I feel has come and gone before
No need to talk it out (talk it out)
We know what it’s all about
Hangin’ around (hangin’ around)
Nothin’ to do but frown
Rainy days and Mondays always get me down

Funny, but it seems that it’s the only thing to do (only thing to do)
Run and find the one who loves me (ooh)