The Creature at Our Gate

Fair to say that since we first came to being and maybe even before, humans have told cautionary tales. Eventually gifting those to the stars, with the telling and retelling reinforcing mystic belief.

The Greeks are legendary for their thrilling moral tales filled with dire lessons. Boy, there were a lot of ways to go badly wrong for a Greek, no matter how well-intentioned.

During the early 19^th Century, the Grimm Brothers earned their name. The 20^th Century of War later brought us Lovecraft’s fearsome Others. After which Orwell reminded us there's only one genuine monster astride the Earth and we're it.

The core lesson in this staggering array of cautionary tales, delivered unto us across all the great diversity of human cultures and their respective times, is ever the same:

Don’t invite the beast. Woe to us, if/when you do.

Now we’re somewhere well beyond all the ancient palaver. That stands manifest as in ruins.

Still whispering in each other’s ears, except gathered around a transformationally inclusive campfire, with yet another in the apparently endless line of creatures banging at our gate.

Many among us clamor to feed it. And this beast so little different than the old. Go figure.

Cultural pride bound to nostalgia is a hallucinatory drug. A bitter tale, sweetened by bits of true blue romance.

Truth is, especially given our awful long way to go as to make anything like a good end, we’re today collectively closer to great than ever before. Even despite the long-term costs of perpetual maintenance, against sorely stacked odds.

Don’t let the creature in. We know how that story ends.

And it never ends well.

Superior Autumn

 

For a couple youthful decades and more, each year we hurled ourselves against Superior’s late autumn wilderness.

 

Dared that to eat us.

 

Occasionally, it nearly did.

 

 

Yet every year we returned. Made stronger and more determined, by what we knew.

 

Superior woods whisper best in autumn, right until they don’t.

 

Certainly, the later we pushed our luck into October, the greater the odds of snow. It only took a couple times camping in spent woods laid low by snow, to know full well that’s not what we sought.

 

 

Timing was everything.

 

 

As of this writing, the official U.P. color tracker rates our old stomping grounds as 'partial'. Peak color, maybe next week.

 

Such a late would’ve been considered aberrant, back when. Today it’s definitely not.

In any event, we enjoyed no such informational resources.

 

Instead, every year required our best, increasingly educated guess. We had to recognize the right moment before it came, so we’d be there when it did.

 

In effect, we had to know.

 

 

Mostly that youthful learning curve worked out increasingly well for us, year over year over year.

 

Until we weren’t exactly youthful, evermore.

 

 

Seasons change. As do the times.

 

Once we’d earned our late season stripes and then some from the autumnal wilderness, we sensibly retreated to the late summer beach.

 

 

S’okay.

Because Superior autumn's perfect light lives inside me now, and always will.

 

Image Essay - Dancing Through Autumn

Or, making the absolute most of every last chance.

Summer's End

 

On the meteorological watch, seasons turned at precisely 12:00 am this morning.

 

As happened, this year’s summer ended not with a bang, but on the midnight whisper of an inexorably changing wind.

 

Unlike recent years past, we never reached full on drought status. The periodic downpours carried by occasionally tornadic storms saw to that.

 

Yet given the typically withering August sun, today we enter fall just on the edge of ‘abnormally dry’.

 

On those happy days when the heat and humidity weren’t too oppressive, I made a point of getting out and about.

 

As ever, the prairie and oak savanna landscape abides.

 

Often thrives.

 

Especially where we’ve since retreated…

 

…and let that inestimably rich natural environment do its splendidly diverse thing.

 

Long about the middle of August, I mentioned to a dear friend that when a changing wind finally broke the latest heat wave, I sensed the first hint of autumn on the northwesterly breeze.

I thought it kind of early for that, considering the world of green.

 

A week later, signs of seasonal change were in the trees.

And today, here we are.

 

As if there’d been a plan all along.

 

Miscellany

 

A way of being present.

Even when seemingly not, otherwise.

People tend to believe the best photographic light occurs during ‘the Magic Hour’.

That’s the half hour prior to sunrise and the half hour after sunset. So not really an hour, unless you count them together at the end a long day. Beware conventional wisdom.

 

Because in this case that’s just universality talking. Which explains the ocean of glorious sunrise/sunset moments captured and held forever on all your phones.

 

As happens, on the occasion the world falls utterly still in the face of an oncoming storm, life draws a deep breath and sometimes holds it. However long.

And in that moment, light might be made uncommonly sublime.