“There is something infinitely healing in the repeated refrains of nature — the assurance that dawn comes after night, and spring after winter.”
Rachel Carson – Silent Spring
Ferragosto: changing colors here and there, leaf fall . . . already! In Italy, Feriae Augusti, the mid-August holiday, introduced in 18 BC by the Roman Emperor Augustus, marks the waning harvest season and, for moderns, the bitter-sweet segue from summer to the academic and work year.
Meanwhile, for us, the seclusion continues . . .
In the south-eastern US, the feathery mimosa blooms have faded after a long, glorious season. Day and night, the air resounds with bird chorus and the rattle and hum of insects: cicadas, crickets, and katydids. I can’t distinguish their sounds. The cicadas quit trilling at night, apparently. They emerge after a seventeen-year cycle of burrowing, but in this part of the world, most adults emerge annually, and thrive in the heat.
It’s getting cooler. Between sun breaks, the dark edges move in.
I wake up early these days and experience Rachel Carson moments when I don’t hear the birds at the crack of dawn. This has more to do with the day’s weather than impending cataclysm, so far. Eventually the birds will move on to warmer destinations, but when the air we breathe is potentially hostile, and treated by some as a space of conquest and aggression, their constancy is reassuring.
***
The other day, in a woodsy residential part of our city, Guy and I had a close encounter. A bear had been scrounging in a dumpster outside a high-end condo complex. We were walking down the road and there it was, at twenty feet, walking in the opposite direction. With nowhere else to go, we walked ahead, slowly. It looked over at us, angling slightly in our direction, as though considering whether or not to cross the street to check us out. It was tempting for us too, but we erred on the side of caution and kept moving. Our presence in their domain is a privilege, and concerning.
I took this photo of a neighborhood visitor from the safety of our home.
From a vantage point of refuge, and captivity, we observe and wonder how this will end. Liminality, like uncertainty, is characterized by ambiguity. As a cultural realm, it’s amorphous, lacking in the attributes of the past or coming state. Social media rescues some of us from total isolation. For me, liminality is nearly impossible. There’s too much to do.
French philosopher Gaston Bachelard said, the home is “our first corner of the world, our first universe.” Alienation is founded on the myth of outside and inside, an opposition tinged with aggression. Communitas, or shared experience, should connect us.
We’re stuck. Yet, “How many times poet-painters, in their prisons, have broken through walls, by way of a tunnel! How many times as they painted their dreams, they have escaped through a crack in the wall!”
One summer, in mid-August, I spent a week in Paris, in the seventeenth arrondissement. The city was eerily vacant, an abandoned museum. The last time I visited, I took snapshots of paintings at the Musée d’Orsay. It’s nice to have them now. Stay well. Be creative!
I quoted from Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space.
I updated this post. Earlier, Dan wrote: You write so evocatively, so keenly attuned to your surroundings. I am right there with you as you describe the dawn chorus and the subtle changes in the landscape as the seasons evolve, and of course your thoughts as you and Guy walked up on a Black Bear. It is all a joy. Since I gently complained last time that the photographs in your blog weren’t large enough, I must thank you for enlarging them this time. They, and your elegant words, make a rich experience for the reader.
And I so agree: “How many times poet-painters, in their prisons, have broken through walls, by way of a tunnel! How many times as they painted their dreams, they have escaped through a crack in the wall!”
Thank you, Dan!
I always appreciate your feedback and observations.
It’s so satisfying reliving these experiences here at tworivers, especially in the marriage of your thoughtful, engaging prose and vibrant pictures.
And thank you for thoughtfully engaging, as always!
Reading your words is like tasting the flavors of a luscious meal, which is not surprising given that you’re also a wonderful cook!
Thanks, Sandro! The cooking is pretty modest these days.
I too appreciate your attunement to the subtleties of mid-August. Even in Santa Barbara as a boy, I would sometimes sense a very slight movement of air and light that felt like a harbinger of fall (the mild fall we had there). Summer is my least favorite season. It seems so one-dimensional, so loud, almost abrasive. I long for times of less garish light and technicolor shades. Welcome to your bear friend and early fall.
Strange. I just commented on your lovely writing, clicked Submit–and it disappeared!? It said “Looks like you have already submitted this”-?
Both of your comments came through, Michael. What an interesting take on summer in southern California. I spent so many summers in when I lived in San Francisco. At least in the Fall, the fog lifted. Merci!
Your evocative prose and astute slant on the world spark my own insights. Bachelard, poetics, liminality, birds, bear, mimosa — walls crack open!
Or, as Leonard Cohen puts it: There’s a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in.
Let’s hope!
So beautiful Greta. I love your photos and sublime sense of nature–both human and the natural world. It’s been scalding hot the last few days here in the beautiful San Francisco Bay Area. Last night, wind and an infrequent light show. This early morning, I feel that liminal space, cool, moist, calm, as if there’s been a breakthrough, a tension released. I wouldn’t have recorded it in words without reading your post. Thanks.
You brought me back to the best of CA days, Tina. Thanks you.
Won’t it be nice when we can start visiting people and places again!
YIKES, that would be too close an encounter for me, though I love seeing our wildlife continue on nonchalantly with their lives while we seclude ourselves, worry a bit, then try to create optimism, and debate if we will attend to the news or not. And, yes, I too notice “the dark edges move in” – what a glorious phrase, as we move through the seasons. Are we noticing it more this year?
Hi Jane. It seems so, though we may only know in retrospect.