Clearing My Personal Skies

It was a good week to be at home.

They are almost all good weeks to be at home, of course - maybe this one a little less immediately so than others due to smoke from the fires, but by the time we left on Saturday morning the smoke had largely cleared out and the sky was looking - and feeling - more like the arrival of Autumn was at hand.

Going up there now more regularly has begun to more and more develop the evident split between where I am now and there.  Here there is the inevitable traffic noises and people noises; there it is still the wind in the trees, the occasional dog bark and cow lowing, and trees filled with singing birds and woodpeckers about their business of chasing down grubs.

Partially because of the fact I only take my work computer, my following of daily events becomes a lot less regular (as, perhaps, the quality of my posts, for which I do apologize.  I need to find my new rhythm) and so a great deal of the ongoing rush of everything passes me by.  And not just media overall - even something as humble as the car radio is no longer heard as I am driving almost nowhere.  In an interesting - and very real sense - I spend the bulk of a week in a sort of bubble.

It is glorious.  

Glorious in the sense that it allows one time to think. To walk the trails unencumbered by the seeming minutiae of the day - or perhaps, encumbered by the thoughts that underlie the seeming minutiae that encumbers us, those base and principle foundational thoughts that I keep saying I would like to spend time on, but find myself always too distracted to spend the time on.

In a rather stunning way, it reflected the skies that slowly began clearing from the smoke while we were there:

It only takes the deprivation of the source of the smoke and the wind to clear everything away.