Large Fierce Mammal

A day you can hold in your hand … (At What Cost, RockfrenzyArt)

The Wild Hunt rode early this year, as its constituents bear full title to do, shredding the tops of the Hemlocks in my range throughout Friday night into Saturday afternoon, and joyously reintroducing a significant part of the local population to what “rural” living really means.

The Solstice occurred at 11:03 Atlantic time today, from which point, “… the nights get shorter, the days longer, and you should curb your enthusiasm because most of the parts of Winter that will kill you haven’t happened yet.”

In this season’s iteration of making hay while the sun shines, otherwise known as doing the things that pay the bills around here, the inevitability of Darkness is something never to be lost sight of. Yet we observe people and their ways of being in the world continuing to “prepare” for meeting up with those vagaries in a range between too inconvenient to be contemplated — perpetuated by having always gotten away with it — and expending all efforts and resources in the spirit of misleading vividness. where travails ahead are graded in their likelihood in shades of most awful.

“We live in an age in which fear of what is unlikely to happen has supplanted any willingness to understand, or even acknowledge the existence of, the more risky probabilities. Where proudly self-identified “victims” believe in a fantasy world where signs proclaiming a “gun free” zone are equivalent to unquestionable safety, and prophylactic surveillance of the innocent is justified by the acts of the guilty whose minds and hands were, and forever will be, unaffected by the laws of nations.” ~ Dark Sentiments 2015 – Day 12: Tooth and Claw

Winter comes every year, and I would strongly advise against behaving as though Nature cares for your opinion.

“As I’ve previously written, all of Life is integrally bound to cycles. In many cases, one might also refer to them, and quite correctly, as rhythms, but not in all.

“For centuries up to industrialization, society was built on an understanding that it was governed as much by rhythms as the inevitable cycles. Technological developments came at the behest of getting the most out of available energies. Those of thought, muscle, and the avails of Nature.

“Cycles are inevitable and to be ignored at your peril. I would posit that rhythms mimic cycles, and again, for centuries up to the very recent past, could be regarded as smaller components thereof.

“Post industrialization, and as with many other terms, the words ‘cycle’ and ‘rhythm’ have been rebranded, and harnessed to the purpose of manufacturing wealth out of vapid nothingness. So today we have cycles of commerce that take retailers from one Christmas shopping season to the next.” ~ Dark Sentiments Season 8 — Day 23: Of Cycles and Rhythms

In a Universe built of time and space where elimination of the former ensures that nothing happens, and the latter that everything happens at once, no mechanism is afforded the denizen to declare an abstention.

Music depends as much upon the space between notes as it does the notes themselves. Learn to enjoy the performance.