Dead of Night

Dead of night. I've always liked that phrase. For me, it conjures up a sense of tranquility, of being alone in utter silence, the only points of reference the gravity of dark earth and the ancient light of stars. I went out into the dead of night tonight and thought of the world falling through expanding space. I thought of the astonishing velocity of the whirl of matter, from the smallest particles to vast, distant galaxies. I noted how the speed of this constant movement was, by vastness or by minuteness, and by my consciousness' brief tick of time, reduced to a frozen moment of a dance. There is a point, or a moment, at which velocity and stillness are indistinguishable from one another; at which points and moments are indistinguishable from one another, I suppose. The best place, or time, to find one is in the dead of night. The air out there: Prehistoric and new.

Sniffing the Air

The smell of midsummer is here. The day is redolent of ripe leaves and desiccated grasses, decayed flowers and dried earth, and pine resin. There are probably some deer droppings in there, too, but I can't pick them out. Altogether, it is a sweet smell, with pungent overtones. In the evening, it will be supplemented by the smell of dinners cooking, and then by the dampness rising from sprinkled lawns in the cool hour before sunset. Blindfolded, I might be able to tell the time of day by the scent of the air.

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I think that Juno may be hoarding my e-mail again. Not a single thing today, not even spam. There's always spam!