...as, two days hence, i shall be flying across a couple thousand miles of open sea, waves pacific and gentle before the storms of winter, generated near the Aleutians, throw oceanic swells the size of small buildings at the north shores of all Hawaiian islands and at coastal California. It's only at the beaches, though, where you will see the waves rise up and crash upon land with a fury that defies belief. Out on the open ocean, the period from crest to crest is long and subtle, lulling. I chose to post this image fragment today, as it has blues and grays on it: blues for the colors of the sky and the sea where i am going to, and grays for the patches of sad daubed on my heart and the fur of my little rat dæmon. The image itself is a digital painting that Kass rendered from a picture I gave her. (Click on it to see the full image.)

But grays aside, I am content. The nomad in me is happy to be on the move once more, scratching the itch of my wanderlust, as the pendulum swings thataway again. And after six months in Berkeley I am plenty ready to leave, as my sedentary lifestyle here has made a mockery of my back's disposition. (Yes, the middle years do that to you, never mind the adage that life begins at 40 *chortle*.) One really should not sit in front of a computer screen all day long and throughout the meatier part of most evenings. Our bodies were made to run (after prey or away from preying animals), bend, walk, climb, stalk, glide (through the green waters of sluggish rivers) and generally move through space in and along the infinitely thin envelope of this blue planet's surface, where air is to be breathed and to be swum through, the earth to be walked upon. But always gently, and with care.

So, I am returning to where I can climb volcanoes, dive down into lava tubes just offshore, and run and walk on paths of my own discovering. However, after six months in Maui, I shall be well and ready and eager to return to the civilized planes of the San Francisco Bay Area... where technology rules, music and dance abound, and the cuisines, tastes, fetishes, garbage, desires, hatreds, hairs, loves, eyes, texts and selves of people from all corners of the planet converge, in a tapestry that too defies belief. But it's the stopped beat at the other swing of the pendulum, and I shall await its arrival in spring, as it always does come, without fail.

{ net.casting }
^