Spring

My thoughts are a bit scattered.  So tired.  Sitting here under the false breeze, its so warm and peaceful.  I can feel it leaking into me, slowly working its little magic trick.  Its so nice to be warm.  Inside my glass box I see the world outside washing away a years worth of dust.  Clouds, so low I could almost reach out and touch them.  So massive they don’t even fit in the imagination.  Complex shapes that slowly past float overhead, silent and comforting.  How vast the skies are.  Oddly its all the mountains that help define the skies.  They aren’t wide and endless, stretching on and on like some I’ve seen.  But how tall they feel.  The mountains dwarfed by the heights.  Most of the year the clouds pass miles and miles overhead, a whisper of a wisp.  But their time has come again, time to descend, like a fleet of crop dusters.  I can see the order in this chaos.  While elsewhere is buried under snow and ice, California is coming back to life.  The land is transformed into a lush and verdant place.  Its all the more beautiful for its transient and fleeting lifespan.

Spring.

A return to life.

In the face of such a transformation, resistance melts away.  Everywhere I look resides hope.  Every obstacle looks small and petty today.  There is so much enthusiasm surrounding me, I can’t help but get caught up in it.  Now I just am waiting for the focus for all this energy.  It will be along soon.  I can almost feel it already, its not far now.  I have my eyes fixed to the horizon.  I follow my guiding star.  You follow yours.  Were all heading somewhere, and I think it will be somewhere warm.

Oh so warm.

Lost Winter

Its less then two weeks until Christmas, and its just now starting to feel a bit like winter. It came up so quietly. I look out my open window and I see leaves on trees, feel a warm breeze pass by. One out of ten trees are bare, and that isn't even counting the evergreens. Most still cling to a bright golden covering, thinning but still very present. I feel like Fall just kept on falling and falling. Will true winter just pass us by this year? Its somehow a very depressing thought. I hope winter is just running a bit late, maybe half way to California it remembered it forgot all the snow and hand to turn around. I hope it comes back.
I think about all of my wintery feelings, and realize most are artificial. I'm entranced by a smattering of decorations and lights, but its better then nothing. It still makes me happy to see them. I drove by city hall today and saw the one mother with her child trying to skate through the melting slush they laid out. I applaud their determination and sheer bloody mindedness. I'm sure its the mothers doing, doggedly trying to give her son a memory of Christmas that fit with her own childhood joy. I wonder where she was from? Somewhere cold I think, somewhere in the real world. I keep coming to this thought, like there is something wrong... Something wrong with here. Like a "normal" place to live would have snow, and rain. And storms, real ones, ones that we talk about in a sentence with out the word fire in it. A place with forests and trees and rolling green hills. For most of the year the hills are just covered in sad brown grass, mostly dead. The odd small bushes, squat and prickly and uninviting. I have fond childhood memories of cacti and dust.
I can trace my bloodlines back to Sweden. A cold and harsh place, but also one of unsurpassed beauty. After my ancestors crossed the ocean, they settled in Minnesota and Wisconsin. They chose there because it was just like home, cold harsh and beautiful. I feel out of place here when I think about it. I keep reminding myself that we in the west only consider things like snow and rain as normal because that's the European normal. That maybe even a large percentage of the human population lives areas like here. But I keep coming back to the fact that in the greater picture, I am an out of place European. I am one of the first few generations to strike out to a radically new place. In the big picture, I am but a dot at the end of a long line that stretches back thousands of years. Is that were all these feelings come from?

Sunset Noon

Somewhere, a war as ancient as mankind is underway. Its another skirmish in the endless battle of man verses nature. The troops are assembled, and weapons brought to bare. For you see, somewhere California is burning. The scar from this primeval battlefield rises up to the heavens and blots out the sun. It came drifting over the hills, from miles and miles away, driven by a cold and hungry wind. Smoke and ash falls from the sky like a great perversion of rain, speaking of only death. Sunset at noon. Its so disorienting. The shadows are short and tucked, the midday's heat still beats down from the obscured sun. But the colors are all wrong. Its orange and red, a mockery of the end of days.
There is this smell of wood smoke that hangs in the air. I know its a herald of destruction but all I can think of is quite nights around a campfire. Of happy times where I was safe and contented, in the peace of nature. And yet I know, right now people are losing their homes to this war. There will be casualties. Is that wrong?