Chiffonesque

It feels a little strange to come back to work after the break. There's some familiarity,  there's some disorientation - much like if you traveled halfway across the world and didn't know about the time difference.  So you'd leave home at midnight and reach that other place at midnight as well. I think that's the one big lesson traveling teaches you...that even if you lose your bearings, you still reach somewhere. Sometimes, even the place you had set out to reach. As for me, days at work will take some getting used to. Like today. Rush for a deadline, snatches of a tslk wigh a friend,  bad coffee, some inchoate feeling of being let down, and a sated feeling that today, I did some part of my job well. I like work, though. Allows me my personal battle and my private truce.

Watched the musical 'Wicked'. Had gone brainwashed with sky-high expectations and spectacular reviews. Wicked matched every expectation, except for those that it surpassed. When Elphaba soars up the stage with her transformation complete as the Wicked Witch of the West...there was magic then. When Glinda comments frothily about the Emerald Island: "It's so Ozmopolitan", there was magic there. The choreography, the music, the message of that musical...it was all magic, magic, magic! There's this proximity to brilliance within touching distance that a stage show brings that a movie - with all its 3-D effects and whatever else - will never compare with. When you watch something great on stage, you know that it hasn't been 'managed' or 'edited' or 'crafted'. You know that it has been brought forth that moment only for you. As an audience of a good film, I feel happy. As an audience of a good stage show, though, I feel privileged. As f

It's past midnight in Chicago. My friend is sitting and reading a book. Two sets of red and cream candles are set on a tray lined with pebbles. They are unlit and their wicks are white and clean, not yet singed by fire. Beyond the large French windows, there's a lawn. On it and around it, you see nocturnal outlines of trees, other houses, shrubs, and sweet little ghosts set up as Halloween ornamentation. Often, I walk down these lanes in the morning. That's when I see trees resplendent in stiff orange and burgundy leaves. Lush lawns sweeping across suburbia and clouds of molten leaves swirling to ponds and floating away. Wild geese fly high in 'V' formations - strident and strong and heading home. It's night time now and I don't see any of that tonight. Tomorrow, it will be day and I will see them again. Tonight, I think of Diwali somewhat like this - not so much about good over evil...but like a gentle reconnect with the feeling that it's all there.