Ask not for whom the bell tolls

Hallowe'en perfection in the facade of what was Village Presbyterian Church, making brilliant use of the bell high above the entrance.

Dark is rising

Beauty like this blaze of color at Fort Tryon's Heather Garden yesterday - they manage extravagances of bloom when everyone else has given up for the year - adds poignancy to dark feelings I've been trying to find a way to articulate. These have much to do, of course, with worry about the upcoming midterm elections, where people who don't believe in elections may be elected (and will in any case claim to be), but the dejection is broader. It's connected to Russia's deranged crusade in Ukraine and the Stalinism strangling China, and barely leavened by Schadenfreude at the antics of Little Britain. But what to say? What seemed to be one world, or a world progressively becoming one, seems to be ending. And everywhere there are people trapped, voiceless, with no say in the divisive schemes of their rulers. (That these sometimes have majority support doesn't make it better!) The dream that all people should have a say in how they live their lives seems almost fanciful, even without its cosmopolitan complement, but what other dream is worth having?

Other shore

On our knees!

At dinner with friends, our frightening political moment came up by way of the deluge of messages we're all getting from candidates across the country just a few dollars from a target, fighting to keep their heads above water in the face of slipping poll numbers or dark money filling their opponents' coffers. One has to delete most of them, one friend said, but in order to do that you still have to process volleys of desperate cries for help - it doesn't help to know that they're all sent out by fund-raisers skilled in getting to us. (A fascinating Guardian article found that the messages for presumed Republicans and Democrats are dramatically different.) Another said they make him mad because they communicate a doomed sense of powerlessness - it's never enough, it never will be. An occasional donor but mostly a deleter, I realized the whole thing is abstract to me: all the money goes to ads I never see, leading a TV-less life.

Antsy awareness

For "Religion in the Anthropocene" this morning I added a second class session on Buddhism. We'd discussed Jill Schneiderman's "Awake in the Anthropocene" on Monday, which offers a "bricolage" of many different Buddhist ideas and practices relevant to environmental awareness in the Anthropocene, but nobody was familiar with any of them. Even the hackneyed Four Noble Truths drew a blank.

I turned the subtitles off, of course

So we started with a guided meditation, the youngish Tibetan teacher Yongey Mingur Rinpoche inviting to a simple exercise in awareness of your body, then of your mind in your body, then of the area around you, and then expanding outward to the larger world - even beyond the clouds! - and back. 

As it ended, I asked: did that seem long or short? I asked in part because I was surprised it ended so quickly. But as I anticipated, several students found it very long. "Generation Z..." one explained, half-apologetic. Another shared my experience that it passed more quickly than expected, but the consensus was that once Rinpoche asked us to open our eyes (for the final 5 minutes) they got "antsy." I tried to work with the reported antsiness. It's normal to get fidgety, in body and mind, in an exercise like this, I said. And it's common to berate ourselves for this antsiness. But that won't make it go away, just add to it. Instead, these practices propose, you need to acknowledge the antisiness, observe it, see it arise - and fall. 

It turned out that several in the class have done meditation of this sort, but as part of learning to deal with anxiety of various kinds. It was a new idea that it should ground you in reality, a reality that is itself antsy, rising and falling. We were using terms that seemed at odds with each other - noticing, accepting, inspecting, holding, letting go - so I asked them to use their hands to show what they thought was going on. Several of us had open hands, as if gently supporting something, but one of the more vocal students put her hands together around a pen as if in prayer, explaining that the pen would otherwise fall, she needed to hold a feeling or sensation to inspect it.

The Lang courtyard trees outside the window pitched in at this point, letting some leaves gently fall. Instead of pointing out how grasping is precisely what many Buddhists will say is the cause of our suffering (the second Noble Truth!), I sensed a teachable moment. Yes, I said, maybe things are falling all the time, like the leaves outside. We try to know them, catching them in our hands as it were. But we can't ultimately stop them from falling. My hands were falling leaves as I spoke but the last word went to the trees. which kept, falling, one by one to no discernible rhythm, as I segued to a broader account of Buddhist traditions, traditions which spread in part because they offered practices which people tried out and found helpful in this world of falling leaves...

This is a different kind of leaf but sympathetic, in Fort Tryon Park

Symbiosis!

A molecular biologist colleague came to "Religion of Trees" today to help us understand the networks and relationships described by Suzanne Simard in her Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest. With lovely visuals she took us from Simard's tracing of webs of symbiosis between forest tree species (assisted of course by fungi) to a profounder understanding of the kinship of all life. She introduced horizontal/lateral gene transfer, and showed how it makes all current life forms hybrid. 

She said she rejects the taxonomy of animals, fungi and plants, and showed us this pie chart. Outcomes of long histories of jumping genes, we're kin with all life already!

I say

The striking thing about the stories written by the students in "Religion and the Anthropocene" - stories many told me they'd struggled writing, as they had never been asked to write a story before, or worked primarily in dialogues, etc. - is how many were written in the first person. 

In one a camp counselor tells of how their beloved camp, which not only they but their parents had gone to as children, has been changed beyond recognition by climate change. In another, a young woman tells of confronting a raging forest fire that may have been set by an ecoterrorist group of which her mother is a member. In another, a teenager from another planet writes a diary about a disillusioning trip to the Earth. In another, a protagonist tells us of her scheme to get into one of the forests where the billionnaires who haven't left the planet reside, only to be left outside the glass bubble with an electric vehicle with no more juice. In another, a drag queen in post-apocalyptic Los Angeles tells us how she follows her bouffant wig when it blows over the side of her paddle boat in a polluted current. In another, a young woman writes in her diary imagining the world her mother knew when she was her age. In another, a "raving scholar" describes their epiphany that anthropogenic problems can't be solved by the same sorts of anthropogenic interventions which caused them. In another, what will be the last polar bear describes their rage and confusion at human caprice and short-sightedness...

I asked the class this morning about this preference for the first person voice. Some (including a self-confessed diarist, who said she probably writes for her future self) said it was familiar and easier. Others told me it was common in contemporary literature, even if every narrator is an unreliable one! But the most interesting spoke of the challenges of the third person narrator, who needs to know everything that's going on: they couldn't pull that off.

One of the texts we read in preparation for this assignment was the section from Amitav Ghosh's The Great Derangement which arraigns the modern realist novel for concealing the realities of climate change in its focus on "individual moral adventure": to allow characters to grow and change believably, they need to be placed by the author in a believable place and setting - where believable means stabile, even unlikely turns of fate must be probable, or the writer will be dismissed as a failure. Ghosh, writing as himself a novelist, sees the problem as fundamental, structural. He discounts genres like science and speculative fiction as inadequate alternatives - nobody takes their world-building for real, he thinks, when the challenge of the Anthropocene is an uncanny reality - and recommends we revive premodern literary forms like epic, fable and myth. (In his Gun Island he does just that.)

But all the forms of storytelling Ghosh considers are delivered in the third person. Have my students found a way out of his dilemma, or just another way of avoiding facing it? In many of their stories, what's stable (relatively) is the voice of the narrator, as it tries, more or less successfully, to make sense of an increasingly confounding reality devolving around it. Perhaps John Green (crediting his wife Sarah) was right to quip that in the Anthropocene "there are no detached observers." Perhaps those who insist on the "thousand names of Gaia" are right to argue that the illusion of a single god's or god-like human's view of the planet has been punctured - and, for those who don't see that yet, needs to be punctured.

Still (I guess I'm one of those resisting puncture) the middle of my course, taking us from the "Anthropocene" section to "Religion," is a section called "Stories," and I was, with Ghosh, thinking of stories in the third person or at least the first person plural. Isn't that what's implied when, for instance, Haraway writes in her "Camille Stories" that the communities where a new way of being emerged discovered that "storytelling was the most powerful practice for comforting, inspiring, remembering, warning, nurturing compassion, mourning, and becoming-with each other in their differences, hopes, and terrors"? Maybe not! Maybe, in the year Annie Ernaux won the Nobel Prize for Literature, the stories that keep things real are all in the first person singular ... but addressed to other first persons, too.

And yet the reading for today's class was Jill Schneiderman's "Awake in the Anthropocene," a celebration of the contributions geological and Buddhist ways of seeing beyond the personal can make to Anthropocene challenges... 

Unwanted future

My students foresee a dystopian future, involving not only ecological but political breakdown. And consequently personal, too. In one story taking place in the not so distant future, the narrator reflects "I’ve always had this theory my mother hates me, since her pregnancy was an accident and abortion was banned completely that same year." 

Church of the tree

The guide of the "Religion and Trees" class tour of Washington Square Park is one of the conveners of a weekly gathering to sketch the English Elm in Washington Square Park called Tree Wonder, and told us that tree alphabet artist Katie Holten would be there for this week's gathering... Holten's alphabet is at the head of my course syllabus, and I connected our weekly drawing sessions with Tree Wonder early on. And the course started with a visit to that tree. (The picture above is from the day of our tour.) I decided this was the week to play hooky from church - well, my usual church! -  and join in! 

The weather wasn't golden like yesterday; indeed, a few scattered raindrops fell. But the group was a nice size, incuding a student from class, with her visiting parents, and another student, whom I'd told about it, with a friend - and I had a chance to speak to most of the other tree wonderers too! And draw. (All of our drawings will be on their instagram page soon.) Holten told us about a practice she learned, growing up in Ireland, called "blind drawing" - you look at the object you're drawing, not the page you're drawing on - so I gave it a try. First looking down from time to time so as not to lose my bearings (above), then without that safeguard (below). Everyone likes the second one best! Holten saw eye movements; I feel tree buzz.

Fall

Hard and soft at autumnal Rockefeller State Park Preserve

Centrifugal Trinity

Among the many splendiferous objects in the Met's blockbuster exhibition on the art of the Tudors is an enormous 15th century tapestry, the only survivor of a set of ten stretching 300 feet, showing the Trinity creating the world. Over six days of creation and the seventh of rest, that makes twenty-one identical scepter bearing figures, doing their thing, and quite upstaging the celestial and terrestrial objects they're calling into existence! Here's Gen 1:11-12:

And God said "Let the earth put forth vegetation: plants yielding seed, and fruit trees of every kind on earth that bear fruit with the seed in it." And it was so. The earth brought forth vegetation: plants yielding seed of every kind, and trees of every kind bearing fruit with the seed in it. And God saw that it was good. (NRSV)

The tapestry's sun and moon and plants and fish and animals are lovely but tiny compared to these engaging triads, each in a different moment of almost ludic divine sociality; only the humans created in their image are big enough to catch the viewer's eye. 'Tis a sight behold, and towers suitably over (it's 14 feet high) an exhibition whose narrative tells of the divinization of an upstart royal line. 

There are too many other splendors to mention, but other tapestries remind us of royals as destroyers as well as creators. Henry VIII apparently specially commissioned this scene of St. Paul directing the burning of heathen books, billowing smoke meticulously woven.

Recycled

Here's one of my very first and favorite fleeces (back when it was exciting to think it was recycled PET bottles), on its way to a winter clothing drive for the migrants bused daily to New York City by cruel and cynical Republican governors. Hope it keeps someone warm in what may be their first cold winter.

Untimely

In "Religion and the Anthropocene" this morning, students shared stories they had written. You might recall that writing an "Anthropocene story" was part of the "Anthropocene humanities" course I taught at Lang and twice for the Renmin summer school, and I knew it would be a revelatory experience for these students too. I had the class break up into threes, so each could present their story to an intimate audience, as well as hear two other stories. Then students were asked to tell the rest of the class about the stories they had heard (not the ones they had themselves written). With as vague a prompt as I had given, the stories ranged widely in theme and voice, amazing and delighting us one by one but even more cumulatively. 

Each little clutch of students was its own mutual appreciation society, and hearing the students praise each other's work drew out affinities between their animating concerns.

One group included a story about extraterrestrial entities coming at some point in the future to visit the Earth, a planet whose beauty they had heard about from their parents, only to find it a devastated wasteland. Another story in that group was the imagined diary entry, from a nearer future, of someone who might be the author's future child, noting sadly that the world they'd heard about from their mother was so different from the one they knew. Strange synchronicity in solastalgia, the sense that the world we know and love will not be there in the future! The group's third student (whose story was entirely different, a John Green-inspired vignette on green fashion at a skate & surf shop) brought it home to the present, asserting boldly that anyone in her generation would give almost anything to be able to experience even a day from the world in which our parents grew up.

This remark had me imagining the world in which my parents grew up, with its midcentury modern aesthetics and trim black and white photos, before I realized, with a start, that she was talking about the one I grew up in. (Indeed, I may well be older than her parents.) Woozy time vertigo ensued, and persists. The class's other stories, in their various ways, have a similar sense of a world irrevecably slipping away, indeed already part way gone. 

Transit

Took the train a little earlier than usual today to find bright sunshine and crisp fall air. That's your truly, blurrily waving from the elevated subway platform, just south of the yellow lines and fluorescent orange pylon men on Tiemann Place.

Urban forest

"Religion of Trees" had a guided tour of Washington Square Park

which revealed an arboreal wonderland none of us noticed before

Importunate

Yesterday's Gospel reading, known as the "parable of the unjust judge" or "parable of the importuante widow," was one of the parables which come up in Octavia Butler's Parable of the Sower. Our rector, who was preaching, was the person who directed me to Butler's book a few years ago - and led a group of parishioners in a discussion of the book as part of the recent "Summer Reads." 

The story was fresh in my mind because our first class on the book in "Religion and the Anthropocene" focused on parables, including this one. They're often more complex and more charged than they at first seem. A story which, as one student said, "casts shade on God" (why an unjust rather than just a busy judge?), Luke 18:1-8 is the text Parable of the Sower protagonist Lauren Olamina chooses to preach on when her father has gone missing and is presumed dead. Its story of wresting justice from an unjust judge prefigures Earthseed, the new religion Olamina will channel into being, a religion where "God is change" and where we are called to "shape God."

But the rector didn't mention it. She focused instead on the importance of persistence and the virtue of boldness. (The day's Old Testament reading was Jacob wrestling with the angel and not letting the mysterious being go until he blessed him, so it made sense, though it jibes with Earthseed too.) I asked her about it afterwards. The connection had completely slipped her mind, she said. But, we realized, Earthseed hadn't. Her sermon ended with ringing words about the importance of making bold claims - and how making them changes us. Olamina would approve:

All that you touch

You Change.

All that you Change

Changes you

Autumn descends

Last stand

Against the grain

I'm drafting an application for my next sabbatical leave, which I'm due next year. The form has changed, now demanding a description of a project. So I've been teasing out a book project around "Religion of Trees," with, perhaps, the subtitle "An Anthropocene Investigation." (Or, more lyrically if obscurely, "Hope for a Tree: Religious Arbor in the Anthropocene"!) I pledge to build on courses I've taught to try to bring into conversation with each other studies of trees, of religion, and of the Anthropocene.

Anthropocene too? Thinking it through, I'm sensing that that is my angle. Others (if not many) have written about trees and religion, based on textual or ethnographic or personal experience, and many write about trees in every register. But Anthropocene dendrology seems novel. I'm picturing a first chapter, or perhaps a foreword, which goes from "Welcome to the Anthropoce" to "But trees?"

"Welcome to the Anthropocene" could introduce the concept to readers unfamiliar with it, and spell out some of the Anthropocene's challenges: how much of received human culture is premissed on the now finished stability of the Holocene, and thus irrelevant or even counterproductive? It's tempting to despair of all of it, seeking solace if not hope in the largely "indigenous" traditions presumed perhaps too quickly to be unaffected by it, but that's a category error in several ways. In ever dynamic ways indigenous societies navigated the Holocene too - which, incidentally, wasn't as smooth a ride as the hockey stick graphs imply. Elements of most cultures and civilizations were - and are - innocent of the devastations of the Anthropocene. Suspect are mainly those connected to western colonial, settler colonial, industrial and capitalist cultures. Not everything in those cultures is complicit, either, but modern conceptions of things like nature, and religion, may be presumed to be. Responding to the Anthropocene involves thinking critically but hopefully about the future, the present, and the past too...

Anthropocene stories are not just about how we got here, but also about how things might have been otherwise; a way of reading the past against the grain of the present in order to open up new possibilities for realigning our values, politics, and social practices to live within planetary constraints. (Zalasiewics and Thomas, Strata and Three Stories, 5)

Well and good, "But trees?" Trees tempt us with the ultimate indigeneity: silent, stolid and, we're learning, hubs of worlds of communication, relationship and care. Many tower generously over us, and some are old enough to make our lifespans seem almost comically brief. Ecologists and philosophers have learned from them the virtues of "sessile" life, the ultimate commitment to the planet, locality, and life. But how much of this mythos of trees is neither very old nor very widespread? How much of it is, in fact, part and parcel of the civilizational changes of the western world that brought us to Anthropocene calamity? We need to ask of our myths around trees the same questions we have to pose about religion and religions. As we do so, we can recover what it is like to live with, not just beneath and thanks to trees. Trees as people, as companion species. And maybe spiritual fellow travellers on the way to thinking "against the grain of the present."

Translucent obsessions

I don't check out the Chelsea galleries nearly often enough, but yesterday afternoon had a chance to immerse myself in two. At one, a work by light-obsessed Spencer Finch (one of whose works I saw and loved eight years ago) mesmerized. Originally created for an indoor space with only color blocks taken from Monet's garden at Giverny, here it interacted through windows with the natural light and movement of Chelsea. Downstairs in another gallery, work by another artist whose work I have enjoyed, dometic space-obsessed Do So Suh. In "Jet Lag" he arranges meticulous polyester fabric reproductions of knobs, handles, switches, locks, faucets from the places he has lived.

Ficus religiosus

Today's was a kind of hinge class in "Religion of Trees." After surveying various human religious uses and relationships with trees in Monday's presentations, it was time to pass the mike to the trees. And who better to do this than the banyan, who explodes ideas of tree as single, straightforwardly vertical analogs to us featherless bipeds? This has been the plan all along, but Mike Shanahan's Gods, Wasps and Stranglers: The Secret History and Redemptive Future of Fig Trees (Chelsea Green, 2016), whose first chapters we read for today, took us even further. 

Banyans are only one of over 750 known species of figs (the picture above shows a banyan Thomas Edison planted in Fort Myers, Florida in 1925); others include the sources of the figs we eat, the pipal under which the Buddha achieved enlightenment, and many more, which have anchored forests and fed hundreds of other species for far longer than human beings have been around. (Chronicling figs' prominent place in religious cosmogonies, Shanahan makes a good case for the Garden of Eden's tree of the knowledge of good and evil having been a fig too, something Michelangelo figured out as well!)

Shanahan also stresses that, while not all figs are stranglers, many start their life high up in another tree which they ultimately encircle and overwhelm. (He illustrated his own book; iage at right is on page 10.) Some of these host trees survive but many die, rotting away to leave hollows at the heart of the fig's growing network of trunks and secondary trunks. (This was what one ecologist remembered climbing in at that panel I attended a few weeks ago.) For my students, this punctured the idea that trees are peaceful beneficent beings.

There's lots more where this came from - next week we read the chapter on the lives of the wasps on which fig reproduction relies, "Sex and Violence in the Hanging Garden" - but students already picked up on an unnerving erotic quality to the lithe twining shapes of fig trees in Shanahan's descriptions. One even looked up a poem of D. H. Lawrence's to which Shanahan refers:

Rather like an octopus, but strange and sweet-myriad-limbed octopus; 

Like a nude, like a rock-living, sweet-fleshed sea-anemone,

Flourishing from the rock in a mysterious arrogance. [...]

These polymorphously perverse trees are all the things students had thought trees were not! And yet wasn't it beneath such a one that Gautama the Buddha (among many others) achieved enlightenment?

I called up an image from one of the student presentations on Monday, taken from the cover of a book called Under the Bodhi Tree. Had she perhaps selected that picture because the tree in the background is so very much not like an oak or pine or sequoia? This tangled snarl, this embodiment of the world-shaping power of clinging, even shows the hollow where the tree's long-dead host once lived! She hadn't noticed, she said, but did now - aghast! Indeed all of us (yours truly included) were wide-eyed, as the bucolic scene of the Buddha gently shaded by a giant giving tree unraveled before our eyes. Satori!

Disarmed

Also in "Religion of Trees" today, we sketched from life - and from death. I had students return to the trees we had festooned with masks last week - do you sense they are watching you still, I asked? - but also to witness a fallen branch which had been parked in front of the entrance to our school. It's from the little leaf linden across the street. How did it get here, we asked, concluding it must have falled into the street and been dragged to our doorstep because there was space. Was anything beneath it when it fell, we wondered? I decided not to share this reminder of the weight of falling branches we saw in Riverside Park over the weekend... 

Religious arboretum

In "Religion of Trees" today, students gave reports on trees appearing in various religious settings. Topics included the Hungarian story of the sky-high tree, the significance of the red cedar to indigenous peoples of the Pacific Northwest, trees in Mongolian shamanism, the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil in Genesis, trees in the Q'uran, trees in Jainism, religious dimensions of the Chipko movement, oak trees in pre-Christian Europe, sandalwood and zelkova in Korean folk religion, the kabbalistic tree of life, the Buddhist Bodhi tree, and a refuge tree of Tibetan Kagyu Buddhism. 

That sounds a little grander than it was: generally our ambitions were rather greater than our research and presentation skills. But the very variety and unevenness of the presentations helped us appreciate the many ways in which trees can matter, whether as ensouled or soulless, ladders to another world or walking sticks, symbols of the afterlife or of earthly clinging, sources of healing or opportunities for care, characters in folk tales or sites of spiritual enlightenment, balm for wounds or among of the torments of the damned, abstractions or even mistranslations. We're ready to hear what the trees have to say.

Coffee cosmogony

Autumn approaches

Courtyard maple darsan

Because the forecast was for rain, "Religion of Trees" postponed a trip to Washington Square Park. This also left us with more time to discuss the chapter on neem trees in David Haberman's People Trees: Worship of Trees in Northern India. 

Haberman's focus is on worshippers' practice of affixing a metal facemask to the trees, to facilitate and deepen their relationship with them. He argues that this represents a form of "intentional anthropo-morphism," where human beings - knowing that we are wired to respond to faces - give human features to non-human persons. The darsan involved - a mutual seeing - doesn't mistake the tree for a human being but rather opens the human worshipper to a deeper communion with the god or goddess manifested in or as that tree. The obvious artifice of the facemask prevents it from being an unthinking effacement (sic!) of the tree's otherness - or so Haberman maintains. 

The ideas are challenging and counterintuitive, and our windfall of class time gave us the opportunity to put them to the test. I invited students to draw facemasks, and to tape them briefly on our familiar courtyard trees, to see if this enabled a different kind of relationship with the trees. (Before proceeding I asked if anyone found the idea disrespectful of the trees or of the practices evoked; no-one did.) 

The less anthropomorphic masks worked best for me, but all were interesting, and have got the students thinking in new ways about trees as persons. Thinking and sensing and relating? We'll have to see... and to ask the trees. (Top image from People Trees, 148)

Leaf peeper's nausée

We had a wonderful time leaf peeping in the 'Dacks, but I have to report that I also had what might be termed a dendrolator's Dark Night of the Soul. Not in the dark - it was in the spectacular glow of sunlit autumnal foliage, realizing that we were thrilling to leaves and colors just as the trees to whom they belonged were letting them go. 

Although we were constantly applauding, nobody was putting on a show for us. The pigments that gave us colors we deliriously grasped for names for (claret? pink grapefruit? rhubarb? blood?) had served some other purpose once. At that chlorphyl-filled time, the leaves were green because they absorbed reds and yellows. Titillating the likes of us by bouncing the golds and scarlets back at us was never the point! By the time the trees elicit gasps from tree peepers like us, the leaves' work is done - except decomposing on the forest floor. It was like showing up for the curtain call of a theatrical performance, or indeed at the stage door, 

unaware of and incurious about the play that had just concluded. At one point, as we tried to position ourselves to get the best reflections in a lake, I was overcome with a sense of the absurdity of it all. Here we were, human visitors, seeking not only the spectacle of the leaves for which the trees had no more use, in colors never meant for 

sharing, but seeking to see them twice! Spectres of spectres! Isn't there something morbid about the whole thing? I took comfort in knowing that we visit in all seasons we can, noting the kaleidoscopic ensemble of the forest from floor to canopy. (Indeed, the floor is the roof of a deeper world, peeping out through the wild variety of mushroom fruiting bodies.) Still, I had to confess a particular rapture produced by the flaring colors of the fall - I'm one of those people who say "fall is my favorite season." Why not spring? Or summer, which I tend to dismiss as dull. Leaf peeper's delight is not about but despite the trees, yet it's real.

 

The treeless Klimty pic above is from the Adirondack Experience, a board where visitors leave their admissions stickers on their way out. The others show leaves on their way out.

Adirondack idyll

Pardon the pause in posting. 

We snuck away north to the Adirondacks for a long weekend, just as fall was starting to fall there! The fringes of the savage hurricane churning to the south peeked over the horizon (above), but our skies were clear, by night as well as day.

Fallen leaf, three views