Washington: Fall leaves

What's your favorite time of year? 

Without any shade of doubt, I'm a child of the winter and fall months. When the summer heat finally breaks and starts to wane with a chill sliding into the shadows and caressing your bones, blushing your cheeks, fogging your breath, I'm at my happiest. The shade grows longer and colors deepen, taking on more dramatic hues. And so many holidays! With the cold asserting it's claim to the outdoor spaces, there's all the more reason to nestle into a warm and cozy blanket and snuggle or read, or pursue other pursuits best enjoyed indoors on cold, drizzly days. Halloween justifies the purchase of exorbitant quantities of candy, and then consuming them when an underwhelming number of trick-or-treaters comes a'knocking. Then there's Thanksgiving, with its shameless, unabashed glorification of gluttony and all the glories of heaping mounds of deliciousness piled upon groaning plates. Sweet potatoes and pumpkin, pies and cakes and candies galore. It's a feast for the senses, literally and figuratively speaking. Here in the Pacific Northwest, the seasons like to mark their passage with extra flair, with bursts of brilliant oranges and reds and yellows cropping up from the most unlikely of places to shout "FALL!"  

And really, who can blame them? Such opulent beauty should be celebrated, like Marilyn Monroe in her prime. It's all too fleeting in this world, as the rapid passage of fall into the greys of winter and passing of stars in their prime likes to remind us. Many of the most wonderful things about life are incredibly fleeting, gone before we even realize how lucky we are to have them in the first place. The waning of the seasons is an excellent reminder to be mindful, to enjoy the moment while it lasts, because soon it will be an entirely different moment and there's no guarantees of certainty. Storms blow through and rip branches off of otherwise stolid, sturdy trees, and friends or family can fade into the ether before we realize they've gone. Be grateful for who and what you have, while it's there, and enjoy the time you're given. All that cheese, all that jazz, man. 

  

Much love,

💘

XOXO,

NAU

Japan: Salarymen and Sakura

Time is a peculiar thing, isn't it? We often look at it as this linear thing, one event sequentially leading to the next, from point A all the way through to point Z, or point Zed, depending on your preferred parlance. Then there are those, whether they be authors of fictitious works like Kurt Vonnegut and his Billy Pilgrim (who became unstuck in time), or scientists who ponder quantum entanglement and what these things mean in the larger scheme. While conventionally time is viewed primarily in this linear fashion, I'm much more fond of Vonnegut's approach myself. In Slaughter-House five the main character, poor bumbling Billy Pilgrim, was abducted by the strange species known as Trafalmadorians, who are not limited to the third-dimensional perspective on time and it's passing. This abduction, coincidentally, leads to Billy becoming decoupled from our hindered human view of the timeline, offering profound insight and also a fair bit of awkwardness, as he has no foresight of when he's going to wake up in the course of his life prior to it happening. This non-sequitur style of timing, however, gives Billy an incredible perspective on time and life, perhaps an unintended gift from his abductors. To quote from Vonnegut:

"The most important thing I learned on Tralfamadore was that when a person dies he only appears to die. He is still very much alive in the past, so it is very silly for people to cry at his funeral. All moments, past, present, and future, always have existed, always will exist."

What, if anything, does all this have to do with cherry blossoms and businessmen, you may be wondering. As of the time of this writing, my time in Japan has already slipped into the past by several years, and every time I'm reminded of this fact, that I lived in Japan 4 years ago now, it seems so surreal. It feels like only yesterday I stepped foot off the plane in Narita, unsure of what came next. The lessons and experiences I gained while living in Japan, while separate in the timeline, are still with me. An appreciation for the changes of the seasons symbolized perhaps most abundantly in the short-lived flowers of the cherry blossoms lives on in me to this day, every day. I thrill at the changing shades of autumnal leaves, do a little happy dance when I find the first matsutake mushroom making an appearance or the first blooms of spring breaking through the monotony of a winter's day. In this way, I like to think I'm a little bit like Billy Pilgrim, the confines of a three-dimensional experience of time dissolving around the edges slightly, reconnecting me to a previous time in my existence. In a very real way, the blog serves that function, too, by allowing me to create a sort of time capsule of photographic and literary evidence of existence. It's not much, but so it goes.