“We are still under the sway of the destructive and vain belief that man is the pinnacle of creation, and not just a part of it, and that, therefore, everything is permitted…. We are incapable of understanding that the only genuine backbone of our actions—if they are to be moral—is responsibility. Responsibility to something higher than my family, my country, my firm, my success. Responsibility to the order of Being, where all our actions are indelibly recorded and where, and only where, they will be properly judged.”
            -Vaclav Havel (poet, playwright, and statesman) in a speech to the United States Congress
 
 
I just always liked that quote and have no other good reason for posting it other than it just came to mind.
 
I like Fall. I like the feeling of transition. I get bored with the longer seasons and like feeling the change rather than the stay.
 
Fall is a stalking season. It circles. It creeps.
 
The grass is still green, but it’s there, crouched. Leaves begin their transformation into mummified bats. Cinnamon and apple become important flavors. The nights grow bolder and take up more and more of the shrinking day.
 
As children, we began to shiver in excitement, for we knew that soon our curfews would be extended into the dark hours. That was exciting. THAT was naughty – to get away with it – a loophole in the cosmology. We tore through the backyards, in the after-dusk that had come to us since our parents would not let us go to it and it would be a whole season and a half before the universe righted itself.
 
There were no fences.
 
There was no time.
 
Never-neverland was night and running and delight-shrieks and happy darkness. Already we cackled and leapt and swooped, rehearsing to be the goblins we’d become on the climactic night when we’d celebrate the naughty season by gorging on candy for the pure, surgery, cavity-filled joy of it all.
 
But it started with mummy-bat leaves and night bedlam in the back yards.
 
 
And finally, Steve and I are going over possible layouts and styles for my webpage and here are a few samples thus far. [Note: That spiral in the center of every picture won’t be in the final product.]