Late Summer Journal
The human mind seems to be so constructed that the discovery, or perception of order or unity in the external world is mirrored, transferred, and experienced as if it were a discovery of a new order and balance in the inner world of the psyche.
Anthony Storr, Solitude
I woke up at four this morning, listened to the katydids chanting. I had been reading Anthony Storr’s Solitude, and I lay in bed thinking about his note on the perception of order. And so I took inventory of the external world here through the day.
At South Glen, dogbane pods are up to ten inches long now, turning red. Wood nettle blossoms still strong, holding late this year. Soft drifts of touch-me-nots full bloom. Tall nettle still fierce but failing. Mint at the end of its cycle, teasel complete, tall bellflowers still climbing their stalks, burdock getting burs, wingstem, oxeye, tall coneflowers, fat patches of showy coneflowers, wild cucumber vines full of white blossoms, small flowered agrimony gone to seed, early ironweed with purple-blue flowers on stalks six feet tall.
So many buckeye leaves are brown, black walnut foliage weathering, falling Most of the sycamore bark has come down now. Patches of bright scarlet in the sumac. A shower of yellow hackberry leaves from just one side of a branch. One cardinal singing almost exactly at sundown. Two blue herons circling above the fog which formed below me in the hollows. Robins calling steadily, almost drowned out by the crickets and cicadas.
I think that what can happen in noting such details is that a kind of order is experienced (whether that order reflects some actual pattern or not), and once that unity is internalized, then there is a breakdown of alienation, a personalization of an otherwise indifferent context.
Then seasonal time and place fill the eye of the beholder, producing an act of possession that is a step toward self-hood and then of making sense and of finding home in which nothing is out of place. Recognizing what is here: always discovery.