Five straight days of nothing but music, and you know something’s up, right?
Well, I’ve been sick again. As soon as I’d completed my writing tasks on Sunday, I crashed and burned with a fever, cough, aches and pains, and I am only just now coming back to life. I’ve been filling my time sleeping and streaming historical documentaries, most of which I’ve slept through and had to re-run repeatedly before I’d absorbed whole programs.
Admittedly I’m feeling a little cranky this week… but I am so sick of the Ken and Ric Burns documentary formula, I could just spit. The format is so plodding and predictable, and the Burns Brothers embrace such a conventional view of history it makes me suspect it has everything to do with keeping those grant revenues coming in. (Grant makers often tend to be those historical “winners” who get to write the narrative of history; anyway, Ken Burns lost my vote when, in an interview in the publicity run-up to his series “Prohibition,” he refused to draw any parallels between Prohibition and today’s fraudulent War on Drugs.)
Maybe my crankiness results from too many documentaries by the Burns boys or otherwise… Anyway, my diet of documentaries had taken me through such a dismal series of subjects—wars and war crimes, politics and politicians, the erosion of our Constitutional rights, economic collapse, etc.—I became so run-down that there was absolutely nothing else for me to do today but take a hike.
The thermometer hit eighty degrees today and I had not been out on the property since before Otto died. It would do me some good, I told myself. And it did.
Cane in hand, I made my way on the road to the top of the hill where one day I’ll build an observatory, and from there out to the end-point of a spit of land that overlooks the deepest part of Elijah’s Arroyo; I descended the steep hill to the floor of the arroyo, and then followed its course back home, climbed another hill and walked the petrified beach to the house—all totaled, maybe a two-mile circuit, but difficult footing most of the way.
This being the first time I’d done it without Otto, it might have been a lonely hike were it not for the fact that Tony (the cat) accompanied me the whole way (he’s sleeping with his head on my foot right now).
I don’t know if it was because the documentaries have been reminding me that so many world leaders have died at my age or younger, but I started out on the hike wondering if I’d have the strength to see through the whole circuit. However, I ended my hike tired but feeling stronger than when I’d set out. It made me recall once again that this land possesses a power that has in it the potential to heal and revitalize.
I hope this warm weather continues at least another day. I need another dose of today’s medicine.
۞
Groove of the Day
