Mongolia: Prokofiev’s Concerto No. 3

It’s hard for me to set this journey to music. Usually, movement evokes an immediate sound in my mind, yet after days in this country, I still can’t hear it clearly. At first I gravitate toward the pentatonic scale, but it sounds clichéd—this country is not the East of my subconscious. From the airplane I glimpse hundreds of kilometers of inhospitable land; I’ve never seen such vast expanses without humans. I spent so many nights of my childhood awake playing Age of Empires, choosing the Mongols over and over again to build my empire. I could never have predicted that I would one day be walking this path, stirring, body and flesh in one of the last virgin steppe ecosystems of this planet.

Capital Ulaanbaatar is a dreadful city marked by a deep disconnection between the urban and its natural context. At least this is my first impression, it seems a result of rushed development without any kind of regulation. It reminds me of Nairobi, Maputo, or Poblacion in Manila, places like labyrinths of incomprehensible logic. On the outskirts, there are remnants of Soviet influence in dilapidated block housing. These buildings starkly contrast with the glass and metal towers that flood the center like an infection. The traffic is considered by many to be the worst in the world, and maybe rightly so: it took me four and a half hours to cover the 40 km from the airport to the city center.

I arrive with the days of Naadam, a surreal journey into ancient Mongol culture. The entire country halts for these games, which begin with the procession of nine white horsehair banners from the Parliament Palace to the stadium for the opening ceremony, a display of riders, dancers, archers, and other bearers of their most ancestral traditions. We are not participants; we are spectators. It’s clear it belongs to the locals and only the locals can be part of it, but we can watch and it’s fascinating. I stand in the stadium amazed yet I don't feel like an intruder. The colors are explosive. The music is solemn, almost military, defined by brass winds and their two-stringed horsehead fiddles. The sound moves me, but I cannot claim it, there is a sharp sense of privilege around it. This is how their fantasy sounds, though it’s not how I hear it.

I leave behind the city’s intense rumble in search of the land’s heart. Our driver, Tögöldör (Төгөлдөр), sings in Mongolian to stay awake on the boundless roads; songs about their lands and its lakes, which are as scarce as water in general in this continental country surrounded by mountains that block moist clouds. I have read so much about this place that I feel a film unfolding before my eyes as I move forward into the vastness of the steppe.

The roads are barely marked, splitting into dozens of paths across the grasslands stretching infinitely, unbroken by trees. Like the garden of forking paths, I joke. The landscape is both soothing and desolate, and I think of some Ravel. A piano sonatina slowly arises. I plug in my headphones and feel it sliding across this abyssal, eternal landscape. No—Ravel is too far away.

With the Mongols, I share a timeless fascination with Genghis Khan. He is everywhere; it makes sense. He was the man who united the Mongol tribes and built the greatest, most powerful empire the Earth has known. I always picture this man alongside horses running wild across the prairies, I didn’t know why until now. This sacred animal is central to nomadic life, living in perfect harmony with the Mongols, who decorate their saddles with symbols like the swastika, lotus flowers, or dharma wheels to protect and bring good fortune. The landscape bestows upon me herds of horses running down the mountains through green fields and across rivers, they evoke so many movie scenes of my childhood, I lose all sense of where I am.

We eat yak, goat and lamb meat constantly, every day, with cheeses of complex flavors and scarce vegetables. At night we drink vodka, in the morning fermented mare’s milk, and tea throughout the day. We offer a bit of each to the four winds in gratitude. Mongolia has been a Buddhist nation for over five hundred years, despite the horrific massacre of monks carried out by Stalin in the 1930s. I visit temples deep in the mountains in my search for a theme but I hear only the wind—meditation is the sound of nothingness.

The countryside dwellings are simple yurts with no windows, carpeted and with walls decorated with saddlebags and sometimes an image or a painting. An opening at the top lets in the light and releases the smoke produced by a central stove. The space is arranged in a circle: the women’s side is to the right of the door, for cooking and chores; the men’s, for rest, to the left. Women work inside, men outside. I visit a couple and their four children. He looks about 65 but is barely 40, his skin toughened by sun and wind, a common sight in a country where life expectancy hovers around 60 due to a monotonous, meat- and fat-heavy diet. The shy girls smile and offer me a small fried pastry and pungent mare’s milk. I accept, though I’d rather not; in Mongolia it’s deeply rude to refuse an offer. For all its novelty, life arranges itself much as it does for us: beds to sleep in, meals with family, dishes to wash, and songs to entertain.

One day, on a long journey, I encounter a beautiful young Mongolian near a sacred stone. We gaze at each other for a long time, he shows a gritty innocence. I tend to look away out of shame, he nevertheless holds the gaze, unfazed, with a slight smile. I approach and ask his name in Mongolian—one of the few phrases I’ve learned. I can’t repeat what he says but his voice is so soft, his presence so deep. Before I leave, I take him a photo and show it to him—there’s a sparkle in his eyes from our encounter. We share a silence, and I think to myself that we are not so different after all.

I arrive at the Gobi Desert after a ten-hour journey where the green rolling steppe gives way to a dry, rocky plain, streaked with reddish mountain ranges. It reminds me of La Rioja in Argentina—a plateau overlooking an infinite flatland, with no yurts in sight. Again, the vertigo of the incognoscible. Sometimes I think God used copy and paste when creating the world, always finding familiar places in exotic lands. Here, a hundred years ago, the first dinosaur egg was discovered, during an expedition led by American explorer Roy Chapman Andrews—the inspiration for Indiana Jones. I think, amusingly, of John Williams. But his music feels like a comedy and doesn’t fit. I’ll keep searching.

I realize how limited my knowledge of Eastern music is. Beyond some pentatonic motifs, I ignore the depth of these local sounds. I always joke that I know about everything, but it’s not true. I’m just too curious. I collect facts, I can talk about anything—but though real knowledge is something else, only a few ever notice. In any case, I do believe that knowledge is acquired in a time shaped by the chance encounters of books and travels. The only rhythm coursing through me now is the fatal rattling of the Russian truck making its way through the sea of rocks and sand. My spine is begging for rest. This country is a journey of becoming, more than a spectacle—reflections from other worlds in order to return to your inner self, as always. I’m becoming more aware of that.

I’ve been riding in this Russian truck for days and suddenly it strikes me. Russia is just around the corner. My mind drifts back to the desert, to the image of the dry sea receding as the Bombardier lifts me into the air on my flight back to the capital. I think of the camels’ gait. I don’t know why, but I begin to hear a distant sound, one of my favorite piano concerti. It feels like this concerto was written for this land, it carries the complexity and grandeur of the landscapes that surround me. My favorite composer, Prokofiev. He is not far. Not even Borodin. Just the magnificent Prokofiev.

I return to Ulaanbaatar hoping to rest. The opposite happens. I find an urban rhythm I particularly enjoy. The contrast with the desert is fascinating. There’s humidity in the air, the city looks particularly beautiful—I don’t understand what has changed. Maybe it’s just that I know these streets now, or perhaps I am thrilled by new connections. I have no obligations. I walk aimlessly while hundreds of little motorbikes swerve dangerously around me. I connect with locals using the phrases I’ve learned, I feel like Alice with the mad hatter, negotiating jokes while I take the streets, everyone smiles at me. I run back to the hotel, soaking wet under heavy rain, while I listen to Concerto No. 3—the sound of Mongolia, my sound of Mongolia—Martha Argerich’s fingers tracing the stone cliffs that embraced me days ago. I don’t know why, this time I don’t want to leave, my body asks me to stay, I don’t want this feeling to end. How can I keep it, I wonder, as I settle into a windowless seat 18A on flight CA724 out of the country. One day, I’ll return. Until then, I’ll have Martha’s Prokofiev to come back whenever I need.

Give it some time to contemplate

Time will never be enough.

A not-so-pleasant start, but also the premise that leads me to write after so long. I resigned myself to the fact that time will never be enough again. Never. I can't get rid of that feeling... there will never be enough time to do it all! To experience it all. Or to see it all, since during the last few years doing things has become actually seeing things.

But what is actually seeing it all? Every corner? From every angle? Every possible point of view at every second of the day? Even if I were immortal, there wouldn't be enough time to conceptually see it all. And, if possible, how would it actually be? I can't help thinking about The Aleph, that amazing point in the universe described by Borges, a point that contains all other points, a point where you can see everything in the universe from every angle simultaneously, without distortion, overlapping, or confusion. Seeing it all would be, without a doubt, devastatingly overwhelming.

I can see today a disproportion between what is exhibited and the time that is available for contemplating it. Any city can be a good place to experience that feeling, but you can also think about any museum, or take just a single painting. This disproportion —which characterizes most of the contemporary exhibitions— has been overly intensified by social networks, where the availability of information and pictures have become virtually infinite. The quickness of the Calvino's Memos for the Next Millennium has been utterly misunderstood (looks like we have speed but we have no actual motion).

Some short stories by Felisberto Hernández were already at the beginning of the last century starting to focus on the changes of the rising consumer society, particularly on a sensory and perceptual level. In 1887, Nietzche had already spoken about an abundance of impressions in the material conditions of the cosmopolitan urban modernity. An overabundance that, like in Felisberto's stories, seemed to be not only difficult, but rather impossible to digest. The result of this distressing hyper stimulation is that: "one instinctively resists taking in anything, taking anything deeply, to "digest" anything". Contemplation turns into 'mere impressions'.

Why can't we slow down the speed and think of those situations that force us to gaze at one thing, just due to the impossibility of of moving towards volatile vertigo? I came across this thought on my fourteen-hour plane journey from Frankfurt to Buenos Aires last night, when I found myself staring in rapture at the dilatory passage of the sky under my feet through the window of the aircraft, while flying over the Sahara Dessert. The remaining flight hours created that "no vertigo" situation. Maybe the loss of one's own time control? —this does not happen to me on the bus because I can drop off at any time, or check my social media accounts—. An aesthetic experience moment, a larghissimo time, as opposed to the prestissimo that Nietzche mentioned in The Will to Power. A temporary dilation that revealed not the thing itself, but the moment in which the thing was happening, and therefore the subjective sensorial experience of that same thing. The founding principle of the spectacular (the assumption that something must happen before our eyes) got exterminated in that very moment: fabulous.

Intellectual elites, however, are rewarding the time of contemplation. For example, I think about Cuaron's latest film, Roma. A film in which the time of contemplation plays a major role, a film which has won many prizes including the Golden Globes, BAFTAs and Oscars, and has several nominations for further recognitions. There is, again, a bourgeois split between cultured time and street time. The cultured time can be bought inside a movie theater with Campari orange.

And what is it about photography, which helps us multiply the joyful experiences in our memory? Is digital photography nowadays an unfortunate attempt to extend the time contemplating about a thing? A faint awareness of our lack of time, or at least, a weak certainty that contemplation may extend over time, even if the thing is gone. Photography has always been a reminder of the transitory nature of time, a record of unrepeatable moments that allows us to thieve that thing that will no longer be there, never again, a representation of an absence, of a pycnolesia.

But when I meditate about the reason why I take pictures with my phone, I can't help thinking of two scenarios: on one hand, I take pictures in order to represent something that turns into a past in the very moment of the capture —basically, a memory—. On the other hand (and this freaks me out), I am starting to feel that I take pictures just to give entity to the moment, a present being that is constructed as a digital present... as if I didn't take the picture, the moment simply wouldn't exist. The time is built by the picture, the reality criteria now lies on the digital picture... has social media shaped my mind so much?


And I also think that this reflection could actually be just a bit of nonconformism... just the necessary amount to be inspiring enough in a consumer world, the necessary amount just to produce a feeling of freedom, an illusive capability of being oneself. I wonder now if this whole contemplating time thing is just another form of late capitalism. The worst part is that I don't think I have the time to elucidate it.

Paint over your used canvas

If it is by nature, because of divine purposes or just another unwished consequence of capitalism, I actually don't know, but we humans are accumulators par excellence. We are surrounded by the culture of 'retain'. Digitally programmed to save it all. Even understanding the pointlessness of preserving a whole arsenal of useless things, we tend to think we might need some of it later on, and we keep them all. There is something awfully unhealthy in the fact that we need to retain everything we touch. As if having filled drawers and overflowing files could, ultimately, save us.

OK.

'Ephemeron, from the Greek, means something that last no more than a day (epi: on, for, hemera: day)'.

I've been lately taking special notice of a whole unpriced concept of art: the ephemeral art. Snow, ice and sand sculptures, body art, fireworks, gardening, magic fountains, graffiti, are all examples of artistic expressions that are not meant to last. Not that it is a groundbreaking brand new thing we have never heard of before, just think yourself as a child. I was used to build sand forts, and I should admit I still enjoy spending hours of patience and endurance to create useless sand barriers which will vainly fight against the fierce waves. Tons of hours spent that go down the drain. So what?

There is an explicit call to the idea of the transitory impermanence of life, something that as a rule, we humans avoid dealing with. It is to be found a strong relationship between the human being and the passage of time in the fleeting integrity of the structural components of those works of art. This is it, and it is now: later, probably it won't be anymore, and that's the whole point.

Figuring up our life stages as paintworks: we need to start painting over our used canvas! There is an urgent appeal to jettison the cursed habit of saving them all. It sounds so tough, after so much effort, thinking of letting our work go. And yes, I know, it has never been easy to experience, deeply, the devastating dispensability of being. But actually there is no need to throw them away. We just have to start over again, reuse them, paint over them.

Every brushstroke incorporates all the ones I made before. I mean: everything that I was and could not be brought me to this present place. The actual painting takes in everything that makes me be what I am. The actual painting includes somehow all the previous ones. It applies to relations, studies, decisions, failures: how many times we have changed course does not matter but for the purposes of what we are in the exact moment of now. Working on an only canvas allows us to step back and ask ourselves why. It helps us focus, clear out. Staying away from the damn habit of trying to understand it all. It helps especially to let go.

Social media as Snapchat or the recent update of Instagram moves in that direction, offering the chance to create a self-destroying message, placing first its content over its relevance in time. It makes me kind of comfortable and confident about the way the world is moving on now. It's time to stop feeding our fragile memories with poisonous chat histories and souvenirs' trunks, epic collections, which ironically stagnates us in a nostalgic whirlwind, no exit, no forward. Memories are an inevitable part of our lives, they bring almost bodily sensations (sometimes with uncanny acuteness) but come on, nothing can substitute a real experience, at no time. It avails me nothing to remember if I can't feel your skin in the end. Therefore no more brand new canvasses to buy, just the old and used ones to bring back. Provided, of course, we never run out of color and paint supplies.

The two brains

There are two brains.

There is one that we well know, inside the head, it thinks and reasons, analyzes, develops. It also imagines, magnifies, ennobles. Exposes. Spins, complicates, clarifies. Tells. All that, the brain in our head can do, and more.
However there is another brain we might miss. It is located in the chest. With another type of neurons. It feels. Some people call it heart.

There is something about the way our brain works that freaks me out. Sometimes it's just too hard to understand. The more I think about something, the further the matter darkens, the quicker the clarity vanishes, the more confused I feel. There are times in our lives, times of mental chaos. In those moments, urgent things normally impose over important ones. The threshold of endless arguments. We mistake a part for the whole. There is a beautiful saying in spanish that prays: don't let the tree prevents you from seeing the forest. Too many 'musts'. Too many contradictions. How to find peace in the midst of so much mess: the point.

When chaos reigns, it's time to pay attention to the other brain. The one located in the chest. It cannot think, analyze or explain. It can just say no or yes. But it should be enough, right? Listen to the second brain.

On transcending polarity

It is inevitable to polarize. From time immemorial, we have had the need to polarize and construct dualistic views of the world, perhaps as a human response in seeking to understand this complex environment in which we are placed. Just think about creation myths and religious stories—to quote an ancient example, but there are plenty—: they already showed these pairs of opposition: creator and created, light and shadow, day and night, sin and salvation. We still talk in terms of binarity as we continue to oppose objects and concepts to understand them: the sun and the moon, the city and the countryside, the left and the right. Even digital technologies are entirely based on two terms: ones and zeros. Over an above, human Modernity has done nothing but enhance this particular conception, mixing it with the idealization of order and progress and a cultural system that supports —and guarantees— this division.

Whether this binarization is fundamentally a structural issue of the world itself or whether it is a developed behavior of the human psyche is irrelevant to me. There is something clear: uncertainty generates anxiety, it is distressing, anguishing. Standing in front of the abstract, of the obtuse, of the vast, the inability to classify, it makes us blind, crazy, it stagnates us. We are not trained to enjoy this particular struggle between opposing forces. We humans have known, since archaic times, how to take advantage of the reduction of events' complexity to just a pair of alternatives and have turned it into a survival mechanism, which is particularly awesome. However, it looks like we are getting too accustomed to this simplification.

Grays —as the midpoints between black and white— mean complexity, the indeterminate, the incompleteness. Also, for the western culture that shapes us, grays translate directly into anguish due to the impossibility to choose between two differentiated elements, in this case black and white. The modern apparatus keep on making us think in terms of binarity. This symmetry has become even a quantum principle that now also runs our physics; just think about the latest scientific discoveries on matter and antimatter. A re-interpretation of Dante’s work The Divine Comedy actually mentions that "the darkest places in hell are reserved for those who are neutral in times of moral crisis". Why all this propaganda against the slightest idea of complexity?

Although duality works effectively when it comes to solving rational issues, it presents serious problems with regard to irrational affairs, often deeper and more relevant to our existence. The lack of polarity hence requires a higher critical analysis of what we know, see and experience, which does not sound particularly appealing to the world power system. Binarization continues to exert an obsolete hold on us if it stops us from looking beyond this duality of black and white, or good and bad. That's why it urges the need to transcend polarity.

There are probably other ways but this is what has worked for me so far —and I am sorry I always talk about my life, but the fact is I haven't lived another one—. If we assume that our understanding of the world depends on its deconstruction in pairs of opposition, then it is logical to choose one of two alternatives. Save that in order to transcend this polarity, I deeply believe it's necessary to explore both alternatives, and furthermore, carry to the extreme of them. There is somewhat controversial with the extremes and also a lot of modern propaganda against its implications. But I personally think that going to the extreme of possibilities is actually the best way to perceive the whole. It demands a high degree of commitment, a release of the organicity, an opening to the risk of exposing oneself to the self-awareness of being. The journey may become even magic when we find the opposites in total syncretism —the order in disorder, for example— and the whole conception of dualism starts to weaken: the two mutually exclusive alternatives show up together?

Openness to radical change is not seen as an alternative anymore, but as a consequence in the search of transcending polarity. Of course it's clear we have to think about what we're willing to lose, to let go, but not necessarily overthink. After all, there is no thing such as pure state of the subject, moreover, if something is actually true, it is the capacity of the subject to be affected by everything. We are so social, so created by the coercive apparatus, so assembled, that we find it almost impossible to think about a range of possibilities that breaks away from what we and society expect from us. These limits are closely related to the polarization model that runs our critical thinking.

If we are able to spot this slight deviation, this shift, this variation in our natural organicity, it probably means that somewhere there is a positive perturbation: time to take advantage of it, time to start exploring. Polarization is essential, as long as we do not just simply choose one of the poles but transcend carrying both alternatives to the extreme in order to lead the emergence of a new wider and more complex understanding of the whole thing in question, and also of oneself, of course. The era of continuous change is paying off, especially in this quest to transcend polarity. But the willingness to make it happen is still the determining factor.

When the road disappears

More than two years have passed since my last entry. I have recently found myself reading some of my old posts, and for some moments I couldn't help feeling that they were written by other person than me. Time is nothing but distance, and now, when I read those entries, it becomes clear to me how far we can travel from our old selves as time goes by, even being in the same physical location.

Fortunately I started this year travelling, and after being devoured by the most imposing corners of Patagonia, I wanted to share what I felt down there, which I believe is in tune with the beginning of a very special year for most of the people that surround me.

I would dare to say that more than light beings, humans are movement beings (which would be pretty much the same anyway). There is something about the way we move and what leads us to move, and I'd like to call it here 'the road', just to be clear in the metaphor. So, there is this certainty under our feet, the road we follow, with different intensities, more or less passionate, more or less confident, but still there: the road. If there is a road, therefore there is a goal, there is a destination, projects, ambitions, just movement, and when we move, we often have a kind of marked road underneath us. But recently, I have come across the thought that sometimes we put so much attention on the road, that it makes us unable to see where are we actually heading to.

But beyond that, the big thing comes when the road forks, or even worse, when it disappears. How difficult it is to keep us as movement beings when we can't descry the road! On a small scale, I felt this uncertainty when the trail vanished in the middle of a forest day-trekking in Fireland. There we were, standing still at the end of the road, at the beginning of the real world, looking forward but unable to move even a toe. Of course it took us not long to start walking our own path, avoiding swamps and passing through tunnels of fallen trees. What happened: we had to switch our source of confidence, what takes time, of course, and the bigger the scale, the more time it takes to unblock the fears and get back into the ring.

On the flight back home, it was extremely cloudy and I thought of the pilots, trying to catch sight of any hint that could locate them in the space. The cabin has to turn very very mystical when the plane is shrouded in clouds so thick that impede any vision. Even for them, the road disappears. The have to switch their sources of confidence: they can't trust their senses any longer, since those become fuzzy and confusing, but still they have other ways to feel that they are on the right path. There is no fear.

When the road disappears, one feels itself small. Roads make world look smaller, certainty makes world look smaller. As soon as the path vanishes and darkens, we feel tiny, minimum, fragile, but part of a huge expanding universe though. It puts us in a place where our boundaries, in communion with the outside, are effaced, and we cannot do anything but cultivate ourselves and grow. And once we dispel all our fears, we are able to move again. That absence of fear is the closest thing to God I've experienced in recent years, and in the Andes, in the middle of nowhere, it becomes stronger and emotional.

This year comes to me as a year of uncertainty. A kind of tabula rasa, empty. Far away from all the previous ones. I feel that what is certain today can change dramatically tomorrow. Everything changes, but actually. The evidence is everywhere. I've visited yesterday La Menesunda, a 1965 mythic work of the Argentine art’s history by Marta Minujin, which has been recreated at the Museum of Modern Art in Buenos Aires. Anyone in Buenos Aires should visit it, mainly to feel this discomfort of the sudden, of the surprise, but also to realize how comfortable it becomes the uncertainty, so postmodern, so hedonist. This year appears as a year of uncertainty: which means, I need to switch my source of confidence. That's why, when I look back in time, those old entries on my blog strikes me as being remote and distant. There was a road, and now it's disappeared. 

Start over again

I have forgotten where or when it was that I first met the structure of a wave. Probably I did not think about the similarity between them and life. But now, this is interesting.

Waves are everywhere. They are oscillations that travels through space and matter transferring energy. Structurally, waves are formed by cycles (red arrow), which are determined by crests and throughs. These terms mean the maximum and minimum value within a cycle, respectively. Waves are everywhere, from the sounds we hear, the communications, medicine, to the colors we see. However, no matter where they are, they always display the same structure: energy that moves infinitely up and down (between crests and throughs), over and over again. And here we have another great metaphor about life: it is all about cycles. Up and down. Like waves, after each through (which could mean bad times), everything starts again. The wave starts to return to its original shape, to reach the top and go down again and so... But what really matters: you can't corrupt the structure! After a crest, it will come a through. After a through, it will come a crest, again. No choice. It is a rule of nature.

I believe it was Maquiavelli who wrote once that humans live in cycles: when they reach the highest point of civilization and progress, and in the event of it not being possible to improve more, the only possible thing to happen is to get worse. And then again, when societies reach their most miserable point of their existence, it not being the option to get worse, they have to improve. It is a must. It can't be helped. Cycles. Like waves. Crests and throughs. I was thinking about it because my days here have been plenty of ups and downs, and I have been trying to figure out the meaning of each 'descent'. And now, I think it is simply about letting go.

Every through brings something we must let go in order to get back up. And it's not the easiest thing to do, especially since we are a species that tend to create bonds with everything. We love people, things and actions and we want them all with us forever. But the secret (and hard thing) is just to let them go, and this relates to my previous post about time. We have to get used to the fact that we can't control it! Your hair will fall, the ice cream will melt, you will leave your place, people will die, your beloved will find a new love, right-wing extremists will still gain support, the winter will come and so... like it or not. Get over it. Like the structure of waves, non-breakable, uncontrollable... every through will bring something with that you will have to let it go in order to continue with your life, in order to reach the next crest. Like cards in a game of chance, you won't be able to change them but to use them in your benefit.

You could certainly ask yourself what sense makes to live if you know that everything is finite and that after every crest you are going to face a through. Well, at least for me, it is all about how we understand time. If the climb was worth it, you enjoyed the crest... who cares about the through? I mean, you need some bad times to notice the good ones! We are here to learn, and every cycle translates into learning. If this were your last cycle, would you dare stop doing something to save it for the next one?



In this exact moment, 4.31 A.M, I look through the window to see the moon of New York City pale and veiled with filmy clouds. For some reason, I can't sleep. There was a premonitory change in the atmosphere today, a quickening of tempo, an increased volume of sound. I am probably about to face a 'through'. Maybe it is time to let something go. In the phantom gleam of dawn I can see a new ascent. And there I go.