The equinoctal winds seemed to start here early last week. At first, from the south, with the characteristic scent of industry (not the good kind) that seems to come with those winds. Which, based on my few weeks' worth of experience, also seem to be associated with cold fronts. Strong reversals, nights just a bit colder.
And the egg balancing. It doesn't work any better on the equinox as a matter of physics, but as a social norm, it expresses the day quite well. Beliefs aside, it's simply what we do.
I could stand to be back in the city, picking up a paperback in the east village, and taking it back to the apartment or to a coffeehouse, or even the small college towns in Minnesota or North Dakota where I decamped during the plague years, perhaps wandering through the 1950s-era library and then taking the dusty Heidegger or Nietzsche back the apartment. (The Minnesota rooms were actually great for this, since the local library could reach into the largest state university library research collections via interlibrary loan. Got thoroughly caught up on the modern Russian novels.) But it seems I'm travelling through the southern Balkans (I'm much more partial to the bits above the Danube, or even further still, above the mountains, tbh), so I must find my existence in the manner of the place, or at least in the understanding of it. I must live as one lives, among the local ways, because these ways actually exist. Grounding yourself in the present place and time in order to live -- an essential practice for those who go to sea in a sieve.
Equinoctal unrest. And in the far, or perhaps not so far, distance, approaching winter.
Manet nobiscum, domine, quoniam advesperacit.
