Yes, this time of year does feel different this year. I love summer and am always sad to see summer end and autumn begin. Last fall I did a lot of hiking in NH with my friend and my dog, Teddy. We decided to tackle 4000 footers, an awesome undertaking, and hiked 4 of them. The picture above is from our 2nd 4000 footer, and really captures some of the beautiful fall scenery we saw. We had fun in spite of the really hard work, and felt proud of our accomplishment. There was a sense of freedom and adventure that we could take for granted. This year, I don't feel a sense of freedom and adventure. I feel much more apprehension and worry. I am worried about a second wave of the Corona virus hitting. I am worried about another quarantine. I wonder what it will be like facing all of this as winter approaches. At least when this all started, there was summer to look forward to. I worry about not being able to have social distance gatherings as it gets cold. I am also really worried about the upcoming election. I was horrified when our current president won 4 years ago, and can't imagine what 4 more years might look like. I am also worried at the distrust and confusion that has been created about the upcoming election and voting. There is so much confusion! I never look forward to the end of summer and this year, I am anticipating fall and winter with much more dread than usual. I certainly don't have the sense of fun and adventure that was so present last year.
September 3, 2020
One thing that brings me happiness is creating abstract artwork in old school Photoshop 5.5 using the Kai's Power Tools plug-in called Texture Explorer. Before the pandemic I was thinking of resurrecting my Titanium G4 Powerbook from 2001 and running some of the KPT visionary software that has since been abandoned. The entire process of getting the computer working in the first place made me pretty happy, and now I create a few of these cellular landscapes each day, listening to music and getting lost in the process. They each take about an hour because the CPU processing is limited to 68K and there's a lot of waiting, but it's worth it. I create them and they remind me of the way we have all changed in the past year, how we have become more aware of living life on a molecular level with differing influences as we change our behavior. I'm trying to make that awareness beautiful.
April 8, 2021