On Halloween 2023, taking it to harvest time, Autumn, and the churn of seasons.

Anna Laetitia Barbauld (d 1825)

On Autumn, Barbauld being the female equivalent of a polymath of sorts, has a few words:

"Farewell the softer hours, Spring's opening blush
And Summer's deeper glow, the shepherd's pipe
Tuned to the murmurs of a weeping spring,
And song of birds, and gay enameled fields--
Farewll!  'Tis now the sickness of the year,
Not to be medicined by the skillful hand."

The impetus towards a change of temperature, or even a warm temperature as a "blush" brings us into a outward appearance context, and yet we can feel too the blood in our faces, making an inward context in terms of our internal feelings.

Indeed, in her time agriculture and commerce: things to be done by the people that made the world pump along.  A lot of manual labor.

Barbauld's own imput was along the lines of her role as a teacher and her side function as an activist, speaking and doing on things that niggled at her in the real world.  If only so many of us were demarcated so in our time, to recognize productive things, day-to-day things, the "core business" and then to give the extra time to the far future, as Bob Dylan says, "testing eternity", and how this feels like salvation he says--

--something of the long game and an inner peace with one's own precepts and doings, like the providential nod from the Lord from On High, but something too of inner peace.

Of "summer's deeper glow", we have not too much of that here in the Southeastern USA, to see the weather turn for two months TOO HOT and make everything wither and sag before the weather turns and the leaves re-color in a welcome respite.  Indeed, we become accustomed to sleeping with our socks off for so many weeks, and then the real world ticks us on the shoulder and reminds us that the state of nature, as Marcus Aurelius and the old philosopher's say, is constant states of change in matter.

And as Barbauld notes below, this endless churn of nature between states of change is a "tempest".

"...The naked trees
Admit the tempest; rent is Nature's robe;
Fast, fast, the blush of Summer fades away
From her wan cheek, and scarce a flower remains
To deck her bosom; Winter follows close,
pressing impatient on, and with rude breath
Fans her discolored tresses.  Yet not all
Of grace and beauty from the falling year
Is torn ungenial....."

The Imago Dei.

Ah, for a human being to "exceed the limitations of his prior programming..."

Such as "revenge is a dish best not served" or "not to render evil for evil", things that sound roundly far beyond our chief instincts, as it were.

The morning rainfall, whispering, and my unction, making plans if not outright in action, like a shark, when not pumping forward, then carving my future path with my mind.

God whispers to me, as I plan....

I am but a type and shadow of the great one, and not great myself; in Protestant theology, this makes our mistakes more obvious, the glaring difference between ourselves and the Perfect Deity.  We succeed only because we are granted grace and mercy by Him.

In His image, such as it is.

A flawed facsimile of perfection.

legs pumping away on a bicycle named Revenge.

It's like riding a bicycle, men with machine guns who lived always in the shadow of an age-old conflict, their entire lives, a swirly-gig cyclical of various revenges, such that "you made me", "no, it was you that did it first".

I saw Erin, and I know, some are pure perfectionists, while others only casual viewers, and the producers are roaming around, hoping to capture the narrative, and it's sauce for the goose, as it were, to the casual viewer, who might imagine an awful collision of important things, but she's there, and we're sitting like baby birds, "peep, peep", hoping to catch what goose drippings aren't absorbed by her socks.

A cyclical deserves an encyclical, I say, and the week, caffeine-addicted and deprived a while, water and fruit juice, mostly coming in.  I found an Italian coffee in a small metal tin and it sufficed great guns for the better part of an afternoon: staving-off headache and lethargy, and I could muster my unction then.

"Mis padres compran...."

In a dull haze mentally, I talked of virtue, ethics, and had a small audience for that publicly, however weird it may seem, the very novelty of the thing.  Then I talked Buddhism to strangers, as a philosophy, mind you, and not a religion, meanwhile in my Bible pretty well through the older and newer parts of the book: mixed-readings, and even into a so called "modern translation" of the Quran, stopped dead in my tracks by back-handed, disguised threats.

Then there was some Tao.

Near the coastline, there was a health thing, which to date has plumped right back, like the proverbial fork testing the roasted wiener, in which the flesh comes back to form, like even the dog returns to his vomit, and the natural abhorration of a vacuum, and various people, Lawrence, even, coming to the fore and doing this thing, participating in the peculiar merciless striving that we call "life".

I was looking at some advertised features for Google Workplace, and thinking they were trying to compete with some other software packages, and doing well, if only they advertised wider.

And I took in sunshine before the clouds came, lizards and kittens my company, and I counted the tines on an old yard-rake, confirming the advertised total, and subtracting the one missing one, the same way I counted the keys on my music keyboard, like a partial OCD, an eclipse of some modern tendency to apathy, in which we are bid to pick apart our own place on the cycle.

By the same notion, it was a rebuke and warning in the scriptures, that people who devour one another, eventually find it becomes their own turn, as such the great wheel comes right on around.

And why, this new thinking, that if we just stopped the killing: well, it wouldn't prevent death, but it would surely curtail murder, and religious killings and territorial disputes.  Those people have come of age in the shadow of great contention, and they had thus along the way prepared themselves to take part.

Productivity: Morning productivity supercharge and Block Scheduling.

I followed some advice from several sources, regarding taking up study in the morning time.

One person recommended getting up early and reading, which was a bridge too far for me, and early in the morning.  I tend my readings after mid-day.

Another person suggested audiobooks, which sounds easy enough, but expensive.

I modified the advice to include podcasts, and I have my devotionals and so forth among the audio tracks, and some other: productivity, side hustles, small business, finance, philosophy.

Its made quite a difference so far in my work stack, leading me to more clarity throughout the day.

Also: Google Podcasts is going kaput early 2024.  They promise a migration tool for users, however.

Another technique I've taken up is block scheduling.

Say a two hour block devoted to one subject.

Or a three hour block devoted to one subject, and not just steady work, but also brainstorming and so forth: whatever is needed.