June 6th, 2024

Okay, so I guess it’s been a long time since the last post.

I was shocked to see I’d actually gone 18 months without writing a post for Life In Engleville. I wrote four paragraphs about all the changes I’ve been through the last couple of years. Suffice to say I’ve driven over a number of Life’s speed bumps, but nothing we don’t see every day. Others have seen worse.

Rambling on about my activities seemed like a monotonous account, and nothing that would inspire a reader to keep reading.

I’m not the only person to observe a considerable change in the world at large following the global pandemic. Maybe that’s just the milepost, and some of these things would have occurred regardless. Folks seem to feel “fundamental shifts” in their lives, or more so perhaps the lives of others that occupy their worlds, the interface with “the world” in general.

I’ve become keenly aware how boring it can be for everyone in the world to be writing or talking about everything under the sun on social media. Andy Warhol was right. Everyone wants their fifteen seconds of fame. YouTube and Tik-Tok are all the rage.

It didn’t feel that way when I started blogging fifteen years ago. Before “The Change”.

I’m not sure blogging isn’t just about dead, but I know I’m not.

August 6th, 2024

The siren calls to me and I must write. As always, the wheels spun searching for the topic, the inspiration. The thought.

I haven’t spent 30 years beside a stream or seven years in Tibet, but I’ve been on my own sort of pilgrimage, I guess. Not exactly a Vision Quest, but two years akin to wandering in the desert only without the desert.

The premise was all around me. I walked through it and watched it out the window and talked to it where fitting. Thirty-nine years here in the Ark of Engleville, in this humble glen, and suddenly its sameness spoke to me. No, she grabbed me firmly but gently by the shoulders and shook me a little. “Hey, hey! Come to!”

My compositional kernels were a maelstrom of thoughts surrounding changes. Current event changes and changes in the world over the last twenty years and changes of the world over my lifetime. Personal changes, chapters of sixty-five years-to-date, from the innocence of childhood to the glory years and and gory years, and finally a return to a second childhood.

Then I opened my blog, and discovered this forgotten draft “The More Things Change…”

My hiatus from the blog world coincides with a hiatus from the world at large, a two-year binge intoxicated by total liberty; no job, no wife, no mortgage…no plans. I decided there was to be no plan. Wake every day and make it up as I go, just the way I would have on summer vacations when I was 10 years old. I played like an emerging teen with my lifelong friends music and photography. I methodically insulated and isolated myself from the “outside world”, the news, the television, the internet, the influencers.

I had always found the world to be generally intrusive, and in the past fifty years it has been marketed to us at an ever-increasing and overwhelming rate. People have become zombies, staring at their cell phones, filming everything and seeing nothing, subscribing to everything that comes down the pike, swallowing anything they are told. Jumping on virtual bandwagons to avoid missing out. Sorry if you must live or work out there in it, but it’s really a bit of a nightmare. On steroids. With a soundtrack.

I looked out the window at the bird feeder. The grass and birds have not changed in the least over the last thirty-nine years. In fact, they haven’t changed in the last thirty-nine thousand years. I went out to sit and watch most of the last one thousand sunsets, and though each one was unique, sunset has not changed much, either. The breeze that stirs the cottonwoods is the same breeze that blew threw my mother’s hair when she was just a tot. Clouds are still made the old-fashioned way, and still look the same as when my father eyed them from the helm of the Honey-Doll. In spite of modern science, rain is still wet, falls when and where it pleases, and makes the same pitter-patter sounds striking the waterproof leaves of the Touch-Me-Nots.

Oatmeal is still a good breakfast. Black coffee is as good as ever. My bed remains as soft as the stars of The Milky Way that splash across the summer sky.

My Moon rises and calls to me. A billion stars sing harmony. That’s all I need.

And the more things change, the more I cleave to those that remain the same.

Slainte,

Paz