One day not long after I moved to New York, I looked up from my writing desk at Studio Space in Waterfront Brooklyn and disappeared into the sea of fog that was sweeping Manhattan.
A vivid vision of a dream, piercing the reality of being late.
An augury, a living metaphor, a revelation: Every Transition is a bridge from the solid ground of known life into the misty fog of its total opacity. We can see one step ahead, but this bridge reveals itself firmly under our feet as we continue to walk, progressing to the “next thing,” separating the fog from touching the future.
For all its mysterious qualities, fog has an important role in the metabolism of this rocky world. It is a dialogue between the land, its bodies of water, and the atmosphere. Fog forms when the atmosphere cools enough for water droplets to form in the low-level cloud. In fact, it is a type of cloud that has arrived – endangered species: across Europe, the fog has decreased by 50% since 1970 and the coastal fong worldwide is disappearing due to climate change, the state of the natural environment and leaving an area highly vulnerable to fires.
While it's here, let it come – sudden as an owl or slow as day, long will it be for you to feel the breath of the earth on your cheek cheek on your cheek cheek on your cheek cheek on your cheek cheek on your cheek cheek on your cheek cheek on your cheek cheek on your cheek cheek on your cheek cheek on your cheek cheek on your cheek cheek on your cheek cheek on your cheek cheek cheek cheek cheek cheek cheek cheek cheek cheek cheek cheek cheek cheek cheek cheek cheek cheek cheek cheek cheek cheek cheek cheek cheek cheek cheek cheek cheek cheek cheek cheek cheek cheek cheek cheek cheek cheek cheek cheek cheek cheek cheek cheek cheek cheek cheek cheek cheek cheek cheek cheek cheek cheek cheek cheek cheek cheek cheek cheek cheek cheek cheek cheek cheek cheek cheek in your cheek in your cheek in your cheek in your cheek in your cheek.
between To drive away the fog (public library), writer and photographer Laura Pashby wrote a book of crazy love “claim and cool fog,” in the “irresistible romance of entering the cloud,” in what it teaches us about the visible and the invisible.
A cake-like childhood – spent under sunless skies killed by the sun with fog, a ruined castle as his playground, a desolate moor as his lake – shaped how he saw the world, shaped how he saw the whole world. You write:
The fog is my muse: where I am, I see things differently. The known and the unknown, the ordinary and the extraordinary. Fog, burst the edges of everything – changing the landscape, changing color and soft light … Focugy Morning feels that Mystery and magic, like salt water, gives a shock, release.
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While the fog can seem to hang heavy, it is often important, not static: to sink, to remove, to rise, to flow. The fog is unexpected – it's not as soft and benign as cotton wool. In his 1919 essay “Das Unlomliche,” Freud described the unconscious as something terrifying and terrifying: the accusation of the ordinary. This is the effect that fog can have when there is a terrain: When it descends quickly, it obscures the ground, obscures the vision, changes the normal environment and transforms it. It was a sensory experience I was forced to experience first hand: Loss of vision as our vision was reduced by the Court; the feeling of a veil being drawn.
In a beautiful walphotogazingchable setting, Pashby Paints a delightful picture with words:
The mist flows from the valley and slowly, slowly fills the city. From my little window of the Loft-Roont-Room, I watch it edge by the side of the road like a visible clown, entering the air behind the house, until it arrives dry. The big tree in the garden ends up disappearing completely, leaving only the echo calls of their building jackdaws – ghostly in the viscous air. The world above in my open white window. I want the mist to drift in, the cool curls of the ndrils around me and take me away like smoke.
What emerges is the idea that fog is not just something but an invitation – to draw a veil over the world and see it more, to see it as meaningful and well-rounded. (Whatever you focus on will focus on the mirror.) Pashby writes:
Paying more attention to the fog … I tried (imperfectly, honestly) to testify, looking for beauty in the world of darkness, in abundance where there was none.
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If we listen, fog has a lot to teach us: about the landscape, the weather and who we are. We are all made of water – we pass through ourselves and move forward into the river, into the river, into the sea, into the fog. Each of us is fluid, hypnotic, magical, and we are no different from nature, ourselves there are the environment. We are fog.
Two To drive away the fog I have the singer, poet, and philosopher Etel Adnan and a beautiful book The sea and the fogthen revisit Cloud Wotianced Officed's delightful field guide to the Science and Wonder of Clouds.
