Halloween Reflections

"Reflet."

Reflect—the late October light, the panoply of clouds, the sobbing woman in the library, sorrowing among the unfelt and unfeeling books instead of being comforted by them. 

Reflect—

. Give back the world around you, what you have absorbed into your depths or caught only obliquely (glimpse or glimmer) on your silver surface ruffed by wind or wake.

. Consider, contemplate, muse on . . . and then give back those ponderings to those who might take them in turn, reflect again (and always differently, a reversed or distorted or imperfect image) the reflections.

Parallel tracks in rain-greened grasses catch my eye, the grass as new as in spring in this advancing fall.  The tracks made by a car or truck or tractor having driven through the orchard of old apricots with their gnarled trunks, their druid limbs.  I'm reflecting on their quiet journey—what they mean, those steady marks of passage, where they lead and what they make me feel.  Do they lead on, somewhere, or back?  Is it a path of hope, or just a set of ruts hard cast in mud?

I reflect on the day's inhabitants.  A woman all but paralyzed in a wheelchair, settling at the window with a book, her helper with another in the armchair behind her.  The children in their princess guises, their animal ears, the fearsome creatures they delight in becoming this day, each year again, taking the town in broad daylight.

My own costume is not disguise, but mirror.  Not putting on something I'm not, but reflecting what others are and do.

“I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking. Recording the man shaving at the window opposite and the woman in the kimono washing her hair. Some day, all this will have to be developed, carefully printed, fixed.”—Christopher Isherwood, Goodbye to Berlin

image:  Nadine Photography, Reflet