Breathe

A well-earned Friday has rolled around.  Earned, I think, because this has been a week of leaning into the needs of the day and swimming against the tide.  At times, it has felt like the quintessential example of elder talk to youth: walking 10 miles to school in deep snow, uphill, both ways.  It has also been a very productive week, so that is satisfactory.  It culminated last night (and, yes, I am drawing a arbitrary line across the days of the week at a point slightly short of the traditional finish line) in a rousing display of the sort of civility-less and abusive public bullying that seems to have become inseparable from public discourse in these fractious times. In the absence of facts, we create our own reality based on our emotional preferences and then passionately call it truth.  On my whiteboard is a quote from Cullen Hightower: "Saying what we think gives us a wider conversational range than saying what we know."  Much is said these days, alas.

The weather this morning was dark, foggy, with either latent or potential wetness (or maybe both).  It didn't actually rain on me on my drive, but the ground was wet and the clouds were someplace between laden and delivering.  The fog was quite thick in places, reducing visibility considerably.  There was also very little traffic, so I had most of the foggy back roads to myself.  Here and there an illuminated Halloween display (a car-sized inflatable pumpkin, inflatable death-size ghosts, lit window decorations, etc.) would loom out of the fog and dark, but mostly it was a wet shadow world with swirled snatches of trees, houses, shrubs, and sidewalks here and there.

If I were to put a playlist together specifically for a wet, dark, foggy morning drive, I doubt I could do any better than the iPod did this morning.  Somber but melodic, very atmospheric, predominantly instrumental, and a sting of tunes that transitioned one to another as if part of an intentionally produced theme album. In a random shuffle of thousands of tunes from a wide range of genres, this kind of capricious magic tickles me.  K. D. Lang's languid and soulful rendition of the song The Air That I Breathe wrapped up the set. Fitting, really.  This is (I hope!) one of those Fridays where I get a little space to breathe and catch up.

The full playlist:

• Patrick Cassidy: Do not break this day, my heart
• Mark Isham: In a Silent Way
• Jake Shimabukuro: Ave Maria
• K.D. Lang: The Air That I Breathe

Small technical note: I use the capitalization, as is, from each album, and different artists clearly have their own standards and preferences.