… And how odd, thinks she as she settles in to blog at the only wifi spot up in these here hills, that they held off on the country version of It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue until your blogeuse, her Baez baggage fully intact at her advanced age, wandered in.
This park, where rustic meets ruination (everything’s in a state of disrepair, with the burnt-out hulk of a row of cottages moving the eye from disrepair to disintegration), generates strange auras like this all the time – I mean the Baby Blue moment; but also many other cosmic convergences, spots of time when some hillbilly Proust rigs up tightly-packed deep-meaning tableaus just for UD.
Or is it simply a lot of age and experience in me, folded into many Augusts one after another at this strange place?
Doesn’t hurt that the big frame of reference every second, in this fern forest/huge open-sky park, is down-home cozy Mother Earth and, at the very same time, jest past the itty bitty atmosphere, the crushing unfathomable universe. A mix embodied the other night in a lecture (downstairs, in the Massanutten Room) given by a space expert who heehawed and guffawed through the tragic gigantism of a dying cosmos. It’s the same thing out on Big Meadows, where people gather very late to watch the stars begin to fall, and it’s a gentle folk ritual with fellowship and tiny peals of music. The massive Sturgeon moon is one hell of a harsh mistress, but we’re after the golden photographable version.
What else are we supposed to do? Even the Christianity inspired by the morbid world expresses itself, ’round these parts, in happy I’m Saved ditties (they dominate the truegrass programming). Looking around her at this social space, UD flashed, yesterday, onto an image of a young monk at Holy Cross Cistercian Abbey (it’s not too far from here), who suddenly, at Vespers (Les UDs were there to do a retreat) hurled himself flat to the floor in front of the crucifix! She was shocked! Just lay flat and unmoving, his white robes flowing around his body, for what seemed forever. Now you’re talkin’.