Walking Through Lothlórien

After putting in several hours yesterday, I took a stroll with my wife before starting a draft for a deadlined article that would keep me busy well into the night. It was a beautiful fall afternoon, cool, but with blue, cloud-laced skies and face-warming sun, and magnificent trees, many that still have not shed most of their multi-colored leaves.

On days like that, particularly with a lot of gold in the branches above, my imagination on such wanderings puts me in the realm imagined and described by Tolkien -- not the one populated with Peter Jackson's CGI-enhanced feminelf action warriors, but the one my mind's eye envisions from the author's printed words.

I wish I had more time to read (for pure pleasure). I wish I had more time to walk.

Some of the trees are starting to give up their leaves in greater numbers now.  That means hours of raking this weekend, a process I will be repeating over the next month. Perhaps it seems contradictory, but I look forward to it.  When I get into it, as with all repetitive physical efforts, ideas come, with untroubled thoughts that interest me, and throughout it all, my mind reaches a level of peace -- what I imagine a Zen state to be like. Yeah, it may seem a form of Condition White, but it's not like unfamiliar things are within sight or earshot, and any change in the surroundings would rouse me from my reveries.

Still, I'll bet Celeborn never had to rake leaves, and Galadriel never called him in to help unload the trunk after a trip to Sam's Club.

Break's over. Time to armor up and hunt down some marauding orcs.