The Settling

The human brain is programmed in such a way that once it receives enough exposure to a new stimulus, the stimulus becomes filtered from consciousness by the reticular formation. For example, before calling it to attention, you perhaps did not perceive the way your clothes feel on your body or the buzz of an overhead light. Regardless of your present awareness, they are present stimuli. It's a pretty likeable feature we have. 

There are fewer novelties in my Maine life these days than there were at the beginning, or perhaps they are no longer as provocative to my reticular formation. I'll call this "the settling" and consider it the opposition of the person eager to live life paying attention. I don't think my life is any less extraordinary, but I'm not experiencing it with the same freshness of spirit as I was. Because of this ordinification (the process by which things become ordinary), I've not felt it pressed upon me to stop and write little essays about my life, hence the delay in updating ze blog.

I've been mulling over what to post as my comeback post for a few weeks now because I've done quite a bit since I last posted; to highlight just a few, I stargazed at meteor showers, built a macabre gingerbreadopolis, caroled on a trolley, went home to North Carolina, scared a bunch of ducks while playing in the snow, went to see the Portland Red Claws (an NBA D-League team providing players for the Boston Celtics)... all of these are great things, yes, but the underlying thought (and I suppose fear) has been that I have reached a point of comfort bordering complacency because I haven't seen  common spiritual threads woven through a series of ordinary events that make them richer than the sum of the parts. I believe this is because I'm beginning to filter out new stimuli. To find them now, I have to choose to pay attention, which is becoming difficult as life becomes fuller. I'm filtering out a lot these days.

So, bolstered by this saddening conviction, I will talk about a detail I love (I am a lover of details) that has not been victim to the RF.

I love Sundays. I go to church, chitchat for a bit afterward, grab a few clementines to take home (if they have them out), and walk outside to the smell of Barowsky's bakery, a large commercial bakery next door to the church that makes the air smell just like brown-n-serve dinner rolls that we used to have at Sunday Supper at my Grandma Odie's house every week when I was a little girl. To borrow phrasing from F. Scott Fitzgerald, I like the idea of olfactory (scent) linked memory so much, it's personal to me. Just the smell of something can take you back to a very specific and richly detailed moment in time, a small clip of life playing in loop.

There it is. Life paying attention, all thanks to brown-n-serve rolls and my olfactory bulb pulling me back into the present. You will not win this battle, RF!

Now some pictures of snow and ducks:

God bless Bean Boots.

The frozen Androscoggin River

This is real life.

Quakin around the river

I just walked by, I didn't mean for this to happen... I didn't make eye contact with them or anything.

Sorry, liddle guys. They were so mad and quacked at me.

Frozen river

Frozen river

I liked the look of kicking powdery snow off the pedestrian bridge that stretches between the Auburn and Lewiston banks of the Androscoggin River

My favorite... can you paint with all the colors of the wind?

The Auburn bridge

Bye!

JB