Josiah’s Johnson

I woke up, made some coffee, opened all the windows in our kitchen/living room that look out over Magnolia/Interbay/Puget Sound and put my Band of Horses/Andrew Bird/Beach House/Sufjan Stevens/Panda Bear/etc… mix on and worked for a little bit on schoolwork that is the final assignment of a long, arduous, but very exciting and productive quarter.

The city of Seattle is subsidizing the purchase of low-wattage bulbs as part of a green initiative (I love Seattle!), and we had all these blood-sucking 60W bulbs running in our house, so I figured I’d go pick up enough light bulbs from the hardware store to kick our high-energy wasting habits to the curb.  I’ve also been wanting to start hanging pictures and art and random creations of mine on the walls in my room for a long time, but didn’t have the hanging implements, so I decided to kill two birds with one stone.

I love walking in my neighborhood. There’s moss and trees losing their leaves all over the place. I passed this house that had a big tall brick wall that rose up for the street to the height that their 15 steps or so took you to their front porch. I loved the way the bricks were laid for the wall. They weren’t flat and even.  They were crooked, diagonal, with vines growing out of the holes, moss everywhere.

I walked there with my hoodie on and covering my ears to keep them warm, but on the way back, I forgot to put the hood back on, and felt this wonderful sensation when the cold bit, nipped, pricked, etc… all up on my ears’ business. It felt so fresh.

I sometimes get this feeling when the clouds get so ominous and the fog rolls over the valley below our house, and the rain drives people inside that this whole city is just a settlement of people, like norse seafaring villages of old or the small towns in the bitter fringes of Alaska that we glimpsed through the mist as we floated by on the cruise ship this past summer, who have done their best to gird their homes against the hostile and all-consuming power of nature.  Today I felt much different, and I love that I sway back and forth between these two sentiments: I felt just privileged to be here, to feel the biting cold, to see the long tunnels of vision created by overhanging trees that stretch down the block, to strive and succeed in making a life in this new city, to meet good people who are doing the same. It’s just so good and beautiful.

This song “Emily” by Joanna Newsom just played, and this line is exactly what I mean to say that I feel: “dumbstruck at the sweetness of being.”