Breath of Light

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ovember 1. My birth month. I suppose that I should start celebrating now. That means I’m a Scorpio. You know how we can be. Vain. Well dressed. Likable. Able to strike at a moments notice. The list goes on forever.

In Chinese mythology I’m a snake person. What a combination.

These days I’ve tamed my evil ways. A little. But, every now and then…

It’s turned weird these days. You can’t say anything. You might get canceled. Cancel culture, indeed. Lack of courage culture seems to fit a little better.

Then there’s this. I got into a spirited discussion with a woman last week. I say spirited because it hadn’t elevated to the argument phase.

After a few minutes she called me a misogynist. I stopped and said I didn’t disagree with her because she is a woman. I disagreed because she was wrong. Since she couldn’t win by calling me names, she said I was mansplaining. If I was doing that, she’d understand why she was wrong.

I gave up.

Wasn’t that the point of her words? To force me to say “I give up.” She didn’t care about the facts. Make no mistake, men are even worse. Our choice of words is just a little more spicy.

This is just the very long way of saying that the world is as polarized as I’ve ever seen it. We can’t even agree that climate change is real and we’ve pretty much run out of time to do something about it.

Why is that, do you think?

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short technical discussion if you’d like.

The image is layered. I used two photographs to create a dense forest. That took some doing because I tried three or for top layer pictures.

Once I found two images that worked well together I combined them but the result was a little shaky, so I worked on fine tuning them.

I almost gave up and started to look for another image.

Then it hit me.

Lighter, not darker.

Once I did that the images blended fairly well. Fine tuning was needed, but fine tuning is always needed.

I made what I think is a deep, dark, dense forest image that speaks to fall.