There’s something reassuring about waking up in a fog. Everything blends, the world is softer, not so bright. Fog always seems to be around in these transitions days between seasons – easing us into a new awareness of the change around us. I always feel a deep sense of poetry with fog – it befuddles the clarity grasping part of my mind and pushes me to accept the multi-tonal variation of the scene before me. As a human, that’s tough for me. These days there’s a premium placed on being right, clear, concise, and decisive. I agree that there are indeed situations that call for that – when in long lines at the local coffee shop, being an important one for example. However, there’s a joyful confusion that’s good for my mind to enter into while walking through the foggy landscape.
I guess that the foggy landscape enhances our peripheral vision (the importance of which is in my consciousness because of an old friend) a faculty I would like to focus on – yes, I note the irony there – maybe develop is more apt?….It’s not too often that I get a chance to be muddled and be safe about it. It’s part of my mind and self where I believe the creative process wells and then spills over onto the page, the landscape or the canvas. When I think about it further and where many fertile and exciting areas are in an ecological context, it’s the ecotone, or the transition zone – the periphery of determined ecological areas. These ecotones, examples being: salt marshes, forest edges, Black Oak savannas, etc., are where diverse species meet, intermingle and cross paths. Because of the degree of “slippage” from one context to the other, they are therefore hard to classify and defy common taxonomy. Fog is the ecotone of conscious states for me, and as such, I can glimpse elusive dreams, more defined landscape forms and a range of elements in between.
