Autumn is coming.
The season is in the air. The formidable heat of summer is closing in for one last strike at our skin and lungs. Autumn is on its way, traveling on winds from the frozen north down through America, arriving on Floridian soil a bit too late for my taste. But it's coming, eventually. But Florida is not where this season shines. You have to go farther north to truly appreciate all that the fall provides. You have to go where the land begins to swell and rise, buckled from massive plates beneath the earth's surface, where the land is crumpled like a sheet of notebook paper after a frustrated scribbler has given up on their prose.
You have to go the mountains.
In these hills and valleys the weather is real and alive; there are actual seasons that come around like clockwork, predictable and variable. The spring is warm, the summer is hot, the fall is chilly, the winter is cold. Degrees matter. It shows on the flora, most vividly in the fall. The leaves give up on life for the year and decay on their stem, scenting the air with that unmistakable smell of autumn. Orange, yellow, brown, red, and every other shade of dying in between gets sprawled across the mountainsides, drenching the land with more than just green. The mountains are where you can breath in the scent of death and still be completely and totally at peace with the world.
"...a walk among the mountains [is] the equivalent of churchgoing." - Aldous Huxley
For this first post, I chose a picture that I took while on vacation last October. This picture captures the colors and contours of the mountains at that time of year, autumn. I made the two sentences, "autumn is coming" and "you have to go to the mountains" large so that when the reader first approaches the text, they read those two sentences first and put them together. They can be read like a suggestion - the autumn is coming, so you have to go the mountains. I crossed out the lines "given up on their prose" to emulate the frustrated scribbler actually giving up on their work. I used colored text for the colors to help visualize what the trees look like during fall. I used the different font to make the words "death" and "peace" stand out to highlight their similarities; in a way, death is peace. I included links to an article about the signs of fall in Florida, information on mountain formation, and a punk rock cover of John Denver's "Country Roads" to provide more background for my content (as well as some entertaining music).
ReplyDeleteThe placement of the image before the text works well because it gives the reader a visual construct of the context before reading the post. Another possibility of image placement would have been to put the image in the middle of the post, before “In these hills…” and after “you have to go to the mountains”, but then the phrase “the season is in the air” at the beginning of the post would have felt more like the writer was jonesing for Christmas while it’s still Autumn. The photo is far removed from Christmas and so the sentences “Autumn is coming. The season is in the air.” have more of an environmental context that a social holiday context. The choice to put “Autumn is coming” and “You have to go to the mountains” apart from the rest of the text is visually appealing. These lines break up the writing, and stand out enough to be read at a glance before the reader reads the blog, giving further context to the first lines. The hyperlinks give a wealth of information that help to place the reader further into the writer’s frame of reference, and the article about the signs of autumn in Florida is funny. It is strange that the music link is in the middle of the post. Normally music included to be background for reading is introduced in the beginning, but the placement here does signify the end of the transition from Florida to the mountains (the transition being “But Florida is not where this season shines. You have to go...You have to go…”). I liked the crossout on “given up on their prose” and the colors on the words for those colors. It gives the post a greater immediacy. The background is beautiful and is perfect for the theme. The image included in the theme was also a good choice. The writing itself is interesting, especially the part about breathing in death and feeling at peace, and the phrase “the weather is real and alive” is thought-provoking, proposing the idea that a thing cannot real or alive unless it can change.
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