November 27, 2016 (Sunday)

by Yule Heibel on November 26, 2017

Today will be the last day of this little 5-day mini-vacation, which, since I cooked and cleaned each day save last night when we went out for an early dinner, consisted for me mainly in being able to sleep long into the morning. Admittedly, a two-edged sword. Tomorrow I’ll have to readjust…

Taking the time to write the #MorningPages has been helpful: along with a couple of other things, it’s something I do daily for general sanity’s sake. I’ve noticed how often my hilltop view plays into what I write. My hill has a name, Prospect Hill. Hill. Prospect. It just occurred to me that those are favorite words to use for political publication titles. The Hill. Prospect Magazine. Surely there are others. Maybe their attractiveness has to do with our evolutionary hardwiring, our desire for both refuge (protection, shelter) and prospect (being able to scan the landscape for incoming potential threats, survey the savannah as it were). There is, too, I think, something just a tad cowardly in the seductions of the refuge-and-prospect life. You aren’t, after all, in the middle of the action. You’re observing not only from a distance, but from an artificially constructed (sometimes literally so) vantage point. I think perhaps this underlying artificiality and constructedness is quite apparent in an actual refuge-prospect setting, but it’s not so obvious how it’s present in every perspective-taking utterance. The very act of stopping – to take stock, to oversee, to view – is artificial in the overall scheme of things which comprise life and nature. There is no stopping, no perspective, no overseeing, no view-point, in the latter. When you’re on the savannah, you’re in the savannah. The notion of finding a cliffside cave from which to view the fray is deeply comforting, perhaps, but also a cop-out: your over-sight has a price, and blind spots.

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