Metamorphoses

Visitors regular and irregular to the Gable Grey have no doubt noticed of late a trend in my posts.  I don't talk much about my writing any more, as I have not done any to speak of in months.  Much of this blog's content these days can be described as "gloom and doom," and I cannot deny it.  But I cannot deny that "gloom and doom" have occupied my thoughts to a great extent the past year or so, and have come to shape my habits and my very ways of thinking about things.  I have become a habitual prepper, and have bent my will on becoming more frugal and practical in my daily routine.  All that is a work in progress, like most things in my life; but as I am come to the realization that the Paradigm Shift I have spoken of before here at the Gable Grey is much more than a concept, but a daily reality for those who (like myself) struggle to see and hear beyond the noise and hype of regular channels, I find that I have no choice but to make me and mine ready for the changes as best we can.  Notice I did not say, "coming changes."  The changes are already here.

I fear that in my efforts to become more self-reliant and pracitcal in my day-to-day existence, something precious will be lost:  that whatever-it-is that spurred me to try my hand at writing, at being a fantasist.  It is the same impulse that drove me to the works of obscure fantasists like Morris and Dunsany and MacDonald, and the same one that led me to scheme grand role-playing adventures for myself and my friends in Middle-earth.  I have found those works less as objects to be studied of late, and find myself instead walking as one in a dream, muttering half-forgotten lines by Tolkien as I stroll the brown lands of Winter.  Sometimes I am surprised at the responses I hear from the dreaming trees, murmuring in their sleep in answer to my halting words.  I am become less an artist, more a character I might write about.  I do not want to give up writing, indeed I do not think I can; but that muse sleeps deep within, the long, dark rest of winter woods.  Maybe the Spring will bring forth a new flowering.  I do not know.  Meanwhile the Paradigm Shift continues, and I continue to change, even as this blog does.

I hope my posts prove useful to some.  I run a terrible risk of becoming "the boy who cried 'wolf.'"  But here I am not going by what my brain is telling me, because my brain is usually to some degree scrambled these days trying to sort out the wheat from the chaff in the news.  But my gut, usually unreliable, is telling me that we are in the beginning stages of a great change, and that it is already well under way.  As a result, I am often busy with things like stringing chicken wire, or planting figs or blueberries or blackberries, or checking our inventories here at home.  But I hope to weather the change, and come out to whatever world lies waiting for us, and bring those things that for now must needs lie sleeping within me.  We must all prepare, but we must all try to retain those daydreams that, for some of us at least, have sustained us this far in life, and have helped make us who we are.