First Meditation (or, Pretentious Rant #1)

I hear that the fog comes every year.  The autumn swims in it.  It moves in during the morning, and if the sun is behind the clouds all day, it lingers until the early evening.  It's a heavy mist that you can see and touch, not the patchy, thin, easy to ignore fog that sulks about the fields of southern Ohio like little bands of disinterested ghosts.  No, this fog saturates everything.  If I go outside during the day, my shoes and feet are always wet by the time I go back inside.

I imagine what this is like in the more rural parts of Burgundy.  The city, with its noise and its lights, has a way of keeping me numb to the more natural aspects of the place around me.  I picture myself alone outside in a field.  There's no noise of cars honking or people yammering about trivial, everyday things.  There's me and the grass... and the fog.  It envelops everything, and when I walk forward, it seems to follow me, like I could go on forever and never see anything else.

Every year it's like this.  Grendel is referred to in Beowulf as "mist-walker."  The impulse to imagine something horrible and threatening in the fog is all too seductive.  I look out at it the same way I look into a pitch dark room.  I know better, but still the thought creeps in,  who knows what sorts of monstrosities nature's coughed up to haunt the veiled landscape?  No wonder people crowded themselves into towns and halls, if only not to have to be reminded of the mist.  

This is the edge of the northland, away from the arid summers of Greece, and the bright springs of Rome.  The boundary marked by the fog tells that this is beginning of where the hairy-faced barbarians of old roamed and lurked about.   Who could stand to live here?  What would those people be like?  

An outsider like myself thinks of these things, but someone who is from here would probably ask the same questions of any place that was strange to them.  Imagine living in this all your life, then being transported to Mexico or Brazil, the stifling heat, the sun so bright all the time it seems to drum on your brain.

Even the weather seems to plays into people's identity and perspective, and I wonder how it has shaped my own.