The Screen Phenomenon

So I am in a Dune Shack in the Province Lands here at the End of the Cape. And I am having a bit of battle, no that's too strong a word..push me/pull you...no electricity, yup, that's what we came for....yet the writing current has caught me and after months of fishing for the myriad trains of thought, I am finally pulling up fish after fish of image, word, whole paragraphs appearing before me. And urgent creature I am, I fear MY COMPUTER BATTERY will run out..which it will actually. So I am being parsimonious with how long the screen, that magic immediacy of now you think the word..aha here it is (which my creative mind now is entrained to desire)...is on.

Because I am relative, having earned it rightfully so by age, latecomer to the digital realm, I still remember the "screenless" life. TV did not come into my house until I was eleven; it had barely been invented. My parents, being wise in this at least, put limits on it; even so, I found its mythic flickering of story more safe than my family's drama. But I was also a child of nature; in this, I received that gift coming in.

So i grew up, lying on my back in the summer fields of the mid west, watching the slow, steady move of clouds. When it was all too much and it was for me much of the time, I had the great screen of the sky. Very stilling, very patient this sky screen and it was always there. That constancy was part of its healing counterpoint to never-knowing-what-I-would-get-when-I-walked-thru-the-door energy of my earlist life.

Then there was the ocean...another screen of shifting light, shadow, tide, contour, wave, froth, plume and crest. Oh how I delighted in that, never tiring to be near it, in it, playing by it. I made my mother's mornings miserable in the summer when we went, as we always did, to Rhode Island, cajoling and badgering her with desparate insistence to "get to the beach". But being an adult, getting out the house presented her with conflict...a phenomeon I now understand, being her daughter after all.

Now sitting in this little shack which is buffeted about with the sound screen of the wind as the dusk is settling into its night's nest, I am so happy for the sky and the ocean and oh by the way, did i mention, the constant dance of flame in the wood stove, another entrancing "screen". Yet as dark as it is becoming, I am frantically in front of my computer screen attempting to get this all down!