the idea of north

The idea of north is not an idea at all, only a feeling, a sense of absences and a quiet, lost waiting.

On the top deck of the 275, outside St. Barnabas's, you saw, for the first time, the thin, threadbare cross, infinitely distant from all the spending and getting back at ground level (Friedrich?)The cross, almost lost in the clouds, lean and necessary..the one thing...above the empty church.

C.S. Lewis..."engulfed in northerness"

The return home that isn't home. The late flaring of the summer sun, the endless last hours. The 'scaffolding of the soul' taken down (or brought down..a world of difference). Concentrate on the wood, the red that lives in the green....

If I were another...

The northern soul opens the door and walks into a desert. The long, narrow road, with the old sun on our backs. Across the wobbly bridge, the millennium, that has now been stabilized. But the world below swings and rocks..the memory of that moment, the first step, the last lodged plank. St. Paul's sits there, hunched, hemmed in.