Ease them into sight

Puddle

Swamp

Grass

Colors

Birch

Twirl

Lights

Ducks

It was a wet day today, but fortunately it didn't rain all the time. I went with two daughters for a walk at the forests and swamps south of Meiko lake. The landscape is fine but sounds from the road are heard there, it is not as silent as north of the lake. But perhaps the road is not so noisy during summer when there are leaves in the trees.

We walked for two hours, and had picnic on some rocks beside an open swamp. The landscape is rather intricate in Meiko, and when returning along small paths we got a little bit too much east, but that was quite all right as we found a road which went back to the parking lot at Meiko.

When I returned home the youngest daughter wanted to go out as well, so I had another walk. She rode her bicycle, and we were out for an hour, just after sunset when the light slowly turns blue.

Addendum: Cedric wrote, one again, an excellent posting, about introspection, and this got me thinking today: "I no longer spend much time trying to figure out my reasons for liking what I like. The reasons come forward of their own accord or they don’t. (As a side-note, I’m finding myself applying this to just about everything else in my life.)"

Cedric pointed to Wikipedia on the topic of introspection illusion, and this was interesting reading:

The faulty guesses that people make to try and explain their thought processes have been called "Causal theories". The causal theories provided after an action will often serve only to justify the person's behaviour in order to relieve Cognitive dissonance. That is, a person may not have noticed the real reasons for their behavior, even when trying to provide explanations. The result is an explanation that mostly just makes themselves feel better.

Recently I have had a lot of occasions when I have tried to understand the behaviour of myself, and quite often I have given up, realizing that whatever the reason was, I can't explain it in a way the would feel right to me. The metaphor of a rider on the back of an elephant is appropriate - the conscious mind is the rider and the unconscious mind is the elephant - and the rider is unable to control the elephant by force.

I notice more and more often that the rider tries to invent explanations for the behaviour of the elephant to stay sane, and that works only so far. But is the illusion of being in control really necessary?

(Posting title is from the poem The Blue Stairs by Barbara Guest.)