The unclean cult of the sunflower

It's loud here. Silence is vilified because we love the sounds we make. Living at odds with an unseen fiend is certainly a test as it courses through the community by hijacking the fit and young so as to dock and steak out land in the meek and old.  The result appears like a scene rendered by Hopper. People are detached to place and owing to the inability to grace a slender caress on the environment reinforces the strange experience. Still one recognizes composure to the scene. Some of my family back in Minnesota and Wisconsin are talking about omens. Van Gogh's paintings always have elicited a sentiment of dread in me. perhaps it's linked to some imminent anxiety I'm hoping to discover in his blooming textured landscapes and scenes. They wash over one with a quietude whose source is in some external trepid pool. While living in Amsterdam I visited the Van Gogh occasionally.  Each time I was struck by what was supposedly his last painting. "Wheatfield with crows" depicts an autumnal field blanketed by an ominous darkening sky as a flock of crows hover menacingly overhead.  The world is ticking on. . . accompanying this cadence, a difficult to reconcile and incomprehensible break down appears in the attempt to address the growing fear of being exposed and the appearance worn by the environment that everything is still ok. There's a parallel found in the experience of camping.  In darkened forests by night, the feeling of vulnerability is tantamount. Fire offers shelter from the creatures of the woods and our minds. But alone in that tent, hiding behind a millimeter thin mylar skin, the sound of crackling twigs and windblown leaves splits the head asunder. It's a luxury of summer to go for a few nights into the wilderness and tap into that vein of archaic fear, finding a pocket of solace and allowing it to slowly fill with smoke.