I believe that we all walk around in a fog most of the time.  I know I do. It’s not a drug induced fog, it’s an overload filter fog. Our brains are constantly filtering input from the world around us, throwing up a fog to obscure the extraneous and distracting. At its best, the fog enables us to focus on what’s important. At its worst, it keeps us blindly following the wrong path.

Or does it?  That statement implies that there is a wrong path. The thing about fog is that you never know what’s going to float into your field of vision. It creeps in at night, coats everything with droplets of moisture, and then lifts.  I was in the fog on top of Mount Lemmon once, before I knew the lay of the land up there.  A friend and I wandered off the trail and found a big boulder to sit on and smoke a bowl. (This was back when weed wasn’t so freaking strong that you go into a coma just looking at it)  As we finished smoking, the fog slowly lifted and we saw that we were sitting on the edge of a cliff, overlooking the mountaintop valley known as Wilderness Of Rocks. The view, gradually revealed by the receding clouds, was stunning.

Had we taken a few more steps, we might very well have fallen over the edge of that cliff, becoming short-lived statistics on the mountain. Instead, we had a transcendent experience of beauty. The fog could have been called responsible for either outcome. In the end, it was the choice we made which mattered. A choice made without knowing either possible outcome.

Sometimes the fog itself is a choice.  I have recently been spending a lot of time in a self induced fog made up of rented DVDs of TV shows which I binge. This fog helps me avoid dealing with several things I am not ready to deal with yet. When I go to Oaxaca Tuesday for a month, that fog will lift. I will be immediately distracted by a myriad of sights, experiences, and people, many of whom you will doubtless read about here. I usually find clarity at such times, for some reason, so you may get a glimpse of that as well.

The above photo was taken in Maine in 2017 with my Olympus OMD E5, which I will be taking on this trip, leaving my big, fancy, Sony A7 R III at home.