disparate or disconnected and doctored

It's fall. And lovely. And strange as all of North Dakota's weather patterns are.

The leaves outside my window began turning yellow the first week of August, the sun began to noticeably rise later--it used to be fully risen before I'd wake up at 6 or 6:30. Now it's just over the horizon when I drive to work at 7:25 and I know in a few weeks I'll barely be getting a peak of light before I bury myself in my office hole.

It's not a bad hole, really. My counter/desk is black and is ever showing office dandruff (crumbs of paper and dust) but the people who come through are usually friendly. The other day as the campus carpenter was doing some paperwork I read him my email invitation to celebrate Constitution day with Constitution cake in the Student Union. "Is it a part of the same cake they ate when they signed the Constitution?" he jokes. Wouldn't it be amazing if that were a national tradition? Every year on constitution day every citizen goes to the town square to take the required bite of Constitution Cake.

Every year on Constitution Day, citizens queue in the piazza to eat the requisite bite of the original Constitution Cake.

Now it's really fall, the leaves are falling and dry scuffling rattling across the pavement and there is more yellow, more orange, and less green. We wrap up our tomatoes at night and buildings smell like reawakened furnaces.

I think about falls a lot.

In LDS theology there is no original sin, there is the Fall but there would be no flesh and blood humans other than Adam and Eve if Eve had not begun the Fall by her first bite of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. In fact, there is a great paradox because God told Adam and Even they must "multiply and replenish the earth" and he also told them not to eat that fruit. But, among other things, they couldn't have babies if they didn't eat the fruit because theoretically they wouldn't know how. So they had to eat or the rest of God's plan would fail. It's the most mind-boggling impossible situation and I love it.

First of all, the Garden of Eden, however literal of a place it is, sounds creepy to me. Was there no entropy? The Secret Garden is bad enough with all it's perfectly tame vegetation but what if Eden and Heaven have no decay? What about those organisms that carry out the process of decomposition? Do they not matter? Do they do something else instead? And a "perfect" garden where humans don't need to lift a finger and it just takes care of itself? How are you supposed to feel connected to the earth?

There is also the implied necessity of rebellion/failure/transgression––this act that we cannot classify because we can't even entirely, or, I can't figure out exactly what happened because: woman made from man's rib? What? And where do dinosaurs fit in? And the evolution of primates? Maybe? And I like snakes.

Well.

Hold tight for what's about to happen. You can roll your eyes a little but there's a point. There's a Doctor Who episode ("The Satan Pit" S2E9 1 Dec 2006) in which the Doctor and an astronaut are stranded without hope of escape (and no TARDIS!) on a planet orbiting a black hole (something which they recognize is impossible yet is inexplicably happening) at the mouth of a giant, ancient-religious-rite looking pit. They can't see the bottom of it but they've got ten miles of cable and so they plan to send the Doctor down because if they can't do anything else, why not?

Balancing on the precipice, the Doctor speaks of the universal niggling at the back of one's neck, the urge to see, to look, the temptation. Ida the astronaut says it's a hold-over of evolution from when we were more ape-like and we followed the urge to jump to see how far we could and to survive by doing so. The Doctor says no, it's even older than that.

It's the urge to fall.

Stepping out of the safety and regulation of the K through Bachelor's educational system has been like entering a vast, dark and foggy night. I thought there must be dance steps drawn out beneath me and that I was doing something wrong since I couldn't see them. But lately I don't care, even if they are there, I'm just going to jump and fall and jive my own way.

There is the urge to fall, when you reach the precipice of having too many unanswered questions. You've scoured every inch of ground around that precipice and can find nothing to satisfy you, not even the surety that you have solid ground beneath you. So you let yourself fall.

And I think it's because you hope and you trust or you need to trust, you just need to know that if you fall it will be alright.

P.S. Two weeks after having begun this train of thought we've had a blip burst of winter, all the leaves were ripped off the trees within seconds and now we're in skeletal, uhhh, fallinter.