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Hey there, I’m writing to you tonight from a park table in the hot, dry, oven-like heat of a Phoenix summer night. I heard the high was 118 degrees today, and though the sun is long since gone to baking the other side of the earth everything here still radiates the heat of day. Summer nights here are like an ever constant electric blanket. I find them oddly comforting — they’re just about always hot, but never burn like the daytime sun. Today I went back through my late night letters of 2020 thus far and noticed that this is already the sixth one that mentions coronavirus. My, how time seems to have slipped past during these difficult to distinguish groundhog’s days! I look up from paper and pen and the signs of a pandemic are all around. The silent city streets because just about everyone’s at home. There’s caution tape woven throughout the empty park playground and the swings are wrapped up high, having been thrown round and round the bar from which they hang. The table where I’m sitting had caution tape strung between the two poles supporting its small ramada. Don’t tell anybody, but I tore it down to sit here and write. It was surprisingly satisfying, the tiniest act of defiance in the name of making space for something along the lines of art and moving right through a bit of my frustration with the unceasingness of this situation. July has been a seesaw sort of month for me — great highs found in exercise in the mid-day heat, a three day backpacking trip in among the northern Arizona pines, and running shirtless through the sideways rain of this violent monsoon storm last week that was ripping down trees and tossing trampolines from backyards like frisbees. Great lows found in endless streams of issues found in building a WordPress website for the first time, my back starting to hurt from so much time hunching over a laptop, and the large lack of human social interaction we as a species are all experiencing. I felt particularly unsettled today, and couldn’t quite put my finger on why for a while, but was eventually surprised to realize it was because tonight I’d be writing you and 2,900 others this letter. I’m usually thrilled by the prospect, welling with the feeling I have much to give, but tonight, I’m writing from another sort of place. Not a “bad” place per se, but I’ve felt enveloped in a mental fog of great thickness lately. I think there’s just great difference between the crisp, clear, clean Rocky Mountain living I grew accustomed to over three Silver Gate summers and being back living with my immediate family in a city amid a global pandemic. I much prefer to write to you with that welling sense and a feeling of clarity, but this whole late night letter writing ritual on the last night of each month just demands “now” and I do my best to comply. It’s always interesting for me to wake up in the morning and see what shook out. Since I took a pause on flight school last month (with the current job market for pilots being just about non-existent), it was my intention to send along two or three articles with this letter. However, like most new undertakings, building this new real estate photography website to compete with the top dogs of our industry here in Phoenix has taken much more umph than anticipated. I’m quite capable with WordPress now and have a sweet real estate photography website going, but I only have one article to share with you this month. Following up on last month’s The Unsung Power of Symbols, it’s a look at six symbols I’ve integrated into my life, written with the intention to be a jumping-off point in the search for yours — a search I’ve found fascinating and very fruitful. If time permits, it’s one I especially encourage you to take. Lastly, I hope you well. If you’re not feeling particularly well, hang in there, cause the thing about this situation you’re in is that, like all situations, it’s going to change. If there ever was a time to be kind to yourself and others (and yes, there are many times for such a thing), now is especially that time. I leave you with one of my guiding lights of the last few years that I always forget but often remember, a few paraphrased words of our since-passed-wisdom-slinging-sage Aldous Huxley: be light — ever letting go of baggage and ever going forward. Til next month! With love & stoke, Ethan
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