The Power of Powerlessness

I had all sorts of stuff I wanted to write about last night on here, but the World's Longest Day Ever became even longer when the power went off at 11PM. According to Seattle City Light, our utility company, it was a failed insulator. According to me, there was a second failure of some sort a couple hours into it, when the lights came on momentarily, I felt a 1/2-second frisson of disappointment, and then immediately something exploded in the unusually quiet night somewhere very near my house and shut down every plant lamp and electronics charger once again.

At any rate, it was a tranquil end to a busy and maddening day. And I have nice candles all over the place, and some unnice ones, as well, in the form of the million-pack of 'tea lights,' which, it appears, is the only quantity in which these sometimes useful but always boring objects can be bought. So the house smelled very nice, and I had enough light to do some beading, without, unfortunately, putting a very great dent in the store of 'tea lights.' I did put some outside, in case other people needed them; I'm hoping if I don't look at them someone will take the remaining ones for future use.

And if you think about it, combining the relaxation of candlelight with the relaxation of beadwork is pretty much zen cubed. It's like putting aspirin with an opiate in a pill: it's not just 2x more pain relief; the two ingredients work synergistically and the effect of each is geometrically increased. So it was with winding down in the darkness. The three hours of traffic jams and the final hour of angry drivers on surface streets melted away, and in the middle of the night it was just me and the color blue and the smell of cinnamon and saffron in the calm silence.

Of course, it would have been a good bit less zen had the outage been in January instead of just an unseasonably cool August night, but instead of dreading that biennial inevitability, I'm tremendously grateful that circumstances forced me to sit down, shut down, and let be.