Deeper Listening | Oct 2025

⚠️ Content Notice: This video contains rapidly flashing images and stroboscopic effects that may affect viewers with photosensitivity. Viewer discretion is advised. 📽️✨
For best viewing, click ⛶ for fullscreen.

Neil Zusman. Deeper Listening | Oct 2025: Tis of Thee — slowed observational study. (11:57) HD video; 4K master available on request.

Neil Zusman. Out Walking | Oct 2025: Tis of Thee — realtime source. (3:36) HD video; 4K master available on request.

Out Walking | Oct 2025: Tis of Thee

6 minutes read time.

October begins with sunlight on texture.

A fish. Patterns and flowers.

Birdsong.

A balloon.

Bright moon, dark sun, wind, a stubborn bee.

An extreme close-up of my boot walking.

Very windy.

Light on the water.

A praying mantis. Grass-eyed views, sun in the background.

The ground.

An Earth flag consumed by fire — Bill Staffeld and grandson.

Selfie shadow, late afternoon.

Light and shadow.

Jungle sounds, a spider’s web.

Dance of the branches.

Oars and boats.

A raindrop magnifier: tree berries, weeping willow.

Dry brush sounds.

Washington Park X at the center of the park.

No Kings.

No crowns for clowns.

Drum roll, pennywhistle — “The Star-Spangled Banner.”

Drum roll repeats.

October is made from texture, wind, insects, water, shadow, protest, and sound. The walk stays close to the ground, then opens suddenly into public language: an Earth flag, no kings, no crowns for clowns, a national anthem played through drum roll and pennywhistle.

In the realtime source, these are quick encounters — fish, flowers, balloon, moon, sun, bee, boot, mantis, fire, shadow, web, branches, boats, rain, signs, drums. In the slowed version, they begin to feel like weather systems crossing one another. The private walk meets civic ritual. The ground meets the flag. The insect world keeps working while history performs in the park.

The stubborn bee and the repeating drum roll feel related to me. Both insist. Both keep time. The branches dance, the water catches light, the raindrop becomes a lens, and the walk keeps returning to the same question: what does the body notice while the public world announces itself?

October does not resolve the tension. It listens to texture, then walks into the drum.

I sign my name at the end with golden triangles.

My spirits infallibly rise in proportion to the outward dreariness. Give me the ocean, the desert, or the wilderness!
Henry David Thoreau. Walking. As published in Atlantic Monthly, 1862.

EPA / Lee Zeldin

EPA frames October as a month of competent administration: confirmed leadership, wildfire guidance, faster lead cleanups, state flexibility for Alaska air planning, and shorter construction timelines for Tijuana River infrastructure. The agency presents environmental protection as a matter of speed, clarity, local control, and practical delivery.

Emphasis

Confirmed leadership for international, tribal, land, and emergency work
Prescribed-fire policy framed as wildfire prevention
Lead cleanup accelerated through clearer Superfund guidance
Alaska air-quality planning framed through local flexibility
Tijuana River sewage work framed as construction-time reduction
Regulatory change presented as protection plus economic common sense

Key rhetoric

“Powering the Great American Comeback”
“Common sense”
“Cooperative federalism”
“Accelerate cleanup”
“Remove barriers”
“Protect human health and the environment”

Foregrounded

EPA foregrounds appointment, coordination, cleanup speed, wildfire management, state implementation, construction schedules, and the claim that environmental protection works best when federal rules are made less burdensome and more locally adaptable.

Minimized or absent

The larger climate context of wildfire, fossil-fuel expansion, greenhouse-gas governance, renewable-energy obstruction, and the possibility that speed and flexibility can narrow public scrutiny or shift risk away from regulated industries.

Guardian / Dharna Noor

Noor’s October reporting frames the month as a public-accountability record: climate language is discouraged inside government, fossil-fuel insiders populate federal energy and environmental roles, a major solar project is cancelled, LNG terminals violate pollution limits, civil society prepares for COP30, and household electricity bills rise.

Emphasis

Government suppression or avoidance of climate-crisis language
Fossil-fuel ties among Trump administration energy and environment officials
Cancellation of major renewable-energy infrastructure
LNG export terminals and pollution-limit violations
U.S. activist and civil-society organizing ahead of COP30
Rising electricity bills under an affordability-centered energy agenda

Key rhetoric

Suppress
Expose
Cancel
Violate
Organize
Resist

Foregrounded

Guardian coverage foregrounds power: who writes the rules, who benefits from fossil-fuel buildout, who is silenced inside public agencies, who pays higher energy bills, and who carries U.S. climate responsibility when federal leadership retreats.

Minimized or absent

EPA’s vocabulary of delivery, certainty, and common sense is treated as incomplete unless placed beside climate science, household costs, renewable-energy obstruction, pollution records, and the democratic work of civil society before COP30.

The deeper contrast

EPA presents October as practical governance: appoint leaders, reduce wildfire barriers, move lead cleanup faster, approve state air planning, and shorten construction timelines. The Guardian frames the same month as a struggle over climate reality and institutional power: language is managed, fossil-fuel interests are embedded, renewable projects are blocked, LNG pollution is documented, and activists prepare to represent a different United States at COP30.