Earth on A Well-Lit-Path

12 - Minor Miracles

Thu, 15 Jan 2015 00:00:00 +0000

12 Minor Miracles

The commuter train pulls away from the platform, and before we roll out under what will eventually be winter-leaden skies, we first creep along beneath highway overpass, suspension bridges, massive concrete tunnels-not-tunnels, that form a pragmatic monument to decades of construction.

(They are monument to equally massive amounts of collusion and kickback, of course: major works seem to be twin brother to power grabs and inelegant behavior.)

against traffic

Mon, 15 Oct 2012 00:00:00 +0000

For miles and miles and miles the southbound highway: stalled. A fog of idling cars’ combustion flogs the air: no progress. Stagnation is repeated in a wide arc to the city’s west and south. Every major and minor artery clogged.

To the east there are no cars: maybe a ferry or two: or a fishing vessel: Here Lies the Atlantic.

Glut is stamped into the morning of a major American city. Stamped on every other, major and minor, from sea to shining sea. “Glut” is the root of “gluttony”, one of seven cardinal sins. Wisdom traditions wisely name destructive behavior “Sin”.

Crows

Wed, 04 Jul 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Between the hills and the channel, the crows flew into cornfields as they had two hundred years before; the crows were chased from the nests of sparrows and starlings as they had been a thousand years before; the crows made their raucous calls as they had as long as earth could remember.

"Crows" by chrissymllr @ DeviantArt.com

On the shore, the channel waves pushed and pulled grains of sand as they had under the same sun, time forgotten. The salty water, warmed by the same rays, made little lives from its brine, time undefined. The breeze rose from one direction and flew to another, mixing sun and sea, making fog and rain, until no one and nothing remembered when it began, until the habit of creation was no longer noticed.

Wildlife News (page two)

Tue, 05 Jun 2012 00:00:00 +0000

The female cat was sleeping next to me on the couch, as I watched a movie. Sleeping, I thought: suddenly she sat bolt upright, stared out the window, and started that guttural growling of hers.

I know better by now than to doubt that growl. I put my head down next to hers and followed her gaze. Nothing.

“So what’s up, Minstrel?” We sat unmoving for half a minute, intermittent low noises of disapproval from my little companion.

The Standing Desk [β] - Day 40

Sun, 03 Jun 2012 00:00:00 +0000

The inhabitants of the Fertile Crescent liked the number forty. There are a couple of dozen references to 40, measuring days or years, in those ancient teaching scripts and histories that we’ve collected into the Judeo-Christian Bible. Forty days of rain, forty years in the wilderness, forty days on the mountain; forty years old, forty sons, forty cubits, forty baths, forty days’ fast.

Other than the numeric connotation (and the fact that everything is related to everything else), there was nothing biblical about the “Alpha” trial period for my standing desk. There was a flash of insight in the form of a worrisome news article, and a half-hour’s work shifting my office from the window that overlooked the garden and the apple tree at its center; the rest was riding out the alpha wave, waiting for a sign that would tell me to: a) land my standing desk in a more permanent place, b) take it apart plank by plank, or c) keep on waiting.

Wildlife News

Sat, 19 May 2012 00:00:00 +0000

- ONE -

An hour ago as the day was leaning west, I was pulling east, bringing the laundry in ahead of the dew. It smelled of light and fresh air and flowers: I can’t wait to sleep on today’s mountain air made linen. Deciding I needed a little music, and finding no other singers around the house – a problem that needs work, yes – I took my guitar in hand, headed back out to the deck, tuned up, and settled into some familiar songs.

The Lights Go Down in the Forest

Mon, 14 May 2012 00:00:00 +0000

There was only one thing made a sound like that, and it was death. This wasn’t a mouse-death, nor a chipmunk-death (with two hunting cats around, there is plenty of that small pleading going on, day in, day out): it was a bigger animal; whatever was going down was doing so just over the lip of the hill, beneath my deck; and only one cat was indoors.

In the time it took you to read the first four words of that paragraph, I was already out the sliding door, leaning over the deck, wondering if my male hunter was no longer predator, but prey. What a terrible shrieking, sound of struggle.

The Standing Desk [α] – Day 14

Fri, 11 May 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Physically, I feel good getting up to work in the morning. I think it’s because I don’t get up just to sit down again. My body feels energized most of the morning, mind alert, and my frame moves around while I type up the morning’s correspondence. Two weeks in, I remain happy with the switch to a standing desk, and am considering when to build my “Beta” version, levitating my old sitting desk one-half-person into the air on a hand-designed scaffold.

The Standing Desk [α] - Day 7

Sat, 05 May 2012 00:00:00 +0000

There is a certain volume of accumulated human knowledge — a kind of Encyclopaedia of Safety — that is based on the trial-and-error successes of generations. One entry in that tome might be as quaint as “don’t shit in your bed” (Any argument…?) Our Australian friends have several: “Don’t introduce species into an ecology with no known predators.” (oops), or “Don’t irrigate your desert with a limited aquifer.” (oops)

There are others:

fireside stories

Sun, 08 Apr 2012 00:00:00 +0000

- 1 -

Look at that moon! And over there, Venus is a diamond. While this campfire warms my feet, the breeze nods itself to sleep, and the river (whose unceasing flow is an unremarked inspiration) hushes along on its gentle, downhill slide…

There is much to be said of city life — but the less said, the better.

We can make smaller circles in the trees, just out of sight of those agitated centers. Here where embraces are slower and quieter, where we do more to nourish ourselves and our neighbors, and less to stoke a Machine whose engines carry others to others’ destinations.

Burning snow

Thu, 17 Mar 2011 00:00:00 +0000

As I stood under the shower’s spray this evening, allowing the warm water to wash away the day’s dust and travel, I found that as the dirt left me, so did peace and security.

I looked at my hands, and as I passed them along my arms, I suddenly felt an urgency, emergency, imagined I was rushing to remove an invisible poison – radioactive decay – that had collected on my skin and sifted through my clothing, as I sat cowering inside my home, whose chinks and gaps would never be airtight, whose doors and windows were designed to breathe as a human breathes, to move air in and around me so that I might have fresh oxygen to light my blood and to quicken my pulse.

Lessons Learned?

Sun, 13 Mar 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Lessons can be learned by watching.

A system is only as strong as its weakest link; make a nuclear containment structure (theoretically?) plane-proof and bomb-proof, still the generator sits outside, its water source exposed, and a shut-down reactor cannot power itself; powered by fission, not fusion, its “steady state” is detonation, not stasis.

A viable solution to the nation’s energy crisis (finite fossil fuels, unsustainable sources of electricity) and a response to a near-universal consensus that global warming is a dire reality (universal to everyone without vested financial interests) must not rely on building more, but on learning to live with and use less.

Day

Wed, 06 Aug 2008 00:00:00 +0000

An echinacea blossom sits in a vase on the kitchen table, slightly to the left of center, bowing in my direction. Some of these wildflowers are sturdier than most, and even cut retain their bearing, their color and form, for many days. There are people like that as well, keep blooming when the root is severed, because water is enough.

This particular beauty has nineteen split-end petals, in a variety of shades of pink, lateral veins and ridges changing saturation and hue and they reach out toward the tip. Nineteen petals, if a lover counted, arrives at “She loves me”: an advantage when plucking, to seek out odd-petaled plants.

Wane

Sat, 27 Oct 2007 00:00:00 +0000

Before the last full moon of Autumn rises behind the hill. The last full moon of Autumn.

Last night it left behind a silver sand, on every blade a crystal strand that morning light made sparkle, turn to tears, then fall remembered winter to the earth. And all the leaves have fallen - summer’s skirt - scattered in reckless tatters round the yard. The bare-limbed beauties naked move inward, their progress slows, their whispering of May flowers blurs to snows, and voices once as light as Light sound deeper in the throat, so deep I scarcely hear them, or scarcely wish to know. The house entire is like a ship at sea, night-ship lighted bravely against the vast and empty waves. Or not so brave: the huddling heart lifts a guttering candle against the void, but the strongest blow it out, take heed of senses that most would only doubt, say I am I and step into their night.

The brightest star on the coldest night

Fri, 19 Jan 2007 00:00:00 +0000

The night is cold, and because it is cold, the air is clear; it is a northern night. With the car turned off, and no light yet in the house beyond, the stillness seems to descend, as though stillness were a thing of the heavens – is it not? – a tangible substance, instead of the lack of one. The ancients knew there was an Ether; we proved that their Knowledge could not stand side-by-side with our Fact, so the tangible stillness vanished, leaving behind only a trace of memory.

A flower the color of history

Tue, 26 Dec 2006 00:00:00 +0000

Every day should surrender a small jewel, something new and intriguing for the body or the mind. Every day does, unless you have been sleeping. I woke today to page 122 of the hardcover edition of Silk Road Cooking, by Najmieh Batmanglij:

Saffron
Long treasured as a medicine, perfume, dye, and seasoning,saffron consists of the golden stigmas of the autumn-flowering purple crocus, Crocus Sativus. It takes the stigmas of 75,000 blossoms – an acre of flowers – to produce one pound of the spice. These must be picked from the crocus by hand, making saffron, currently selling for about $55 an ounce, the most expensive spice in the world…

"The Milk of Human Evolution"

Fri, 15 Dec 2006 00:00:00 +0000

Evolution is a process that most of us associate with a geological time scale — the slow elucidation of life over the last 3.5 billion years. We also tend to assume that the most recent signs of continuing evolution must be happening in species with short life spans and rapid reproductive rates.

A team of scientists has now discovered that an important human genetic trait — a tolerance in adults for the milk sugar called lactose — might have developed in several East African ethnic groups 2,700 to 6,800 years ago. That is astonishingly recent.