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 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.

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.

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 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.

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…

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.