Seeing It's Not Ordinary

If I learned anything today, it's that there is complex beauty in the ordinary things around me. It sure is easy to overlook them, though, if I take the same route, walk at the same pace and believe that other places far away are more interesting.

On my walk today, I paused and looked at a little scuff of blue paint on the weathered wood, a wrinkle in the glass of the old house on the corner that reflects light in such a curious way. I had to ask:  What am I really seeing? The more persistent question became:  What have I been overlooking?

I had to walk backwards, bend over, crouch down, squint my eyes. I looked from different angles than I usually do. I found it created a sort of visual warp through which I could enter, a way to exist differently, if only through my eyes.

It's funny I think that leaves are green or that flowers are soft and delicate, that glass is flat or that the the sky is blue. Seems like the natural world has all kinds of ways of showing me that it's anything but ordinary.

Thinking At 30,000 Feet

I am visiting Idaho.  Always, when you fly long distances in a very short time, you think about being high in the air, changing time zones and accepting the fact that you are someplace not in your usual routine.  You think about a machine that can fly a few hundred people and their suitcases from state to state, remembering that only a few short minutes ago, you were down there on terra firma, gravity keeping you leashed to the ground.

Then, klunk, you're on the ground far from home and you join the stream of humanity in that new place.  The space you fly over is nothing to you.  You have no sensation of it except as it looks to your eyes, a big wide map of geographical features and then clouds that shelter your view of it here and there.

Snow had sifted lightly over tall mountains, especially in the Sierra Nevada range, and it looked like an investigator had dusted for fingerprints with flour.  Being so high over terrain I probably will never walk on instilled a feeling of distance, detachment and even of lofty solitude.  I could easily imagine I was simply my soul flying over a green lumpy blanket looking for the gateway to heaven.  I wondered if my sense of unfeeling about the earth below me and my lack of a physical sense of how it felt down there could be how a lot of people go through life.  It seems likely or else how do you explain being indoors  and staring at TVs instead of standing on the plain dirt and listening to birds sing?

Is She?

If there is a god, she fills the skies with a million birds that circle in vast flocks that settle down in marshes and treetops and then lift off again, circling and calling across burnt amber skies at the end of the day.  If there is a god, she sends butterflies migrating across mountain ranges or caribou across a thousand miles of permafrost and tundra or puts tiny lanterns on transparent fish with blind eyes in the compressed darkness of a cold ocean.  If there is a god, she coats summer grasses with dew drops that look like diamonds when her sun shoots its rays across a morning dawn.  If there is a god, molten lava looks like water fountains and mica flecks in dark ponds look like the stars scattered in a nebula.  

If there is a god, she's in the details, the wide scope of everything, the in between and the unwinding clock spring of all time.  

Tumbling Rocks, Storm Surf

Walking in the salt-tinged rain this morning brought us to our senses.  Or rather, it brought our senses more to life.  We heard the loud crack of giant rocks banging and clacking in the surf while cold drizzle coated our jackets and faces.  The tossing and tilting waves spewed salt-laden mist heavy with kelp, fish and wet earth.  Debris thrown on the walking path crunched under our feet like glass.

The ocean's watery hand is violent and unrelenting in its insistent pounding.  Life and death intertwine, trading places often.  There is no room for weakness or ambivalence when the tide rises and waves are roaring.  Some parts of the shore are piled up with shredded heaps of kelp ripped up during the last storm.  It lies in acrid mounds, rotting and decaying, washing back into the surf in shreds and bits.

Shore birds unable to dodge and lift above breakers are broken themselves.  Cracked shells and legs of sand crabs, anemones and mollusks have been scattered by both waves and other stronger birds.  Constantly, the smacking whump of wave after wave continues, beating hard against slowly eroding granite rocks.  As if forming a zone of indecision,  loose boulders roll from the earth to the water and back again, and you can hear the crackling boom as they are pushed by tons of water.

The potent and primal admixture of cool misty air, rough dark rocks and tumbling waves reduces all things to a struggle between life and death, a drama that continues from dark to light and dark again, ceaselessly.

I Am This Because I Am Not That

I went to the farmer's market and noticed three little children amidst the browsing large adults.  Juxtaposition of the tall and short people, old and young created a visual dynamic.  Contrasted sizes and abilities between the babies and adults described each to the other.

The children are charming to us because they are not adults.  We know adultness because babies are babies.  They can't be anything else.

A dog is a dog.  Perhaps when we watch the dog, we learn more about ourselves, we define humanness because there are dogs.  They can only be dogs.

Snow is snow.  Perhaps when we take time to feel snow and not impose our human qualities on it, simply letting it be snow and learning how snow is not human, we learn more about being human.  The whole entire physical natural world teaches us things about our own nature because it is not human.

We walk on two feet.  When we watch another creature who walks on four or six or eight feet, we define our humanness.  If the world were comprised of only human beings, we would much the worse for it.  We would not know that Usain Bolt is fast as a gazelle or that a baby is as soft as a rabbit.  We define things that are because of the things they aren't.  Black is not white, but both look more beautiful because of the other.  The difference between them helps to define both of them.

The babies and children I saw today were cute and funny and small because they were not adults, not dogs, not pumpkins or any other of the things in the world around them.  The difference was wonderful.

The Face of Change

When nothing becomes something, does god laugh?  Emergence and change are constants in nature, artifacts of forces and substances intermingling in a dance that sets its own pace regardless of our observance.

A stone grew teeth, or seemed to when I saw it.  Big laughing teeth jutting right up out of the ground.

At the moment that I recognized the stone to have teeth, I became interested in it.  Until the very moment of being recognized, it was just stone, plain and simple.  Igneous rock sandwiched between sedimentary rocks, substances formed over a span of time we are barely able to conceive, form the grin.  It's easy to see the bits of things they are made of, but now those things are becoming something else.  They have never stopped changing and never will.  

I once recognized Clint Eastwood driving in his Mercedes in Monterey.  Until the moment his face became a face I could identify, he was just a driver in a green car at an intersection taking his turn to pass through.  Ho hum.  After the surprise of recognition, the moment became important, and I talked about it to a friend.

I wondered what else changed, but now I know that the simpler question is what did not change because the answer is:  Nothing.  All of every single thing changes all the time.  Force and substance always do their dance together.

Former classmates from high school have faces that time has weathered and gravity has worked on.  I feel my mind clanging through data banks, opening drawers and closing them quickly in a search of a match with old images captured long ago.  "Is that...?  No, can't be."  But it is.  A face once solidly familiar has changed and become nearly entirely unfamiliar.  

Children you first saw when they were born and last saw when they were two walk up to you in high heels 15 years later and say hello, and your mind does a stutter step as it looks for a familiar landmark on the face before you, one that identifies this young woman as the same child you last saw in diapers a short time ago.  A blink of an eye, and everything seems different.  I wonder if it's me changing, rushing through time while everything else stands still.  It feels like that.

Old trees and landmarks seem imperturbable and abide changes, show us how to do the same.  I stand next to old trees and think that they have seen a lot, endured much, withstood change every minute of their lives.  Strong and gnarled old trees, warriors dancing in the wind, defy the forces around them but change constantly in spite of themselves.  

The toothed rocks will be there for a long time I imagine. I just saw them for the first time.  They seemed the very grin of god.  I wanted there to be eyes, too, and a big resounding laugh that would echo off the hillsides and roll up into the clouds.  What's next to emerge, what will come into being and what will be lost eventually?  I happened on a grinning rock that laughed for having emerged, whether I was there or not.  Knowing it's there, I smile too.

Early Bird Calling

I heard a small bird calling this morning as I was waking up, a sweet plaintive call that seemed to echo and trill the very song of life.  I remember long ago, hearing the same calling birdsong on dewy mornings in fall.  The cats, who lived outside all the time, would ignore them in favor of piling themselves together under a shrub, flattening the foxtails and grasses with their sleep-warmed bodies, making no noise at all, deeply relaxed in slumber.

In the cold and damp of predawn autumn, small birds, too chilled to do anything but fluff their feathers and wait, gripped the small branches and high wires near the roof tops.  One bird, in a hiccup of discovery, would make a tentative chirp, and it would be a signal, like house lights flashing before a performance, that something was beginning to change.  In response, other birds would begin to rustle, chirp, flap and preen until everyone would declare themselves loudly from every corner of the yard and beyond, a feathered company of shouting, singing birds waking the world up in their own words.

The first chorus of songbirds in the morning has no real equivalent in our human world.  I don't know of any place where people wake up, stand up on their chairs and sing loudly to the world, uninhibited,  before they do anything else.  "This is my house, I am here, the sun is coming up!  Tra la la la!"

The little bird I heard today was a bit more wistful than other birds usually sound.  He was still sounding his call, though, a little sparrow with something to say, singing sweetly from a branch high in the neighbor's yard.

There isn't any calling right now; it's the middle of the day and everything, everyone is going about their business, done with declarations of existence for the time being.  What a treat while it lasted, though.  Because they called out and announced themselves at the top of their small lungs, I knew I was alive, too.  Can I imagine a world where there are no birds singing up the sunrise?  No sweet voices that seem to express life itself?  Only when I am in cities, but even then I imagine the voices I have heard in more-whole places as a means of soothing myself.

I'll be listening for the sweet little call tomorrow morning, a signal that a day is coming 'round, and that that little bird knows it is alive, part of the whole of nature.  

On The Fly

There's a fly zig-zagging around the room.

The door's open to let in fresh air, but with the fresh air in came a fly.  It has settled into a flight pattern that doesn't seem to really be accomplishing anything obvious.  It is not near food, other flies or me.  Nor does it seem to be ready to go sit down and read the latest National Enquirer, a publication certainly meant solely for flies.

Don't you sometimes wonder what in the world is going on in a fly's mind that makes it decide to get up off its sofa and fly around and around, acting like a tiny flying pinball?  Whatever serves as a "mind" in a fly instigates a flying mode and it flies until - what?  What the heck is it doing anyway?  

Most likely, it is both avoiding and seeking.  It's avoiding bats, birds, lizards and human fly swatters and seeking manure, dead things and slime.  Flies are attracted to moisture and suck it up with their mouth parts.  Females lay their eggs and then keep on going, flying, zig-zagging and - actually - pooping almost constantly.  Great, huh?

A while ago, a very small fly-like insect seemed intent on hovering about three inches away from my nose no matter how I waved and fanned it away.  Very irritating behavior.  Whatever the fly-like bug was doing to avoid my hand - easily a million times bigger than it was - as I swatted back and forth very spastically, is probably worth studying.

Flies are definitely alien looking with their weird multi-lensed eyes and buzzing wings.  They have two wings where most flying insects have four.  They're not cute like bees, and they carry diseases on their feet, bad diseases like cholera, dysentery; they are vectors for nearly everything we humans try to avoid in order to stay healthy.

Dogs, cats and I love to nab flies, especially right out of midair, although I have never eaten a fly like a dog will.  Not on purpose anyway.  Once or twice on bike rides, one has achieved total engulfment in my mouth, but it was rapidly ejected.  Followed by shouts of disgust and revulsion, which flies are pretty much masters at generating.  I do have a grudging admiration for their flying though, now that I see this particular fly wearing itself out as it goes about its business in the middle of the room.

If flies had been invented by, oh, terrorists, they would have no redeeming value whatsoever and annihilation of all flies would be completely justified.  Before you kill every last fly, try to imagine that they are part of the Big Picture of nature.  Other creatures find them delectable and depend on them as a major food source.  Disgustingly, they begin life as maggots, the most repulsive things of all, pretty much.   But, if you watch shows like CSI, you know that maggots do a pretty important job in the world of leftover body parts, gobbling them up rapidly, recycling like no other.

I'm not saying refrain from killing flies.  Just realize that as creepy as they may seem, as annoying as they always are, they have a place in the ecosystem.

Okay, now that I've admired this fly, I'm ready to kill it, but I'll keep my ears open for news about how flies make decisions.  Then, maybe I'll understand some politicians.

What Is Human Nature Anyway?

At an airport given over to a large international airshow, I walked around looking at flying machines, contrails, smoke, exhaust, pavement, rubber tires the size of cars, and heard roaring engines and generators everywhere.  I walked on asphalt and cement covering hundreds of acres of fertile land.  Speaker towers blared loud rock and pop hits and an announcer informed me of the aerobatics going on in the open sky above the airfield.  Thousands of human beings walked around looking at trucks, planes, jets and big tents that displayed pictures and slogans of the military service branches.

Jet fuel and lighter fluid perfumed the air.  Far in the distance a bird or two blundered into the air space but did not hang around long.  It was a day completely devoted to and encompassed by humanity and their mechanical things, mostly very big things, enormous things like 707s and C-17s.  Many of the things were named after birds:  Falcons, thunderbirds, eagles, hawks, seahawks, blackhawks.

I thought about the nature of the place, how it might have looked before anything was built or changed by people, a hundred and fifty years ago.  I mused that the hills to the southwest and to the east of the airport probably looked exactly the same, but everything where I stood was made possible because of petroleum products manufactured from oil and gas.

Then, as I stood there and as I looked at all the humanity and machinery everywhere, an FA-18 fighter jet came shrieking overhead at 550 mph with a cone of moisture forming around its fuselage, afterburners glowing deep orange, and I got just as excited as everyone else by the pure crazy ferocious speed and devilish power.  Yes, I did.

I have that polarized set of scenes sitting side by side in my mind, and I feel that because humans, me included, are seduced by speed and power and mechanical technology that allows for unearthly things like FA-18 fighter jets to exist, nature is facing a losing battle.  I will always do my best to grow green things, reduce my own personal impact on the environment, and value keeping our mitts off of wild places.  But, there I was at that place, which was about as un-green as one place can be, admiring technology and fierce metal machines, in essence supporting them by being there.

Is there a place for humanity in nature or are we just kidding ourselves, denying the sad truth that we are actually just witnessing a slow but certain annihilation of the natural world?  Is our predominating lust of technology leading us to such a separation from the natural world and its exquisite mystery that we will always judge it to be the lesser choice?  Today, my response to the roaring jets told the answer, and I am not encouraged.

Transformation: Nature Small and Wide

Overnight, a hundred buds opened and out came butterflies with stems.  This is magic.  You can't convince me otherwise.  How could this ever be an ordinary thing, this silent unfolding, exquisite perfection nearly gone unnoticed.  

All afternoon, the late summer heat intensified and the air compressed, exhausting the ground of moisture.  The oaks looked desperately dry, as they do in September, the dirt around their roots hard as a rock and devoid of water.  A heavy ocean swell rumbled in the distance hour after hour, a fine haze of drifting mist veiled the hills, born of tons of smashing salt water battering weary granite and sand.   

Summer has burst upon the west coast like a switch thrown by a startled stage hand caught sleeping on the job.  It's very hot.  The whole state is flattened under intense heat, a high-pressure atmospheric blast that will last until there's a shift of some other low-pressure air somewhere else.  Then the air will lift or settle and move on, and we'll cool.  It's a timeless form of magic that feels like an easing, a transformation of invisible scope and dimension.   

After the temperature rose today, in the hours after the butterfly flowers emerged, tradesmen hammering, sawing, scraping or dishwashers rattling pots in hot kitchens looked up at the sky, wiped their brows and remarked about the spike of heat.  From the south, in a sympathetic gesture, nature sent a bevvy of clouds to shield the coast from the relentless sun.  They tumbled in a slow flight, turning and changing until they captured the sun itself, blushing pink, ochre and amber, an unmistakable magic spread across the darkening twilight sky.   

Summer to Fall: The Bay is Changing

My view of the earth, the part I can see from my chair here, is turning gradually away from the sun.  The sun, a blazing mass of hydrogen with shooting tendrils of gas that arch far out into dry cold space, is roasting our blue planet wherever it shines.  I hear it sizzle if I listen.

I am riding the grand blue ball eastward, feeling the cooling breath of twilight ahead.  Across the way, a short distance from my window, the last light of the evening is setting the leaves of my neighbors' trees aflame with light, a searing light beaming horizontally, parallel to the street.  The wind has died down for now, and I can hear the din of distant waves kicking up along the long curved shoreline.

Yesterday, we stood on Monterey State Beach and watched the sweep of waves bubbling and foaming back and forth across the tanned, curvaceous swells of packed sand.  They eddied back out again in wide ripping currents that made an effervescent hiss.  I felt an increased intensity of energy in the sea, building and changing with the season.  It's a mean ocean, beautiful as it is.  Tons of water, undertow, cross currents and riptides must be watched as well as wind gusts, logs and kelp washing in and out of the water's edge.  Those who are lax or inattentive are sometimes lost.

We parked above the beach, strode like giants down the steep dune to the more level beach below and then headed north, eyeing the waves, running for higher ground when they rushed up to us.

After a few miles at a steady pace heading north on the wet sloping sand, we trudged back up a steep dune and looked back to take a look at the vista spread before us.  The water was a dark titanium blue and a bobbing cluster of small fishing boats out in search of sea bass were collected a mile offshore.  Waves' constant muffled low roar was the voice of nature in full cry.  A scuffing wind made small white crests, brisk enough for small sailboats to keel over before it.

One man, dwarfed by the vista and expanse of ocean, stood alone below us, a solitary figure, buffeted by the wind.  He looked ahead to the tossing seas and boats, alone with his thoughts, with the elements of nature constantly jostling for his attention.  Tides and bright sun never leave you untended, always demand your respect.  You may seek solitude in nature, but, unlike a place built by people to segregate, silence or confine, nature is always vigorous and stimulating in constantly changing ways.

Northern California Looks Beautiful Now

Here we go zipping through September, dipping our toes into Autumn, peering down the line to Winter.

In Monterey and Pacific Grove, summer is showing its shy face, late to the party.  Anyone who has ever been here for a year or more knows what to expect and somehow survives a very long cold spell during June, July and August.

Now, with tourist season quieting down gradually, the really pretty weather is here.  This is worth waiting for.  If you are considering visiting Northern California or the Sierra foothills, all the way up to Yosemite or Lake Tahoe, the beauty is undeniably special.  Except for lack of lush green and gushing waterfalls, colors are richer, the sky is more clear, and the night air is refreshingly cool even if its warm in the daytime.

Long-time Californians know the look of folded hills covered with pastures of dried grasses, bent and aged oaks or redwood groves standing in the crooked angles of steep ravines.  Go out with your camera early in the morning or late in the day and watch how the sun plays across the tips of those grasses and gilds their edges and tips with a beautiful light.

California's natural places are uniquely appealing, beautiful and dramatic panoramas to feast your eyes on.  Just one look at the golden rolling hills with the sun glancing off them really does something to those who love the sight.  I am immensely grateful that places are preserved simply because they are beautiful and still wild.  That is priceless.    

Gabriel At One Week

A very small human was handed to me today, my great-nephew.  Gabriel The New slept peacefully in my arms, radiating heat, smiling and grimacing while the traces of dreams flitted across his face and his arms flopped back and forth.  He is one week old now and, by all accounts, the most beautiful boy we have seen in a long time, possibly all time.

His mother is tired and a bit unsteady, weighed down by uncertainty and inexperience.  It's her first baby and, having done so many things right in life, wants everything to go wonderfully for Gabriel.  Her anxiety is born of love and exhaustion and will gradually relent as she gets more used to nursing, napping when he sleeps, and letting the house go for now.

Women collected in the livingroom and filled it up with love, clucking and laughing, unsure of how to help Gabriel's mother be perfect and also knowing it is a false hope.  She is doing fine, which is better than perfect because it's normal.  He is the proof of that, gaining weight, wetting diapers and paying no attention to anything but her heartbeat and his hunger.  They are still very much connected and interdependent, one week past birth.  She will gradually trust that nature is setting the pace, calling the shots, making all things possible for him to thrive now.

He was sweetness itself while he slept in the crook of my elbow, a very tiny person with miniature everything.  I think I held my breath the whole time, thought he would disappear like a bubble in the midday sunlight, a tiny swaddled boy.  But, seeing my niece wilting with lack of sleep, I was the one who left, to return sometime soon for another close look.

Quiet Sounds

We who are quiet admire a quiet world.  That's not to say a silent world -- although some silence is a balm -- but a quiet one.

Pacific Grove is a pretty low-key town as towns go in California, but truly natural peaceful quiet is hard to come by even so.  I've just listened to a Newsweek online magazine piece

http://www.newsweek.com/id/40211#?t=61743767001&l=1825927394

about a man named Gordon Hempton, a sound ecologist who listens with more than his ears, measuring the nature of quiet, especially in natural places, by recording it in stereo.  He states, to my sadness, that he has found only 12 places in the country where there is truly an absence of human noise.  I was thinking about my trip on the Rogue River last summer and how I listened for those few days almost solely to the sounds of nature woven through with the fabric of river noises.  It was a peaceful interlude of four days.

Four days.

In an entire year of 365 days, I had four to listen to a world without jets, cars, trains, buses, scooters, jackhammers, sirens, TV and car stereos.  Most wonderful of all, I heard no Harleys ramming my ears.  But, even with acoustic evidence of our motorized and mechanized occupation of the planet being absent, there were still human voices all around. 

Living in a quiet environment -- wherever it might be -- can be unnerving for some folks, although I have no idea why.  I don't even want to venture a guess.  Physiologically, tolerating incessant unnatural noise is, actually, sickening.  Some carefully designed studies have shown that our bodies show chronic signs of stress if we are exposed to loud noise over long periods of time.  We are more aware of sounds than we believe we are; all sound is perceived by our ears, but our brains pay attention to only certain ones consciously.  We have to work to tune out all the rest. That intrusive-sound-filtering work is stressful, even if to a small degree.  Ever wonder why you can't sleep at night or why you feel irritable "for no good reason"?  My hunch is that the noise level is so different at night compared to what you've been enduring all day that your nerves are jangling. 

The stress changes us over time.  In addition, because we are drowning out natural sounds, we are losing awareness of them and what they could be telling us.

There is a question:  If a tree falls in a forest and we are not there to hear it, did it make a sound?  To that, I say:  We seem to be at a point where we barely hear it even if we actually are there, so inured to natural sound are we by the blasting cacophony of daily life. 

Another study I read today says that a majority of adults over the age of 65 don't believe that global warming is affecting the earth.  I'd like those elders to ask their grandchildren or any small child if they have ever heard a cricket or a frog at night - common sounds years ago when those elders were kids themselves.  I'd guess that most kids here in PG -- definitely in large cities -- have no idea what a cricket sounds like because they've never heard one.  Both crickets and frogs are our favorite folk songsters.  Walt Disney became a wealthy man based on the simple charms of crickets and mice.  While we gaze at a night sky splashed with a zillion stars and sense infinity there, what night voices still sing?  Go listen. 

In the entire time I've taken to write this post, I have not had one second of natural quiet, and I won't if I stay at home for the rest of the afternoon.  I find that impossibly sad.