Peak peek

Monday

• This is not New Hampshire or Vermont, with mountain ranges sheathed in red orange yellow, and glens of blinding kaleidoscopic  mid-afternoon color.  Trees in much of Long Island are far more sedate, moderated by bodies of water, and generally turn genteel shades of ocre, umber, and sienna before being rudely torn by northwest gales.  Nevertheless, there are spots and locations here and there where one scarlet maple or a stand of golden hickories will provide some brilliance.  No matter what, this week will be the full show until next year.
• I try to remember my hidden spots and revisit them.  A certain church pond is pure old New England, a pocket park contains a vibrant swamp, and cemeteries  flicker in full glory.  It’s just a matter of me making the effort to get around.  Soon enough, I will fail to notice as I keep head bent down to industriously rake leaves from our lawn only to watch it become covered once more.  Sisyphus in the New World.

Tuesday

North chilling breeze

Through crisp leaves

Turning gold

Makes me long

For warm songs

Summers old

All surrounds

With dark sounds

Faintly heard

While I fear

Ends drawn clear

As Verlaine’s words

And I arise

Full of sighs

Pained and slow

Tasks are few

What I do

None will know.

Wednesday

• Betty Allen Park is a small pocket preserve around a pond.  Nearby, heavy traffic streams constantly, but here there is a certain tranquility and lovely autumn views.  Long Island has fortunately preserved little jewels of what once was as massive development occurred over the centuries.  Within a short (driving) distance of almost anywhere there is somewhere to enjoy and reflect on what nature remains.  Mostly flora, at this point, with birds.
• An almost unknown local park like this is one of my secret inner maps _ I try to get here in the spring when the leaves are bursting fresh green, in the summer when swans nest amidst ferns, in the winter iced over forlorn, and of course in the fall when the pond reflects red swamp maples.  There are too many of these areas to remember all the time, but I try to visit, and be grateful that there are so many, so hidden, and such sanctuaries from strip malls and intersections.

Thursday

Jane was walking her big black dog when I passed her along the harbor road.  “Bit chilly, eh?” I said.

“Ah, but it does bring out the colors.  Not so much here, of course, but Johnny and I were up the Hudson Valley last weekend and it was gorgeous.”

“There are some really nice trees here, too,” I began.

“Oh, you can’t imagine how is from looking here,” she noted dismissively. “ The Catskills were spectacular.  Not as good as Vermont last year, but we didn’t feel up to a longer trip.”

“Maples  in Hecksher …”

“Pitiful.  Why waste time on them? It’s not the whole experience.  It’s not overwhelming.  We like to be overwhelmed, Johnny and me.  That’s why we like trips.”

“Well, my wife and I don’t like the hassle,” I replied, “so we make do with the local parks.”

“You deprived things,” she laughed, “you just don’t know.  We’re going at least to Westchester on Saturday.”

“How about the pumpkin festivals out east?” I asked.

“Might as well stay in your backyard.”

I agreed, but in a different way, and did not comment.

Friday

• Hecksher park has a few brilliant maples, unfortunately few remaining on pond.  These trees were planted quite recently during one of the playground innovations.  Perhaps it is appropriate to keep young trees with young children.
• All life has a cycle, but I tend not to realize that is the case with trees.  They just seem so long-lived that from my perspective they always have been where they are.  But almost all the huge pines along the water have gone now, and Hurricane Sandy wreaked havoc with some of the others.  Anyway, the most important part of seeing as an artist is to find beauty everywhere, small and large, always.  

Saturday

• Some of the popular music of the ‘60’s had almost biblical injunctions inserted.  One I remember is “if you can’t be with the one you love, love the one you’re with.”  Good advice in many things.
• For those of us fortunate enough to be able to live with little fear of starvation or violence, we need not seek the “most” or the “best.”   Finding a perfect life or a perfect place is almost impossible at any time, and absolutely impossible at all times.  Winter woods are less colorful than those of autumn.  But we still need to find the beauty and serenity of a dormant forest, even if its views do not stun us instantly.
• All most of these natural things do, after all, is to fire our imagination and thought.  We bring all the other concepts from deep inside, invisible to the outside world.  Once in a while, an artist can communicate from an inner vision to our own _ but it is still our inner vision which must be provoked.
• And so, as this colorful week begins already to fade into brown hues, I continue to seek the joys of seeing and thinking, even in a world of falling, drying, brown.  Even as I must rake and bag to preserve the green of the lawn just a little longer.  I never claimed it would be easy.

Sunday

• Japanese maples are always lovely, even having a wonderful pattern of branches to glisten with rain and outline in snow.  Leaves, which are a dull red treat even in summer, turn brilliant in October.  And when they dry and fall, they remain red and shrivel into insignificant vestiges which become mere ground decoration.  And unlike native species, these remain relatively small even at maturity.
• There are always one or two problems, of course, even with this most spectacular of imported species.  This plant, like all maples, has aggressive surface roots that prohibit just about anything else from living underneath it, which can be frustrating if it is planted in a front yard.  But a glance at these scarlet leaves on a wet morning is at least one reason to put up with any problems, and indeed a good argument for being happy that we have some options in landscaping not fully reliant on native plants.

-

Real Mysterious

Monday

• Science would analyze this image as shapes, or possibly emanations of platonic mathematical interactions.  Hidden forces, nucleonic stress, covalent bonding, wave interaction, and hidden bits sleeting through mostly empty space.  That is reality, science claims, if only poor human senses were better attuned.  Pleasure, beauty and all the rest cannot be measured by a machine, are transient and incomprehensible, cannot be detected by a supercollider. 
• I see water, trees, autumn; I feel my body my breath; I experience memories and fantasies; I am joyful tired; meanwhile an old tune floats unbidden through my mind.  And much else, simultaneous.  I do not see mostly empty space and forces.  I claim all that _ and more _ including all I am each moment _ is what is real in my universe.  We need to push back against a technologic age that measures all truth with electrons and pretends intelligence is the same as conscious being.

Tuesday

We’re each a universe unique

I can’t know yours, nor you know me.

Existing fully human,

Sole mystery worth knowing,

Entire the purpose of our day.

You’re just a bag of water, salts

A walking, talking, thinking sea.

Unbidden hormone magic

Keys ancient fears, joy, hope

Bids you rest, or run away.

No quark holds hope, no hidden force

Casts joy or hope or fear or glee.

No meter measures joy nor fear

No container safe stores dreams

No switch turns on love’s ray.

“A kind of farthing dip”? Oh no

Much more the lord of all I see.

Turn water blue,  ride liquid wave

Paint sunrise gloried expectation

Singing on my way.

Wednesday

• Warm days have everyone thinking summer again, but that will shortly change as another cold front moves in.  And then, will these days have existed at all, or are they figments of memory?  Everyone knows they live only in the moment, but few comprehend what that actually means.
• Time and the other dimensions of space are the big elephants in the room for our logical mathematical models of the universe.  There are no time particles, no width leptons, no depth atoms.  These things _ just are.  Isn’t that obvious?  Well, no it’s not, and although faith that time is somehow real colors all we learn, we are fools indeed to think we have any true grasp of its nature.

Thursday

“I see they think they found another elusive particle,” says Bill, looking up from his paper.

“And that will solve all the world’s problems,” I answer sarcastically.  “A lot of money for something nobody can see nor use.  And the proof is pretty flaky, as far as I can tell.”

“Oh, you’re one of those anti-science people, like my various fruitcake relatives?  They never met a spiritual idea they didn’t like and take for absolute truth, even though each vision contradicts the other and is demonstrably useless in real life.”

“Not anti-science, not anti-spiritual either.  Not sure a crazy particle is much more valuable than a yoga session, is all.  After all, what’s more real _ your happiness or the hormones and electric currents that presumably cause it?”

“At least the equipment and techniques used for science eventually yield something tangible and useful.”

“But Bill, you could say the same about philosophical insights gained from various spiritual disciplines.”

“Nutcase!”

“Frigging Geek!”

Friday

• Are clouds real?  Science would say yes, as areas of condensed water vapor capable of blocking or reflecting sunlight slightly more than surrounding atmosphere.  Human characterizations of clouds as white, fluffy, floating, soft or threatening are purely subjective.  Only imagination can project faces, animals, and other objects into such random shapes.  Meanwhile, clouds form part of an experienced moment, a casual scene, and may alter mood by portending future or recalling past events.
• All these characteristics are unities complete which do not sum to a greater whole.  A cloud is never 10% soft, 2% threatening, 12% water vapor, and 30% looking like a puppy.  Casual mathematics fails to enter this reality.  For me at any time a cloud can be all these things and more, or may slip by completely unnoticed.  Yet each perception is a reality in itself while part of the reality of the whole, and it’s little use to try to constrain all that with logic and mathematical models.

Saturday

• Theoretical scientists continue to search for the “Theory of Everything” which will tie together all their mathematical models of the universe.  Religious scholars seek to divine the meaning and purpose of life, which will explain who we are and what we should do.  These are natural quests of a human mind focused on discovering patterns in its environment.
• Renaissance humanists resisted the scholastic Christianity of their time, which sought to understand God through deep perusal of ancient documents and dense logic constructed on fragile intuitive foundations.  I think we need some of that same refocusing now.  Science is wonderful in giving us a better understanding of how to be comfortable in our physical world.  Religion is useful in defining ideal personal values and social interactions.  Both, however, are tools.
• Each of us is an embodied Theory of Everything as well as the central meaning and purpose of our own consciousness.  We each know that.  It does not seem enough.  Surely, we believe, we must be part of a greater pageant, something more eternal and grand than our flickering and insubstantial moments of brief existence.  Besides, to fully embrace that we are nothing more important than our own being can easily lead to monstrous conclusions, from solipsistic isolation to truly horrible behavior in the pursuit of our selfish needs.
• The sane path, and the one most of us eventually accept, is that on all the most important issues, not only do we not know but we cannot know.  Whatever the deepest scientific construction of the cosmos, whatever the spiritual dimensions of the universe, we are middle players, incapable of knowing beyond our inherent limits.  I accept science as it affects my life; I conform to philosophy (religious or otherwise) as it helps me feel and act better in society, which is a massive part of my experience. 
• We are individuals, and alone in our minds.  You wake up yourself each morning.  But in just as real a sense, you are part of your society, and without its mirror you also do not exist.  My language, my behavior, my goals and triumphs are defined within that construct.  Nothing is easy, except that possibly the most obvious fact of all is that each of us is absolute reality.

Sunday

• “Whence cometh Jack Frost?” Dylan Thomas asked.  He knew better than anyone that Jack came from stories, from people.  For children and those with memories or imagination, Jack Frost is as real as white ice on grass or sparkling crystals lining leaves in mockingly brilliant dawn sun. 
• Our practical society exhorts us to use our imagination only to conjure technological improvements or to focus on distant monetary goals.  Daydreaming is an idle waste of time, an abomination deeply etched in our puritanical book of sins.  Yet I enjoy imagining impossibilities, fantasizing with no purpose at all, entertaining myself far more effectively than can most media extravaganzas.  Fabled anthropomorphic characterizations are one of our most powerful tools to achieve enchantment with the world.  Even though I know whence Jack Frost, I’m glad he has stopped by for a few visits.  

Turnings

Monday

• Weekend of extended late November weather suddenly reminded everyone of the true season. It’s been deep summer for so long that many turning points to autumn passed unnoticed.  Spartina grass is almost done with seeds and beginning to shade orange-brown , for example.  Some leaves have hardly had time to begin turning colors before they were ripped down by fierce winds.
• We think of seasons by average _ a perfect summer day, a crisp fall afternoon _ but no day is truly average.  Natural cycles are determined by far more than mere temperatures, and proceed along almost heedless of how warm or cold it may be.  On the other hand, I tend to ignore everything except how warmly I must dress.  A fault in my makeup, aggravated by our technological isolation from those cycles.  No complaints, of course.

Tuesday

While walking woods, inspecting leaf,

Each flower, mushroom, bird, and beast

Looking up, I’m struck amazed

Fields, not forests, meet my gaze.

Strolling sandy shore in dreams

Lost in fantasy’s bright gleams

A splash of wet shocks thoughtful train

When did the sunshine turn to rain?

Toiling troubled on some task

All concentration focused fast

Hours speed in heedless flight

Suddenly long day is night

Compartments sharp, division tight

Twixt field and forest, day and night

By logic crisply boxed in mind

But nature blends, obscuring lines.
Wednesday

• Not all the signs of autumn are purely natural.  This boat yard was recently an empty lot, and now is quickly filling with craft wrapped against the coming weather.  For each area filled thus on land, an empty space is left in the harbor, so that view becomes more open.  Marinas busily scrape and wash the bottoms of each vessel as it is taken from the water, covered with an accumulation of algae and barnacles.
• Besides that, all I really need to do is look at the people, including myself.  I’ve been wearing long jeans instead of shorts for some time, usually with a sweatshirt, occasional light gloves, sometimes even a heavy jacket and wool cap.  A few die-hards will run until snow in nothing but shorts and tee-shirt, but this time of year more and more pedestrians give in and subtly wish summer goodbye as the temperature dips and a chill north wind becomes a daily presence.

Thursday

“Water looks pretty clean today,” remarked Josh when I passed him near the head of the harbor.

“It usually does clear up this time of year,” I noted, “when the algae stop blooming, I think.”

“Surprised there aren’t more oil slicks, though, with all these boats.”

“I’ve been noticing that there seems to be a lot less junk floating around as well.”

“Maybe things are getting better.”

“They say there were whales in Long Island Sound this summer.  Seals too.”

“No lobsters, though,” added Josh.

“Yeah, hard to tell.  Lots of fish, but maybe that’s just cause the ocean’s so bad with all the little plastic pieces.  Sometimes I do hope we’ve turned a corner.”

“You’re too much an optimist.”

“Hey, look at China.  It turned into one big 1960 Pittsburgh with smog and polluted rivers, but it looks like they’ll end up cleaning it up almost as fast.  The air and water is certainly better around here than it was twenty years ago.  I can dream.”

“Me, I think it’s too late, like the climate scientists say.  We’re travelers in the desert who suddenly start rationing water halfway across, but we should have been doing so from the beginning of the trip.”

“Today is nice, the water’s clear, the sky is blue.  Enjoy the day.”

“Oh, I suppose, I suppose.  See you tomorrow.”

Friday

• Doesn’t take keen observation to see increasing patches of color _ some brilliant _ on scattered trees.  Nor to notice that most ground plants are blending into a mélange of brittle browns.  Over the next month, seasonal cues will be increasingly obvious, some almost brutal.  Not only visual, of course, a fair amount of wind, rain, and temperature will get into the act.  And the sun _ already rising later than most people, drifting southward at an alarming pace, and setting way too early.
• I try to enjoy each day and season as it comes, so I do not live in keen expectation nor dread of winter.   I can’t help hearing other people expressing relief that the cool air has finally arrived, or fear that snow and cold will soon block the highways.  For us, in this time, in this place, it is far less fraught than it was for our ancestors.  We don’t worry if the food supply is sufficient and has been properly preserved, we don’t measure the woodpile to be certain there are enough cords to be chopped later, we don’t anguish over the last of the fresh vegetables we will eat until next summer.  Most of us have it remarkably easy, which doesn’t keep me from complaining.  Human nature.

Saturday

• Worries of human-induced global climate change are shrilly echoed in most media, except for anti-science purposely ignorant folks who have their own reasons for things to remain as they are.  We are assured that we are reaching tipping points, statistics of melting glaciers and rising temperatures are paraded before us, and computer models show increasingly dire outcomes.  Logically, it is hard to disagree that something is going on, possibly something bad.
• And yet _ well there are always Cassandras and prophets of doom.  Most of them slink back down from the mountain caves when their predicted end dates come and go.  Computer models just don’t work with the vast chaos of large systems of weather and society.  Tipping points are just dramatizations of dream visions.  No computer model can give you the exact local temperature an hour from now, and it gets worse from there.
• Extrapolations are horrible, scientists will claim, because of “black swan events” like meteors or varied output from the sun or whatever.  But there are always such events.  What would be the effect on global warming of, say, a plague carrying off eighty percent of the humans?  Historic recreations of society give no clue what we might do _ no model in 1910 could have predicted the next fifty years of war; no model in 1960 could have predicted that humans would avoid nuclear war, let alone engulf everything electronically. 
• So, we are right to be skeptical.  And sometimes humans do change.  Our environmental awareness is better, pollution is less, resource usage per capita is stabilizing.  Amazing things seem to happen when we recognize true dangers and concentrate on them.
• But right now, who knows?  Some even assert that global warming is holding off the return of an ice age.  And it is hard to seriously believe that changing all my lightbulbs and lowering the thermostat will make a dent in a world of war planes dropping bombs and spewing gasses from their exhaust.

Sunday

• Sometime in the last month, this old pine slipped from dying into death.  For the entire summer that seemed inevitable, yet there was still some shock at its final loss.  Soon it will fall, or be cut down, and another scene will be replaced.
• I always enjoyed this one tree of its type, reminding me of old Chinese ink paintings.  Layered in snowfall, standing firm against the north wind, glistening from rain, needles and cones framing lovely views.  And now _ well I have old pictures, and memories, but they slip away.  The gap between life and death spans far more than simple cessation of certain chemical processes, even for a tree clinging to the harborside.

Berry Happy

Monday

• Berries are everywhere, along with fruits, nuts, seeds, even hidden tubers.  Although some are stunted from lack of water, like children everywhere lives of offspring were prioritized by parents, and the crop remains far too large to be fully consumed by birds or the few remaining small ground animals.  Some will hang on through winter, when finding enough to eat is a different matter entirely.
• Once upon a time in much of our Northern hemisphere, this was harvest time and harvest moon, with final picking, pickling, canning, drying, salting and smoking.  Busy days and nights storing bounty against the certain famine to come.  Today _ well according to most media, harvest moon is just some curiosity to point out to youngsters, another irrelevant tidbit from the past like the names of months.  Most of us claim to be overworked, but at least as frost approaches again, I think we are clueless as to what our ancestors accomplished.  

Tuesday

Fruits promise future

Encapsulate life gone

Carry

Universe complete

Wednesday

• Berries, unlike most seeds and nuts, tend to attract attention with color or scent.  They sit in field or forest flashing a bright “eat me” message.  Seems a peculiar way to do things, going to all that work only to have offspring begging to be consumed.  Ah, but the fruit is not the seed, and the undigested seed falls wherever it is dropped by animal or bird, enclosed in a handy packet of fertilizer.  Such long-term complexity is astounding.
• Many berries are nutritious and delicious for humans, although others try to keep our species from bothering with them, like this hard, dry, tasteless and (for all I know) poisonous yellow variety.   I came late to berry appreciation, although these days I have them on my cold cereal every morning.  When I was a kid, the only way to get them year-round was as some kind of jelly or jam, since the natural harvest season for any given berry is often short indeed.

Thursday

Met Joe coming out of Been & Jerry’s on Main street, waffle cone in hand.  “That looks good!  What flavor?”

“Cherry Garcia,” he responded happily, wiping his mouth with a paper napkin.  “I like cherries, especially after the pits are removed.”

“Ah, but I think the sugar helps,” I said.

“Of course, of course.”

“Tell me,” I asked, “I’ve been wondering because I read so much about it.  Do you think that berries and vegetables and all tasted so much better when we were growing up?”

“Well, you know, I could taste things a lot better back then.”

“Agreed, but to read some of the reviews now, once upon a time each bite was an orgasmic sensation.  I don’t find strawberries or tomatoes or _for that matter _ cherries remarkably different than I remember.”

“Well, I do know store tomatoes were pretty awful for a while.”

“Yeah, but that was true even back then.  We grew our own _ I guess tomatoes might be nicer just picked from our garden, but everything else was just fruit and whatever.”

“I liked most of them better in jam or with sugar,” he admitted.

“I know nobody wrote them up.  The farm stands didn’t get much beyond fresh and local.  Sometimes sweet, especially for the corn.  But nothing matched current fantastic descriptions of luscious heritage crops.”

“Capitalism in action,” Joe noted.

“They can get away with it,” I said, “who’s going to remember or call them out anyway?”

“The old days were always so much better,” sarcastic.

“I think it’s too many food writers with nothing real to do, and maybe too much food.”

Friday

• Small fruit like this crabapple is hard to distinguish from berries, and for that matter by common scientific definition a lot of what are called berries are “really” fruit.  But a berry is just one of the many sub-specifications of fruit in general. Sometimes it’s more fun to go with the obvious and decide anything within a certain size range is a berry for all intents and purposes.
• Our age has a mania for classification, for we have largely convinced ourselves (like primitives supposedly used to think about photographs) that by fully describing something in words we have captured its soul.  In a nutshell, that represents the problem with all those who gabble on about artificial intelligence and how a computer “like us” will soon be constructed.  The name of the thing, the description of the thing, a model of the thing, are not the thing itself, and wisdom respects that.

Saturday

• Like children, we smugly believe that a workable theory explains everything, and we gain control by knowing.  Thus it has been with evolution.  Lots of time.  Drive to reproduce. Overproduction of offspring, some of them genetically varied from parents.  Survival of the fittest.  Bingo, nothing more to be said.  Before that the theory was just a simplistic _ a god or gods who created everything just so just for us. 
• Anyone who pulls themselves out of the madness of basic simplicity realizes that even if basic ideas like “survival” or “gravity” or “atoms” are “true”, their manifestations in our real world are certainly not.  In a way, it is the exact opposite of Plato’s cave.  Instead of the “ideals” outside the cave casting shadows which we take for real things, the real things we know cast shadows into our logic which create models we mistake for reality.  Reality always is what is, our explanations are necessarily incomplete (but useful) ways to gain power over our environment.
• Berries, fruits, seeds are examples of incredible complexity.   Stationary plants that use insects to cross pollinate to produce enticing fruits to be eaten and spread farther than the wind could carry.  Animals that eat the fruits.  Insects that need the flower pollen.  Environments to support everything.   And sure, some smart aleck will show how any particular part of it is easily explained with a simple modification of this or that theory, until another layer of infinite onion is peeled off and yet more fantastic anomalies are revealed. 
• I admire science as much as anyone, and believe it is a better tool for human control than anything else.  What I am not sure of is that a tool for control is necessarily the best tool for figuring out what should be done.  It’s the old “use the hammer for everything because we have a hammer” problem.  The need now is not to stop using science nor to limit its applications, but rather to understand that in certain areas we have better tools that we should be concentrating on. 
• The analogy I would close with would be cooking.  Scientifically, we can more and more finely describe and tune how to make and season a given dish, such as a cheese omelet.  But sometimes we want a steak, or ice cream, or salad.  Understanding why we want such things, how they might make us happy or unsatisfied,  how much of a role cooking should play in our lives, and our very thoughts concerning meals and memories and how each of us is totally different from each other rapidly become too complex for any equations which can be applied to our fast-moving “real” world.

Sunday

• All mammals learn by observing others, as well as through their own senses.  Humans add to that being able to convey information with modulated sounds or irregular marks on some surface.  Poison ivy seems to be a combination of all three _ warnings by parents, experience with leaves, and unappetizing appearance of the berries themselves.  Birds and other wildlife apparently enjoy these immensely.
• By the time the fruit appears, even the most stubborn child has learned that shiny three lobed leaves should be left alone, which is fortunate because otherwise there might be some wicked poisonings in the fall.  It takes longer for older folks to realize that even the bare vines are hazardous, and burning smoke doubly so.  Yet for all its inconvenience, poison ivy is much too hard to root out entirely, and pretty enough if left alone.  So we follow a live and let live philosophy, one of the few rigorously enforced by both man and nature.