Chromatic Contrasts

Monday

• Like the start of a fireworks show, this first week of spring produces noticeable explosions of color against background browns either in nearby flower beds or far off landscapes.  No longer necessary to peer anxiously checking if one crocus is beginning to open _ there are clumps of them shouting for attention.  Daffodils wave brilliantly, but hillsides remain mostly a harmony of sienna and umber.  Blushes of red and yellow-green fuzz crowns of trees. 
• Also like beginning a fireworks show, I have not yet become jaded.  The first starbursts and fading trailers still evoke ooohs and aaahs from the audience.  In coming weeks there will be more and more, overwhelming in quantity and quality, and yet, somehow, that will remain less exciting than a single forsythia high on a hillside, a blotch of magnificent gold, bravely alone awaiting possible snow.

Tuesday

Lawns are greening, skies bright blue,

Winds blow chill, snow may be due

Daffodils shine every day

Yellow nod along my way

Crocus blooms chained to sun

Open morning, quickly done

Sunlit maples making love

Fogged in scarlet high above

Now I cheer each bright new show

Overhead or down below

Almost too soon this time moves on

Another prelude season gone

Wednesday

• Easter week, which some neighbors take as a signal that yards must be scoured as deeply as kitchen countertops.  Predictions and actuality of a quickly-melted beautiful snowfall have narrowed the window for cleanup.  Today yard crews are blasting everywhere with multi-megawatt leaf blowers strapped to their backs _ they’d use nuclear if it were available.  Noise level is approaching insanity.
• There are many things taught in school, but unfortunately none involve aesthetics.  Our binary culture firmly believes that every leaf and twig should be banished to wilderness, every lawn should be monocultured, poisoned, drenched, and barren.  Instead of realizing a few leaves, even weeds, add elegance, balance and communion with the natural world, we consider them an affront to our consumer sensibility, wealth display, and control.  I don’t much care that such an attitude is sadly wrong _ I am annoyed that it must be so noisy.

Thursday

While admiring the harbor view from the top of Coindre Hall, I noticed Linda toiling in front of an easel under a subtly flowering maple.  “Ah, starting a new career?” I asked as I strolled down.

“No, I’m more of a Churchillian artist,” she wiped her brush on a handy rag. 

“Blood, sweat and tears?” I inquired, startled.  “Surely it doesn’t take that much out of you, even at our age.”

“No,” she laughed, “And speak for yourself!”

“But that’s Churchill…”

“Just a part. He was a complex man.  Surely you read his book on painting?”

I remembered something vaguely.  “Oh, yeah, he had an exhibit at the Met once, right?”

“More than that.  Painting as a Pastime is still an excellent guide for amateurs on exactly what we think we are doing wasting our time making pictures.”

“And that is?” I had become intrigued, and my memory wasn’t pulling anything else up.

“He said nobody really understands how hard it is to see unless they try to paint.  Lines are hard, but colors are impossible.  Every time you look, relationships have shifted.  He was absolutely right.”

“Doesn’t that just frustrate you?”

“No, surprisingly it just makes me see better.”

“Well, very nice picture, good luck anyway,” I encouraged, continuing on towards the water.   

“No need to lie ….” drifted from behind as I suddenly noticed the subtle shifting hues within shadows.

Friday

• Unusually warm temperatures followed residual chill of snowstorm, typical spring swing.  Today has settled into the normal middle: cold in wind, warm in sun, always on the edge of “too.”  Along the harbor, temperatures run five or more degrees below what they are inland, fifteen or so below reports from New York City.  Consequently, floral displays change dramatically within short distances.
• This pattern will hold for a while.  I waver  _ grateful that winter has gone, somewhat anxious for May to arrive.  Certain garden chores can begin, although there are limits to what can be accomplished.  Chance of frost remains, but we put out pansies to brighten the patio.  I enjoy staring at crocuses finishing up their run. Blooms pop up everywhere, sometimes exposed when I clear off the detritus of winter storms.  Spring is _ above all _ surprising.

Saturday

• A set of famous pictures looks like a duck/rabbit, or a woman’s profile/vase, depending on how you glance at them.  Optical illusions show what is not there.  We used to think that what we see is somehow “real” but now we know we are only interpreting photons hitting a biologic maze to trigger chemical/electrical messages interpreted by interconnected neurons.  And those photons are bouncing off impossibly odd combinations of weird forces acting in an emptiness that is not even space.  Seeing may be believing, but it is far from absolute truth.
• Aesthetics _ theories of perfect visual combination _ are arbitrary.  Logical constructions declare one thing right, another wrong.  Such a theory will claim, for example, that a complementary color may clash, or accent, or harmonize in a scene. Meanwhile, we only see what we expect.  Some of us look at a scene and notice certain patterns _ houses, cars, a piece of trash _ while others admire shrubs in bloom, green grass, and opaque clouds. 
• As a game, aesthetics modifies notions of beauty.  We are capable of admiring formal gardens, or wild waterfalls, or jungle or desert or anything else.  Our tastes are infinite, and we can shape our environment to please or startle us with unexpected contrast or pleasingly matched subtlety.  Those with vast wealth and power _ Cheops, Tiberius, Kublai Khan, Louis XIV, the Vanderbilts _ constructed immense artificial wonders based on particular opinions, which most of us are happy to experience for a while.
• With more modest means, I try to be more practical.  Realizing that aesthetics are entirely in my own mind, I must shape my own mind when I cannot control the outside world.  A rotting boat in the harbor could strike me as ugly unless I consider it picturesque.  Since I can do nothing about the wider environment, controlling my appreciation of it is simply common sense.
• That approach has limits.  Ragweed is beautiful, in a certain way, but I will rip it out of my garden.   Discarded snack wrappers add bits of color to the roadside, but I may clean them up.   If I accept everything, I will do nothing, not even that which I ought to do.  But if I try too much, I become frustrated and as callous as my neighbors frantically blowing leaves into oblivion.  Unlike in movies or self-help books, there is no happily rational middle path.
• Nature happily ignores my inner turmoil, and plops any color anywhere and dares me to enjoy it.

Sunday

• Carpet of purple mint has its moment in the sun, but is too subtle for most folks to notice.  It’s not simply rushing about in cars, but an entire attitude of ignoring the environment except on special occasions.  Many pedestrians grimly staring straight ahead with internal intensities matching their dutiful exercise, others lost in music from earbuds to pass an otherwise boring interlude, many of the rest talking on phones.  This entire marvelous world is taken for granted, while more important business takes precedence.
• Once in a while I wish I were a real photographer with professional equipment.  Here the purple is washed out, and I regret it’s not more dramatic.  But I remind myself that the purpose of this blog is not to amaze anyone with the photographs, nor stun with my insights.  There’s enough of that in the world already, and more all the time.  These are just poorly captured moments of an average person on an average day trying to pay more attention to my immediate surroundings.  A spiritual exercise, if you will.  No prayers nor meditations are deepened with fancier apparatus.

Wild Song

Monday

• Western civilization possesses the hubris to think it commands time itself.  King Canute could not command the tide to cease, but setting clocks ahead or behind seems rule the sun, even though it is only human convention which has changed.  Sunrises are not normally so spectacular as sunsets around here, or perhaps it is merely that I am not so awake as I am later.
• My camera with all its fancy color filters and light controls continues to confound me.  On the other hand, like all tools, it forces me to pay more attention to the materials I use with it.  I look more carefully at sun, birds, and nascent leaves.  What I really need is the equivalent attention grabber for the increasing sounds of spring as well _ from the ripple of waves to birdcalls to even leaf blowers and overhead jets.

Tuesday

Birds flit ceaselessly, shrilling for nests

Buds explode shouting silently from branches

Crocuses dance to hidden symphonies.  Why

Do I remain so sad?  

Wednesday

• Andromeda bush out front in full bloom, attracting early insects.  Unfortunately, its small dead twigs are ideal for making nests, and its dark spaces underneath eaves encourage small birds fleeing predators like cats and aerial terrors.  That results too often in a nasty, possibly fatal, collision at flight speed with the picture window.
• We replaced our windows almost ten years ago, getting rid of the ancient cold and leaky antiques that had chilled the house for over a half century.  I love their insulation and clarity, but I am saddened by the occasional avian carnage.  I know there are increasingly technical ways to make them visible to birds without affecting what we see, which is good, but I do not feel I have resources to update again.  So the poor birds suffer for my economy as much as we all do for the excesses of our wealthy.

Thursday

Walking along the crumbling seawall at the old boathouse, taking pictures of the greening shoreline, enjoying birdsong and a burst of sunshine warmth.  Linda comes by with her terrier, yapping away.

“Birds noisier than your dog, today,” I notice.

“Really loud and persistent, aren’t they,” she answers.  “Guess they like the brighter mornings too.”

“Think I saw some red-winged blackbirds in the reeds …”

“Pretty early for them,” she says.

“Global warming.  Standard answer for everything.  Like this massive erosion along the shoreline.  Just look at that.”

“High tide line way up.  Rising sea level.”

“Well, the last set of storms were pretty nasty.”

“Again, global warming.”

“What can we do?” I note.  “I’m not gonna make a difference.  I don’t drive my car or ride in planes much anyway.”

“All heat, no action.  Good metaphor for our current politics.”

“Then what do you make of all the bird calls?”

“Twitter!” she laughs. 

We both head on our way, determined to enjoy at least this one fine spring day.

Friday

• Many are amazed by the clarity of harbor water in early spring, and imagine that they view what it looked like year-round before modern pollution.  Summer murkiness at low tide results from decaying fish and plants, algae, crabs chomping away on bottom detritus.  It did so before humans, domesticated animals, fertilizers, and the overharvesting of oysters, although all those have given the algae in particular a strong boost.  Ripples may have been a lot less opaque, but never springtime crystalline.
• Folks these days tend to overestimate relatively trivial local environmental issues, and underestimate really dangerous global ones.  Huntington itself is probably less polluted than two hundred years ago, when farms covered the land, tanners took over the ponds, and all industry just dumped residue into any handy local stream.  But the world’s seas, and skies, and weather, and ice were in far better condition, even though nobody noticed.  That’s what frustrates scientists and environmentalists now _ global issues can deteriorate rapidly even while local standards improve dramatically.  

Saturday

• Civilized springtime noises now begin to overwhelm silence, wind, and birds.   Although hard to appreciate, perhaps even house renovation, leaf blowers, motorboats, small planes and helicopters, and the thousand-and-one other annoyances of suburban life _ not excepting parties playing music too loud _ should also be considered wild song. 
• Humans are the most supernatural elements in our universe, in the sense that they continually overwhelm natural balance in weird ways that have nothing to do with nature before they arrived on the scene.  I’d accept, perhaps, an argument that they should not be considered “nature.”  But nobody will ever convince me _ especially given what is going on in the world now _ that people are not “wild.”  So the first word certainly fits.
• Now, it may be that a leaf blower is not a song.  Annoying pure noise, far worse than thunder.  Same with garbage trucks and everything else, including certain kinds of music that I do not like.  On the other hand, a pure naturalist may well consider music as mating behavior, leaf blowers as nesting behavior, and certain kinds of mechanical noise as song.
• But, you protest, it’s not vocal.  Well, neither are grasshopper or cicada serenades in summer.  Before modern humans arrived, clicking of flint and obsidian marked their ancestors’ presence as surely as loud squawks of crows or gulls marked theirs. Tools are as much a part of us as beaks are of birds.  Sounds of tools being used productively may have attracted the opposite sex before speech.
• Ok, I won’t take this any further.  It doesn’t change the fact, one way or another, that around here the sounds of spring _ wild or not, songs or not, come into full cacophony as the temperature rises.  If I prefer to imagine it some kind of cosmic symphony, perhaps such is an excusable madness in an unavoidable situation.

Sunday

• March, of course, is famous for wind, which sweeps along the empty, storm-ravaged shoreline today.  Few flags yet fly, to demonstrate its power.  Its constant background sound provides welcome relief to a crescendo of construction clamor onshore.  Weekend sounds of children playing, dogs barking during exercise, and pioneer power boat drift distantly.  The breeze subsumes all, a muffling blanket, still raw with cold and moisture. 
• I sit and listen to the peace it brings, watch gulls strut and hidden clams squirt as tide recedes.  In another month there will be others here, but for now I enjoy solitude.  An ever present mass of miracles spreads all about, which I, enwrapped in petty concerns, too often ignore.  Winter ends, spring invites, and hope blooms with the daffodils.       

Desire

Monday

• Countless shells are piled and ignored on this beach, thrown up by storms from countless countless more living in the water beyond.  Nobody desires to take more than a few home.  This contradicts modern mythology which states:  “Any organism must struggle for scarce resources or perish.  All resources are scarce.”  An intellectual priesthood intones an innate drive to desire more _ knowledge, power, goods, happiness_ infinitely and forever.  Desiring more is a positive social good, justifying wealth, evil, and misery in the name of universal scientific truth.
• I gaze on these oysters, whelks, and moonshells and do not seek more, nor do I believe any child would do so.  Those priests, if present, would take me aside and explain, “No, son, perhaps you do not desire more of these particular shells.  You will soon yearn for something else, or will desire finer and rarer shells, from elsewhere.  There is joy in possessing something that others do not.”  They are wrong.  I recognize no “hierarchy of needs” in myself.  Basic requirements satisfied, all other desire is a figment of imagination.  Religions and societies less dependent on capitalistic consumerism have recognized that fact for tens of thousands of years. 

Tuesday

“Desire and lust drive endless need”

They say

Relaxed with belly full I disagree

You know

“Must strive or die, there’s scarce enough for all,”

You know

I laugh and sing _ “He’s heading for a fall,”

They say

“Some crazy Buddhist freak, or even worse”

They say

I’m quite content with beauty put to verse

You know

“He’ll starve quite soon, takes struggle to buy feed”

You know

Sure, work a bit, but draw the line at greed

I say

Wednesday

• Life’s most endearing traits are a desire to continue moment after moment, and an occasional overwhelming desire to create copies.  That desire to continue is quite remarkable.  A mature specimen of any large species living in a stable niche should be literally bored to death.  Survival struggles are generally confined to the young and the old _ not even a pack of wolves, for example, is going to take on a bull American bison in its prime.  An organism’s most mysterious genes are those that keep it eating, facing each day, struggling through storm and season, simply to experience another storm and season.
• Darwinistic capitalism preaches that “survival of the fittest” means the fit must totally control their environment, and must grow ever more powerful.  But in nature, “more” is rarely involved.  Predators stop when their territory is adequate size, prey rests when it has enough food, trees attain only a certain height.  I believe the fittest prosper in their niche, and limit, rather than ceaselessly expand, their desires.

Thursday

I’m watching swans and children charging about at Hecksher on an unusually warm early spring afternoon, when Jim jogs up and thrusts his hand in my face.  “Lookkit what I got!” he gloats.  “The latest iPhone.  I’ve wanted this since I read the reviews.”

“Ah progress,” I respond sourly, miffed that my pleasant meditation has been interrupted.  “I sometimes wonder if our desire for progress might kill us all.”

Jim pretends to inspect me up and down closely, then intones “You look happy, sleek, and fat enough, mister.  You’d maybe rather be starving and shivering in a cave somewhere with a horrible toothache?”

“No, I suppose not,” I admit.  “But maybe the Polynesians and Classic Greeks had a point _ enjoy life, think grand thoughts, slow down on the aggravation.”

“Right!” he grunts ironically.  “New Guinea tribesmen shrank the heads of their neighbors.  Those Greeks rushed from philosophical gatherings to attack and sack the next town.”

“OK, OK.  But I still worry we rush too far and too fast, desire too much, do irremediable damage before we realize what is going on.

“You’re just an old fart,” he complains.  “We’re entering a new golden age.”

“I don’t know,” I state stubbornly.  “Maybe more is killing us.  Shouldn’t we desire intangible things as much as goods?  Shouldn’t we pause and reflect?”

“Ha!” he exclaims happily.  “Fortunately, your questions are easily answered!”  He bends closer to the black box in his hand.  “Siri?”

Friday

• Sometimes the greatest desire is simply to rest and enjoy a calm view of the world.  Unseasonably warm weather for the last few days has driven many from offices at lunch, happy to spend time with sun and clouds and temperatures that promise spring.  Even seagulls got into the act, mobbing some poor unfortunate who threw the remainder of her sandwich on the sand.  Out on the bay, clammers seem to be the only people at work.
• In my more active days, I tried to take lunch in the open whenever possible.  At that time, many remained tied to their desks as they jammed in nourishment, or else rushed off on some errand.  Now I see where companies are forecefully encouraging employees to eat together, in effect making what used to be break time into just another dreary meeting.  Freed from such supervision, my only real chore is to continue to waste hours doing nothing but listening to birds and watching the slow opening of crocuses and daffodils.

Saturday

•  As is said in investment advertisements: “past performance is no guarantee of future results.”  We may be about to discover whether a species genetically driven by desire for more can be satisfied with enough.  Or perhaps can redirect its acquisitive instincts to intangibles such as beauty.
• Why is desire genetic?  Any evolutionary theories are pure speculation, but it is generally accepted that our most remote ancestors were driven from disappearing forests onto the savannah because of climate change.  Since modern man appeared and left Africa, population pressure combined with human ingenuity to destroy most large land animals and place people everywhere on the planet. 
• With the advent of agriculture, civilizations with enough land, water, climate, slaves and serfs could provide stable surplus for aristocratic elites.  The problem, of course, was that in spite of plague and war, populations in some places just kept growing and needing more resources .  Since the Renaissance,  humans have increasing swarmed everywhere,  and now threaten the biosphere itself.  Because of the way we are made, because of all we know, we desire more and more because stability or loss feels dangerous
• And yet ….
• Although all economics, politics, and social theory is based on how to handle the problem of scarcity, more and more it appears that if it avoids catastrophe, civilization could enter or has entered uncharted territory, where the problem is surplus.  That’s why we cannot depend on the past.  A person in 1200 dreaming of a day when billions of words would be available for anyone to read would have imagined millions of slaves copying manuscripts.  A person in 1800 informed that anyone would be able to listen to any music anytime anywhere would have pictured a world filled with musicians.  A Roman emperor could never have conceived of a city fed by the efforts of a few farmers.  And so on.
• Most socioeconomic theories implicitly assume that idle hands are dangerous hands, that a society liberated from necessary work will rapidly devolve into chaos, that slaking desire with abundance will halt any progress.  Perhaps they are right.  Perhaps we need new theories.
• Oh, some will say I live as the favored few or that scarcity continues evermore as population rages out of control.  Yet birth rates can be and are being controlled,  the majority of people live with more goods than they had in 1950, automation threatens to drown every job in a cornucopia of output.  I believe it may be time to examine desire itself.  

Sunday

• Words can be irrelevant.  There is a huge stretch of imagination to conceive of the bursting of buds in spring as somehow involved with the desire of a plant to continue to live.  The impulse, and genetic drive, is more primitive and integral than any fancified poetic metaphors.  All such words only have meaning for use, the bushes and trees and even birds (and some would claim people as well) are just doing what they are mindlessly wired to do until Malthusian Darwinism drives them into overpopulation and extinction.
• Some of these current bad photos have the (bad) excuse that I have a newer, supposedly more capable, camera and have not worked out how to handle it properly.  I will continue to inflict them on my blog for a while because that is the only way to force myself to actually reread and understand all the settings available.  Manuals are pretty deadly and now that they are all on line I cannot just curl up somewhere and page through them.

Ragged

Monday

• Earliest March is frequently ragged.  Temperatures spike high, plunge low overnight.  Dry brown reeds and weeds lie broken and torn.  Winter storms have littered ground with needles, branches ripped off trees, broken limbs and whole trunks expose fresh scars.  Not least, human detritus glitters and shines incongruous colors everywhere, since nothing has yet been hidden by new growth, nor remains covered by a melting blanket of snow.
• Like everyone else, I unconsciously filter what I do not want to see.  Trash is invisible to my eyes seeking flowers or sprouts.  Seemingly dead elements of nature fade behind a desire to discover new growth.  I can mold my world as I wish, and that is not wrong.  But it is never truly the entire story, either.

Tuesday

Imagine all time all space infinite

Multiverses, fractal dimensions, physicists’ dreams

In all immensity, could there be,

Another beer can just like this?

People consider other forms of life

Perhaps intelligence, bug eyed monsters everywhere

Even gods playing with stars

Are candy wrappers strewn throughout the Milky Way?

Are hydrogen clouds celestial chariot fumes?

Asteroids discarded kitchen tiles?

Suns residue of playful thunderbolts?

Must trails of trash proclaim each life or act?

I’m certain that is true of us

Since flint flakes littered ancient hills

Cuneiform shards piled in smooth desert sands

Beer cans, garbage, natural as me.

Wednesday

• By moonlight, this scene would be wild and haunting enough for the most romantic poet.  Another tree toppled by heavy snow and fierce wind, leaving only a question as to why those others survived the midnight onslaught.  Dreary, bare, browned downs of soggy low grass and stiff reed stubble.  Not even enough forage for flocks of geese, abundant everywhere else.
• As snow gives way to mud, shrill sharp sounds of chain saws envelop woodlands and clearings.  When the mud dries, ubiquitous whining drone of leaf-blowers will make quiet a rare commodity even in deepest forest.  And yet, I am content, not querulous.   No saws, no blowers at this moment, cool but not cold breeze, blue sky.  One tree toppled, but most sturdily remain.  Grass will soon grow, weeds jump forth.  I find it too easy to project fears into the future, to worry about what may be, and my frightened mind discounts current happiness and wonder.  My consciousness only truly exists in this moment, after all, and both past and future are mere memory and fiction.  

Thursday

Dashing under shelter of the narrow awning at Surfside Deli, I bump into Carl, also huddling from the fierce sudden spring squall.  “Whew!  Sure didn’t see this coming ...”

The Surfside Deli has never seen surf and never will.  It’s on the opposite side of the Island from the Atlantic, and even the minor waves kicked up in the Sound don’t penetrate the narrow inlet.  There are occasional tiny whitecaps on parts of the harbor, but this end is too sheltered even for those.  I guess Rippleside Deli doesn’t have the right sound, so the owners use the same poetic license that yields “Lakeview Drive” in the middle of an Arizona desert development.

Carl squints into the driving rain, “Nothing about this on the weather last night, that’s for sure.”

“Last night nothing!” I exclaim.  “No radar on the internet an hour ago.  I looked.  Should have brought a raincoat.”

“And hat and gloves,” he adds, ruefully.  “So cold, so fast.  It was warm and sunny when I left.”

“Yeah, the bad part is I have to trudge back into this mess.”

“You appreciate the plight of those old-time farmers before we had any idea of what was going on,” he noted.  “When you get trapped like this out of nowhere you can understand all the deaths from the blizzard of 1888.”

“Oh, we have it easy,” I agree.  “And nice warm houses, hot water, electricity to get back to.”

“We’re just the most lucky fellas, I guess,” he jokes sticking his hand into a river cascading from a drainpipe.  “You gonna try to wait it out?”

“What was that old saying about spring weather _ if you don’t like it now, wait a minute?”

“Something like. “

“I’ve got stuff to do,” I insist, as I tighten up the collar of my already soggy “water-resistant” jacket.  “My skin at least keeps the rain out eventually.  Time to play duck…”

“Quack, quack,” he calls, as I lean into the stinging gale.

Friday 

• Ragged implies random, like these branches thickly clustered.  There seems to be no discernable pattern, each twig formed by circumstances and twisted by the luck of sun, shade, cold, wind, and wet.  At this time of year, as we anxiously scan for swelling buds, we are more likely to notice such underlying structure.  Plants which appear smooth and carefully-shaped in full foliage reveal themselves much less so when support is revealed, unlike our own more predictable skeletons.
• I have learned to accept that luck is part of the universe.  We inhabit a relatively quiet and stable bubble of time and space but even our sun flares violently ragged.  Elsewhere galaxies collide, asteroids smash.  I am happy if tornadoes avoid my house, if my tall trees survive a snowstorm, if my zillions of furiously fermenting cells hold together another day.  To find beauty amidst infinitely twisted nature is an art skill of highest order.  

Saturday

• Chaos theory and the indeterminate character of whatever underlies our universe decree that science and other human tools can never accurately predict exact moments or events, such as this snowfall.  No matter how fine our observations and massive our computations the result of one coin flip can no more be foretold than exactly when the next drip from your faucet will occur, or the exact second a given crocus will open.
• On the other hand, we’re pretty good at averages, probabilities, and ranges _ how much water will fall from that faucet in an hour, how likely a snow event may be this morning, when backyard daffodils should bloom.   I have a fifty percent chance of losing one coin toss with you, but almost no chance of losing a bet that after we have done a thousand the count of heads will be around five hundred.
• Humanity has taken what it’s got and run with it.  Hard work, difficult thought, and using averages intelligently have yielded a gigantic _ and I would claim beautiful _ civilization.  On average. 
• My real problem, like yours, like everybody’s, is the specific.  I may care deeply about that one coin flip.  Odds are I will not be struck by an asteroid or hit by lightning or even run over by a car _ but I can never be sure I am not the one out of whoever who gets blasted.  There are ragged possible terrors all about, and if I obsess on them I walk in constant fear.
• Of course, I work it the other way too.  The odds of dying today increase with every day of my life, yet I tend to ignore that prediction.  Death is certain for any mortal _ but am I really mortal?  Most things happen to other people. 
• What value, then, odds to me?  If I cannot know, is that perhaps a blessing?  I seem to have wandered far from chaos theory and ragged nature, but in fact I think I have burrowed towards the core.

Sunday

• From this tangled ragged mess of dead stalks, ripped leaves, twigs stripped from overhead branches, and all the dull brown detritus of seasons past, new growth emerges.  Buds on thorny runners, green shoots thrusting out of still frozen soil, dark leaves that have somehow survived periods of intense cold and dark weeks buried under snow.  Nature’s next spectacular is underway.  Ignorant of humans’ gloomy thoughts and depressed attitudes, cycles continue.  In a short while, this patch of land will be unrecognizable.
• I remain too impatient.  I miss many of signs.  I cannot quite make out patterns.  What will bloom where, which seemingly dead buds are swelling to life, what stirrings occur beneath the superficial cover which is all that I see?  I hardly notice that bird species are changing, as new migrants flit by, and robins begin to search for worms.   The most wonderful miracle is that one day soon I will suddenly awake to embrace the overwhelming beauty of another vibrant spring.