Top Sun

Monday

• Longest day of the year!  Druid festivities!  In northern temperate climates, summer solstice makes sun worshippers of everyone.  Of course, high sun itself is rarely pictured _ a boring brilliant spot of yellow high overhead.  For those shots we must rely on specialized equipment, NASA, space telescopes and expensive filters.
• There will be innumerable spectacular pictures of sunsets, fewer of sunrise (takes an early bird indeed to capture sunrise at this time of year!)  But few if any of the prime disk in all its glory. I’ve been taught since toddlehood that to stare up at noonday will blind me.  Even sketchy instructions on a digital camera warn of burning out sensing arrays by pointing directly at our solar powerhouse.  Besides, almost anything is much more interesting than the source itself _ that’s like taking a photography of a light bulb.  How quickly my silly mind can denigrate the most critical element in our lives. All it does is illuminate and warm everything, without it there would be nothing.

Tuesday

Constant, predictable, overwhelming sun

Day, heat, light, life

Nowadays taken for granted

Too obvious to worship

Wednesday

• Honeysuckle in full bloom is as beautiful as any other flower, but also stuns those passing by with a blast of unexpected strong sweet perfume.  The olfactory shock encountered when entering a cloud of fragrance from less obvious privet hedge or linden trees is even greater.  Of course, few experience such glorious surprise anymore _ the ambient temperature is over 72, so they generally rush past in hermetically-sealed air-conditioned obliviousness.  On the positive side, they never catch the occasional whiff from rotting garbage or low tide mud flats.
• I recently read some woman explaining how liberating it was to go to an expensive spiritual retreat and stare at a single flower blossom for an hour.  I fortunately find it equally (and less costly) spiritually satisfying to sit on a sandy beach viewing sparkling waves and hazy far shore, or to lounge in my back yard watching clouds, leaves, and birds, as time drifts by.  Detaching from our annoyingly intrusive world is difficult but rewarding, and well worth any effort to accomplish.

Thursday

Joan and I are under our umbrella in bathing suits at West Neck Beach a day after solstice.  A surprisingly large weekday crowd is enjoying the afternoon.

“I’m amazed everyone is not sheltering in place at home,” I remarked, “terrified of Zika and the new killer jellyfish.  Not to mention left over West Nile Virus, Lime disease, or stepping on the spike of a horseshoe crab.”

“And skin cancer,” added Joan.   “Hand me that sunscreen, please.”

“I guess it’s the novelty,” I continued.  “It’s the first time it’s been this hot, and everyone is excited to be nearly naked outside.  By the end of the summer …”

“Well, those girls you’re staring at are certainly nearly naked,” snorted Joan in a huff.  “Good figures, though.”

“Ah, when you’re as young as they are it all comes naturally.”

“Including ignoring warnings and common sense.”

“Well, after all, so are we,” I noted.  “We’re here just like them, mosquitoes or not.  To tell you the truth, harmless but painful greenhead flies bother me a lot more than imagined terrors.”

 “You’ll change your tune if one of those new jellyfish sends you to the hospital …”

“Maybe.  I suspect we’re in more danger driving here and back.”

“Beautiful, anyway,” Joan leaned back and adjusted her sunglasses.  “We used to spend hours …”

Happily under the blazing sun, we drifted off to shared memories about supposedly simpler wonderful days gone by.

Friday

• Local schools are finishing up their year.  This weekend, commencement parties commence.  Cars will line streets, late night booming music, laughter, and yells, young bellies full of beer and god knows what else, sexual rites _ or at least sexual rites dreamed of.  Followed the next day by prostrate sun worship on the beach, weather permitting. We pray for no human sacrifice, but automobile carnage after midnight on twisting roads will probably appease the dark gods.  Our culture’s exact analogue of ancient solar festivals.
• We are not so far removed from stone age Druids as we may like to believe.  Every day we encounter irrationality and superstition, in everyone else of course, but also in our own urges and thoughts.  Most of it is harmless enough, and a big part of what makes us interestingly human and not merely wet logical intelligence.  I envy those young folks their enchanted and fearsome realm, but I dread the nasty sorcerous and disastrously righteous politician/priests into which some of them may grow.

Saturday

• Apparently our universe, filled with explosions and emptiness, began almost 14 billion years ago.  The sun only about 5 billion, almost contemporaneous with the Earth itself.  Primitive life more than 3 billion back.  Then evolution, rush, us.
• During all that time, the noisy racket all around did not much affect this ball of rock.  Only a mere infinitesimal flicker of the Sun’s immense ongoing power reached it, and much of that was deflected by magnetic shield, or reflected by high atmosphere.
• In other words, the universe has wasted a hell of a lot of energy and time if you and I are supposed to be the outcome.  Not an efficient effort at all.
• Most of the energy we use is in some way solar-based _ photoelectric, hydropower, wind, fossil fuel compressions of ancient biomass, new biomass.  Only nuclear, geothermal (also nuclear), and tidal are not in some way related to the sun’s output.  And most of our energy conversions to electricity are horribly inefficient, passing through a mechanical generator stage to do the work.
• But should we care?  We are not using energy efficiently, but even the solar power we do utilize is hardly an efficient capture of the full output of that reactor.  Life hardly uses all its solar-based energy efficiently _ at least for individuals, although a case can be made that the entire biosphere and Gaia itself is about as efficient as possible.
• Efficiency has never been the measure of our relation to the sun.  We accept its gifts gratefully, except when they become extreme.  More efficient delivery of its output would instantly burn us to a crisp.  A slight reduction would starve and freeze us.  What we mostly get from our sun _ and what we probably should aim for in the rest of our complicated systems _ is not efficiency, but absolute stability over long periods.  That is probably something worth praying for.

Sunday

• Long days, short nights, bright light, warm afternoons, carpets of flowers exploding, greenery in glorious control of every vista _ a perfect time, filled with daily happiness and hope.  Yet already the sun sets a little sooner, some plants have begun to hibernate waiting for the next spring season, and insects start to have their way chewing through the feast spread around.  The cycle back to cold and dark has begun, even if it is easy to ignore, impossible to remember.
• Hard not to compare it to political and social events of the day.  We like to believe we have escaped cycles, that the future will be filled with ever more glorious wonders of science and ingenuity.  Yet many civilizations have felt the same, not least that of the industrialized nations in 1913.  Unlike the classic Newtonian majesty of solar astronomical events,  human affairs are unpredictable, harsh and often catastrophic.  Unlike the billions of years adjustments of the biosphere taking solar rhythms into account, we have only our day of which to be certain _ I may not exist in another year, our culture may crumble.  The biosphere has little imagination _ but imagination may end up being the Achilles heel of our entire species.

Grasseous

Monday

• Any introductory biology textbook will likely state “flowers changed the world.”  Which may be true, but the heavy lifting had already occurred in DNA and the biosphere.  A person transported back to the era of cycads, ferns, and conifers shortly before flowering plants appeared would be able to breathe air, drink water, eat food, contract diseases, and die of organic  toxins.
• We first think of flowers as gorgeous blooms of roses and lilies, then perhaps of fruits and vegetables like apples and zucchini.  Perhaps more important than all of those for you and I were the grasses.  Primates left trees to begin walking upright when climate change expanded the African savannahs _ grasslands.  Civilization for the last ten thousand years has largely depended on domesticated grains and animals that can turn grass blades into protein.  Without grasses, it is almost inconceivable that I would be writing this now, nor you reading it.  

Tuesday

Wild wheats which once waved on wide plains

Our ancestors bred into grains

Civilizations were fed

With production of bread

While we’re worried now of weight gains

Wednesday

• Grass is almost as adaptable as humans.  Patches of it exist in deserts or frozen tundra.   There are high grassy alpine meadows, waterlogged grassy marshes.  In temperate areas with rainfall too slight for trees, vast steppes, plains, savannahs stretch to the horizon in all directions.  Even more impressively, it coexists easily with people, who cultivate it for crops or beauty everywhere they can.
• Perhaps that is why I hardly notice it most of the time.  Something that is always present tends to fade into the background, so I am only shocked to awareness at its absence.  Even the meadows and estate lawns that I favor as open spaces, created by grass, are interesting to me more for the butterflies, grasshoppers, flowers, and birds that they nourish than for the common denominator and most dominant species of all.  Like air, I just take it for granted and continue looking for alternate treasure.

Thursday

“And, so you see, humans and civilization as we know it are largely a result of grass,” I finished grandly, waving an extravagant arm gesture to the fields around us a Caumsett State Park. 

“I don’t know,” replied Dave as we paused on the gravel driveway.  “I see your point, but people eat a lot more than cows and sheep _ fish, bears, dogs on occasion, shellfish.  And they have more staples than grains _ potatoes, breadfruit, coconuts, yams, peanuts. “

“Well, yeah, ok.”

“I mean,” he continued, “South Sea Islanders had a pretty interesting civilization and I’m pretty sure they had no grain at all.”

“Exceptions, I guess.  All grand theories have exceptions, you know.  Heck, the law of gravity has exceptions.”

“Look,” Dave was trying to be nice, I could tell, “Maybe I’ll give you the thing about primates onto the savannahs, but we don’t really know.  Maybe I’ll give you that the whole Guns Germs and Steel primacy of the Eurasian land mass was tied up in cultivated agriculture like rice and wheat and what not, or even in nomadic domestication of grass-eating food supplies.  But I think there is a lot more to it than grasses, that’s all.”

“But it’s such a nice theory…” I whined.

“Even if it were true, so what.  How does it help calm our current world?  What does it do for you or me today or tomorrow?  You might as well be writing fairy tales.”

And that was that.  He had me.  Nice speculations, and lots of fun, but not worth a nickel at the supermarket, and even less in most conversation.  Well, at least the grasses spread on the rolling hill before us were still beautiful.

Friday

• Grain crops are bred to yield abundant and nutritious harvest, of course.  But they are also selected to be hardy and to survive in marginal conditions.  Inevitably some, such as these oats, escape into the wild to compete in the rest of the environment.  Ornamental grasses such as bamboo are notorious for overwhelming local vegetation.
• The saving grace so far has been that our crops are annual, and must be sown from seed each year.  With modern genetic techniques, it is increasingly likely that future wheat and rice will be perennial.  Thick overwintering deep roots will not only eliminate erosion and sowing, but may also be tailored to host nitrogen-fixing bacteria so no fertilizer would be required.  If such strains should be developed, native grasses on steppes and plains will stand little chance against them.  Like Japanese Knotweed and Kudzu, modified grasses may come to completely dominate entire ecologies.

Saturday

• Are we just blades of grass in a vast field?  We feel like more.  Surely no stalk of wheat ever considers itself master of the universe, or abject victim beset by untold cares of the world.  There is so little resemblance between us, what should I care about such a lowly organism?
• One of the problems of our civilized, globalized, wealthy, and generally secure and insulated modern lifestyle _ at least around where I live _ is that I become too easily removed from nature.  In many ways that is wonderful _ I have no desire to desperately search for my next meal, nor endure clouds of mosquitoes in summer nor heavy snows in winter for lack of shelter.  I appreciate electricity and running water and even _ on occasion _ fume-belching automobiles and noisy suburban machinery.  But I can end up turning inward to a good book, a television entertainment, or the momentary pleasures of window shopping in large mall and big-box bazaars.  I miss sunsets while mindlessly being shown distant disasters.
• Spending time regarding a field _ its multitudinous inhabitants, its imagined past, its possible future, its stage of growth as summer solstice approaches _ is an exercise in humility.  No doubt in the grand scheme of things _ if there be a grand scheme of things _ I am exactly as a blade of grass or possibly this field itself.  A humble part of a greater biosphere, a bit player in the adventures of Earth.
• But what I most enjoy is my magnificent duality.  That I can feel important _ not merely a little important but supremely important _ is a gift of heaven.  That I believe I can experience and know and enjoy and reflect on the cosmos and myself and all I can possibly imagine is a treasure beyond price.  And that _ in all this self-absorbed hubris and pride _ I can also somehow manage to contemplate being humbled by a field of grain or a blade of grass is possibly the most astonishing ability of all.

Sunday

• Gazing along parkland lawn, everything back to its accustomed place.  Lawn no more than green open stretch to allow framing with trees and spectacular flowers.  Like sun, like harbor waters, just another landscape element.  Nothing to see here, folks.  At least nothing much worth noting.
• I will rarely again think of what composes that emerald carpet.  I will scarcely notice stiff brown stalks or dusty green blades as I seek color and unusual patterns.  My focus moves on to more exciting and unusual thoughts and visions.  I suppose I should feel guilty, but the world is rich and inexhaustible, and I know I am missing everything whenever I pause to concentrate on something.  A happy dilemma, indeed.

Fluidities

Monday

• Nothing exposes limits of still photography like water patterns.  Water does not look like its picture.  Even videos, more faithful, fail to capture the experience, because when there is no central focus, such as on a distant scene, the eyes wander and see differently all the time.   Sometimes refracting almost (but not quite) geometric patterns , sometimes ongoing glints of sunlight, sometimes resolution into tantalizing reflections.
• Gazing at a water surface seems a good metaphor for how I view my life.   There also lies shifting focus, things appear one certainty, then another.   Impossible to capture, impossible to remember exactly, and impossible to decode into Newtonian or mathematic schematics.  Beautiful but frustrating, and, most important, impossible to truly know.  

Tuesday

Go with quick flow, glide over tide

Inspect what reflects, gaze ranks of waves

Nothing is ever the same

See flowing seas, sight ripples bright,

Astound each rebound, stare into glare

Never exactly again

Wednesday

• Water views are disorienting when presented out of context.  In real life a viewer is aware of looking down or out, of what is up or sideways, always peripherally focused by what surrounds the framed image.  An isolated water view requires complicated investigation and intuitions.  Even this pond’s calm reflecting surface is difficult to decipher.  A photographer might claim a photograph such as this approaches the “modernity” of abstraction.
• When not confronted with survival-level challenges, too much leisure in hand, I become obsessed with transitory passions.  I may, for example, deeply examine weeds or wildflowers or historic markers.  People I know turn into connoisseurs of cooking or craft beer or social media.  Such personal myopia bores other people.  A saving grace is that each pursuit remains fluid enough that I may drop it in the blink of an eye to move on to something else.  

Thursday

Waves drift in endless lines, encountering other disturbances, bouncing and reflecting and picking up glints of sunlight.  I try to make sense of it all, then fall into a reverie.  “Hi Wayne,” brings me back to my body here on the dock.  Oh, our neighbors Joe and Linda.

“Watcha up to,” asks Joe,  staring where I had been looking.  “I don’t see anything.”

“Just being hypnotized by ripples and reflections,” I answer, “doing nothing.”

“Ah,” he intones dramatically, enunciating  slowly in a deep fake voice “You will now jump in the water …”

“If you were a wave,” I laugh, “I probably would.”

“It is beautiful here,” Linda murmurs.  “Especially when the sun is setting over those trees.”

“Just looking at the surface activity is always wonderful to me,” I add.  “Kind of an aid to mindless meditation.”

“So do you do this often?”

“Probably not often enough,” I admit.  “Like everyone else, I always seem to have something more important to do.  But when I force myself, this can seem just as critical to my thought balance.”

“Know what you mean,” Joe gestures to his boat.  “When I’m out there fishing I can get into the same kind of trance.  Refreshing.”

“Given the problems of the world,” muses Linda, “I suppose mindless is good.”

“I don’t know,” I reply.  “Seems to me mindless is the cause of a lot of the problems of the world.”

“Well, we’re off to the deeper waters,” says Joe as they start down the gangplank.  “Give us a minute to fire her up and we can add some big action to those waves of yours.  No, no, don’t thank me now.”

“Have a great afternoon.”  I turn back to the circles and flickers and darks and intimating patterns, lost in complexity and happy for it.

Friday

• Until the late Renaissance, artists hardly attempted the depiction of water.  Rembrandt showed interesting spills from a goblet, but even Courbet and Homer painted waves that appear more like copies of photographs than reality.  Canaletto’s intricate and beautiful wavery flecks around gondolas (this skiff as close as Huntington gets) are hardly what the grand canal looks like, but are accepted useful convention.  Marvelous abstractions of Turner and the Impressionists are all but meaningless unless a viewer is already familiar with water, mist, and waves.
• We laugh at the schematic efforts of small children, who put a blue line on the bottom of their picture and draw their tree as a green lollipop with brown stick.  Yet I see that way most of the time.  A car is a box on wheels _ all I really need to know is if it is moving and in what direction.  Houses are giant covered boxes with holes cut in.  And, yes, most trees are lollipops.  The world is so complex and fantastic and liquid that without use of schematics I would never be able to concentrate on what is required for my current task.

Saturday

• Liquidity refers to how quickly we can turn assets into cash.  Cash will let us buy a candy bar, video game, steak dinner, car, boat, milti-million-dollar house, or election, depending on our level of affluence.  Liquidity determines how quickly and easily those purchases could be used to get something else. 
• Fluidity is different.   A gas is intangible, has no shape, and offers little resistance to anything.  A solid will break your nose if you try to walk through it because it resists everything.  A liquid, on the other hand, flows around and modifies, but still has presence and resistance to change.  A fluid can be contained, but not grasped.
• American morality is oddly fluid.  We claim to admire rock-solid values, never deviating, break-your-nose if you waver or flip-flop.  Yet we profess a gaseous mantra of forgiveness and understanding.  Adjectives applied to a more liquid morality are hardly admiring _ oily, sleazy, shifting.  Contradictions pile up, and it must be so, because in fact all of any society is more fluid than static.  Rigid societies crack under tension, and are unable to handle real changes in their environment.
• I suppose Karma comes as close as anything to the nature of our fluid interactions.  What we do will bounce back, reflections will affect us, what we accomplish is less eternal than we think.  Ripples in a small puddle.  Yet without some anchor of moral certainty, however arbitrary, we drift queasily on unsettled waters.
• Mostly, fluidity is a concept of play, to let me try out different viewpoints, evoke unusual fantasies, make ridiculous judgements.  A game, but possibly a very serious one.   Meanwhile, I stare from the shore and let my mind flow as the waters, hopefully sparkling internally once in a while like the breaking foam.

Sunday

• Three quarters of the surface of this globe is water,  almost the entire human body is constructed of it.  Although apparent solids remain the center of attention, liquids are the essence of being.  Fluidity is not some cosmic fantasy of consciousness, but the essence of life itself.  And even after that is acknowledged,  for the most part all the liquid which is noticed is the mere skin, reflecting light, rippling along.  The much more extensive lower internals are forgotten or ignored.
• Do I think of what lies beneath the surface?  Not often.  I am too concerned with the pretty baubles readily available to vision, to easy photographs.  My thoughts are often limited to “is that fresh or salt?” unless there is an unusual tide or storm.  And so it is with fluidity itself.  That whole concept, with all its complexities, is a reason I distrust silicon “thinking” machines.  I do not think artificial solid intelligence can ever mimic fluid intelligence, and I believe we should all spend more time considering the vast difference.

Fleurs de June

Monday

• Impossibly well-endowed rhododendrons, carpets of showy roses, brief delicate appearances by irises and orchids such as ladies slipper _ June arrives with a flourish.  Depending on temperature, some will last a few days or a week, others extend the entire month.   In a few weeks, as solstice arrives, almost all annual blooms will reach peak.  Some will continue all summer, others will quickly be pollinated and work on the important target of producing fruit. 
• A few people claim this is absolute perfection, and believe a continuous floral world would be heavenly.  Such exists in tropical zones.  But I truly enjoy the wild madness of seasons, when solar energy must be seized as conditions are right, and every day is preparation for another cycle of dormancy.  Maybe I am just a masochist, but that aspect of nature presents a continuous morality play and entertainment unmatched by the stifling dripping sameness of an equatorial jungle. 

Tuesday

Stein sighs a rose is just a rose

Exactly true, yet also wrong

Several billion years of death,

And birth, and glorious strife

Enclose each rose

As they do you,

As they do me, who is just me.

Wednesday

• Swordlike leaves, sultry voluptuous flower, an iris resembles something out of medieval mythology.  Adding to the mystery is the impossibility of telling exactly which plants will bloom, if ever.  When display does appear, it almost instantly vanishes, broken by wind or rain or some internal process of shyness.  Like a unicorn, the more it is pampered, the less it thrives, dying of attention.  An impossibly perverse plant, but gorgeous.
• Ours came with the house, originally started by Joan’s mother, under whose care they thrived.  We have had no such luck, but we keep nursing them along, and hoping, and are occasionally rewarded.  This specimen, in particular, lasted exactly three magical days, racing into high heat, destroyed by heavy downpour.  I could force a lesson into that, but for once I will rest content at simply having enjoyed its moment.

Thursday

“Your patio is amazing,” remarked Jean as the four of us settled into our chairs.  “How did you get it all so early?”

“Joan does all the work,” I said, “she’s been shopping for weeks.  We had some of the stuff in the garage for a while when the weather was so bad.”

“And then I have to plant it all,” noted Joan proudly.  “Lots of work.”

“Not as much work as the shopping,” I reply.  “She needs everything just exactly the right color.”

“They usually don’t have just what I want.  I need to keep going back and grab the right plants when they come in.”

“So all of this is new every year?” asked Richard, amazed.

“No, there’re a few annuals,” Joan pointed a few out almost defensively.

“I was reading about making a really natural garden in one of my magazines.”  Jean likes to have a point of view.

I laughed.  “If we let this become natural it would look like any vacant lot in town.  Does anyway, if we don’t keep up with the weeds.”

“But I read it’s not as good for bees and birds and butterflies if you just put in common stuff from the store.”

“Well, I like what I like.  I know how I want it to look.”  Joan is, in gardening, a true artist.

“We get lots of birds in any case,” I added, trying to find a middle ground.

Fortunately, at that point the conversation swerved into families, and we could relax for a while to enjoy our drinks in peace.

Friday

• Roses star in Huntington’s June.  Not only are many insanely beautiful, but the wide varieties include native or naturalized species that thrive like weeds (which is, remember, the classic definition of a weed _ a rose in a cornfield.)  Some fill the air with perfume, some climb thickly as if by design on old buildings and walls, some stun with intricate internal folds and patterns.  For the next few weeks, they are ubiquitous.  After that, they become less clamorous, although there always seem to be a few blooms somewhere until frost.
• Years ago, my own statements would have sent me racing to reference materials.  “How widespread are roses?”  “What does the species include?”  “Which were originally found on Long Island?”  Now I rarely bother.  That may be a failure, or sheer laziness, but I prefer to think of it as a deepening wisdom.  It is well to know the accepted details of many things which can expand my worldview, but enchantment does not really require massive common knowledge.  Enchantment with life is what I now seek.

Saturday

• Now almost a century on, back in my mother’s day, there were small crystal globes filled with liquid in which was preserved a flower _ typically a rose or orchid.   Often it held memory of some special moment _ a dance, a wedding.  Like a soothsayer’s apparatus, this small keepsake would hold place of honor on a shelf, mantle, or table.  We would examine it closely once in a while, the curved glass acting as a magnifying lens, a strange curiosity.
• I sometimes think of my life that way, as a bloom to be preserved in the equivalent of one of those spheres.  I am not of the generation that thinks in terms of being embedded in a matrix, nor of the persuasion that my disembodied spirit will somehow flit free of worldly ties and do something else.  I like my fleshy envelope, and would be quite unhappy and quickly bored without it.  But, like most humans, I find it is a little frightening to consider that all ends, and the universe continues on as if I had never been.
• Ah, but preserved as some rare bloom _ I like that.  Some creature out of time free to examine my prides and faults, to admire or point out blemishes.  I imagine a kind of envy such as I sometimes have reading a particularly good biography.  Time, of course is the last frontier, and we are so entangled with it that I doubt we shall ever comprehend how life and the arrow of entropy really intertwine with the cosmic surge of leptons and branes.
• Am I a weed or lovely hothouse production?  Does it matter?  All such judgments are in the eye of the beholder, and as far as I know I remain the sole beholder.  Misty fantasies for a rainy, meditative afternoon.

Sunday

• Assorted festivals and fairs, like this art show in Hecksher Park, are part of the human efflorescence of the month.  Weddings, of course, are the other tradition.  People and their crafts of amazing inventiveness bloom as much as any flower.  Passersby are merely amazed at what they can see, touch and purchase.  This day was perfect, but rain washed out the next.
• From conversations, most of the artisans here are dilettantes, in the sense that all their income is not dependent on what they make and sell.  Quality is as high or higher than that of professionals.  I understand that those who live and breathe and sell and perfect art are wonderfully able to craft things nobody else can.  But in the American market, at least, those who seek to earn a living from their efforts find they must devote huge amounts of time to sales,  and warp their skills to continually provide artifacts which require more novelty than vision and technique.