Cold Comfort

Ice barely skims puddles during this year’s freeze/thaw gymnastics.

• Around here, some people love the winters.  Others despise, endure, ignore, or accept its cold and snow.  When I worked I was often happiest in winter because I did not think I was missing out on anything else.
• Most residents claim they like the change of pace, the natural reset.  We get fabulous cycles of spring, summer and fall.  My own feelings are probably the result of growing up in a similar environment; perhaps we are always eventually happiest where we recall our childhood.
• But sometimes, day after day can be wearing.  We have fortunately avoided heavy enduring snow cover this year, but by late February with no signs of breakout, winter has worn out its welcome.  Not even the tips of spring bulbs are showing, except for a few snowdrops.  Brambles have no baby leaf shoots.  Grass remains brown.  Bright sunny days are a kind of mockery.

Male geese display as much frantic pre-spring bravado as any human males at the local bar scene

• Enervation and cabin fever are likely afflictions.  It is all very well to try to meditate or think deep thoughts, to catch up on reading or entertainment, to go out to eat or attend various events.  We are fortunate to live in a society that offers so much.  And yet …
• Sometimes when it is 23 outside, and clouds promise chill wind or damp snow, it is awful hard at my age to jump out of bed.  I become prone to just sitting with an empty mind and no ambition whatsoever, content with memories and less.  Any activity a bit too much to begin.
• However, when I do get a move on, when I ramble through silent muddy woodland trails or near-tundra meadows, I am profoundly grateful for the unusual quiet and solitude.  Everyone else seems to be somewhere else, my whole immediate environment is mine alone.  King of the world.  Empty spaces all around, as close to nature as it is ever possible for me to be.

In spite of occasional power takeoffs with frantically flapping webbed feet, swans emanate total calm.

• Besides, the glide to spring is in full force.  Days are much longer, sunsets much later, daylight much sooner.  Most puddles melt when hit by the increasingly strong rays of the sun.  If I search hard enough there are plenty of signs of life stirring, from the frisky squirrels stealing from the birdfeeder to the swans beginning mating flights over the harbor.  Rumor has it that a local park already offers lessons in maple-sugaring. 
• The best thing about the end of February is that these deepest of winter hours also hold the most hopeful promises of what is to come.  For one more year, I have survived the bleakest times, and any terrible weather day is simply a temporary setback. 
• Truly nothing to complain about.  I’m warm, well fed, healthy and entertained.  By all measures, a genuine king of life.

Fading Omens

Raindrops and fog are just as pretty as flowers glowing under clear sunny skies.

Our environment is so infinitely rich that we often fail to notice the absence of something.  Unconsciously, we are tuned to detect threats from something, rather than nothing.  That is why the so-called sixth extinction is so insidious. 

I would worry if thousands of dead ducks floated on the harbor, but I am less aware that this year instead of scores of buffleheads I have seen only two.  I would be aghast at masses of dead monarch butterflies carpeting my yard in summer, but rarely pay attention to the fact that there are few where there used to be many.

Extinction in our times is not often massive.  It is a phenomenon of less and less, becoming none.  It is not suddenly in one area, but gradually everywhere.  That is the most frightening aspect of the tragedy, that we will be mostly unaware until it is too late.

Truly empty puppy cove, not even a seagull or crow, let alone a wild duck.

Children of the suburban post-war era are used to vanishing local wildness.  I grew up familiar with roaming box turtles, ground-nesting birds, various types of snakes, odd insects.  As they disappeared, I assumed there were still lots more over the hills, upstate, in the jungles described in National Geographic.

On Long Island, only forty years ago, there were lobsters being harvested nearby, toads in the sand of the south shore, bats flying at twilight.  My wife remembers seals in Huntington harbor.  We assume that they have simply moved to better places.  We are overoptimistically wrong.

Life is tenacious.  There are lots of squirrels, pigeons,  gulls, rats, raccoons and mosquitoes.  Current worries are diminishing bees and other useful insects, a drop in numbers of horseshoe crabs, but they are still easily found. 

For years, migrating bird counts have been plummeting, a sign that all is not well elsewhere.  Articles from alarmed scientists note the end of many species, a disastrous fall in insect activity, the possible collapse of rain forests.  But those are far away, out of sight, out of mind, as I take my local walk.

Weeds will certainly survive any human apocalypse, and all unknowing will provide what was once considered beauty to an unappreciative world.

I like to fantasize that something will be done, that it all will work out, that somehow my childhood Pleistocene paradise will be saved or will save itself.  Logically, I understand that such is too late already. Looked at one way, humanity is just another natural catastrophe, like an asteroid.  No more use to lament extinct birds or frogs than extinct dinosaurs.

I grew up thinking nuclear war would destroy everything.  It has simply taken a little longer.  Back then, I knew there was nothing I could do about it.  Still feel the same way.  An awful lot of people voted in an anti-science administration.  An awful lot of people are willing to kill a rain forest to have a new floor.  An awful lot of people need to eat and are willing to do whatever it takes.  Me yelling “stop” at them has no effect whatever.

So at times like this, I simply put it all in one bucket and enjoy a possibly dying world as I am enjoying a soon-to-die self.  There are still wonderful experiences, still possibilities.  Maybe all the rest will work out, but I will never know.

Ch'ill

Passing heavy snow shower reminds us how much worse this winter could have been.

• Winter has seemed relatively mild, in spite of an occasional visit by the polar vortex.  Only major snow near Thanksgiving, ongoing a less-than-half-normal amount.  There remains lots of time, but with equinox peeking around the corner of the next month, the length of days and angle of sun would already make lingering snow cover for weeks unlikely.
• The harbor has never actually frozen over, certainly no mini-icebergs.  A few times the fresh water floating on top from shore seepage has formed a light skim, and once or twice severe cold with wind froze even salt spray on the docks.  But those times have been few and far between, and Huntington remains an ice-free port.
• On the other hand, for our own extended family, seasonal illnesses seem to have been circulating since early December without letup.  Flu or norovirus or something unnamed is always being fought off, coming on, being endured, clearing up, or finally gone.  With toddlers, young adults in health professions, and elders who like to shop, it seems that someone has always had something to donate to the stew for the next round.   Being stuck inside together all day in extremely dry heat doesn’t help.

The famous “Blizzard of 1888” didn’t come along until March 11 of an unusually mild winter, so nothing is certain about the rest of this season.

• Nature even seems to be holding back.  There are far fewer birds than normal in the local waters, not even so many at my backyard feeder.  Only squirrels seem up to their regular numbers.  I only hope that avian crowds have found more congenial spots somewhere else, and that our empty waves do not portend something worse.
• Often by now, a “January thaw” or some other week of warmth would have started bulb shoots and some buds well on their way, might have slightly greened grass.  Not this year, all remains brown and seemingly lifeless.  A few snowdrops at the end of the driveway are doing their best, and I shall cut my traditional forsythia branches to force indoors, but I’ve seen mid-February’s with a lot more signs of spring.

Hard to remember this beach packed with blankets, bikinis, teens, toddlers, parents, and elders as it will be again in a few months.

• In dead of winter, especially when health is shaky, I find it too easy to sink inward and forget spring is coming followed by long seasons of summer and fall.  Retired, I read and eat and perform repetitive tasks each day, so that all days seem like the same day.   Getting dressed and going into the chill is an adventure.
• Another cycle has begun, and its progression will eventually seep into my bones, then flow into my soul.  

Spirit World

Is our reality as insubstantial as reflections on calm harbor water?

• Some people age into religion.  Consciousness of mortality brings out the best and the worst.  Perhaps the oddest aspect of this change of perspective is that there is so much diversity in our “religious impulse.”
• I am well aware of multiple realities.  I encounter, for example, one set of things I have definitely experienced while asleep.  I experience another set, with more rigid rules, when awake.  I may be happy or sad within instants when confronting exactly the same scenario.  Daydream imagination, unfounded worries, or specious plans are constant companions.
• Rarely do these different aspects of my consciousness fully interact.  The rules of my awake self do not apply in dreams, nor vice versa.  The mood of this moment vanishes rather than clashing with my next mercurial emotion.  I accept this complexity and contradiction as part of the mysterious miracle of existence.
• I believe my contrasting experiences are each real within my universes.  Dreams of flying over fields or taking a detested test or talking with dead friends are memories as sharp as those of going to the grocery store yesterday morning.  Since all remembrances are suspect, dare I judge which is more real than the other?

Where do I fit, where do other people fit, and what about all the rest of it including this squirrel?

• But that is my personal universe.  We can both remember going to the supermarket together, but our dreams are sealed from one another.  I may see you in my dreams; you do not simultaneously find me in yours.  I know the “whole” universe is mysterious and unknowable, so none of that distresses me.  I accept that “ultimate reality” is truly ineffable _ we are incapable of knowing it.  And I leave it at that.
• I object to others who would try to force their own rigid alternate visions on me.  I encounter personal “truths”, they find their own,  each is unique.  I refuse to believe any prophet knows more than I do about how I experience life.  Anything beyond what we call “objective reality” _ which is to say the passage of days, the effect of gravity, the happiness of a good meal, and so on _ is disputation in vapor.   
• The more fervent the preaching, the faster I run. 

Standard reference for resurrection are deciduous trees _ I prefer these nearly-blooming snowdrops.

• Science is a fine thing, but it is only a tool.  Human existence is as ineffable as the cosmos it inhabits.  Scientific measurement of purpose, joy, love, friendship is cold and useless.  Like any tool, science has proper uses and improper applications. 
• People are fine-tuned to be people.  What we can experience is what we should experience, and at least in some sense that is what “reality” means.  Moreover, people are social creatures, and some of our existence requires interaction with others.  We can share bread, we can share work, we can share love: we can only share individual visions through the power of words.  In spite of the claims of ancient philosophers and prophets, words are not the basis of my spiritual worlds.