Atmospheric Blues

Invisible air even heavy with mist only blurs a springtime hill

• “Why is the sky blue?” is the quintessential child’s question.  Adults could query “Why is the air clear?” or “Why can we see?” or even “Why can we breathe?”  Short scientific explanations about blueness refer to scattering of light by molecules.  Details about which molecules are most involved on earth (nitrogen and oxygen) and why humans have evolved to perceive blue and use oxygen are usually omitted.  On other planets, we now surmise, the sky might not be blue at all.  Even on our own turf, different eyes on different creatures will perceive it much differently (if at all) than as a “blue experience.”
• With many important things on our minds, we usually pay no attention to the sky and air around us.  Perhaps a sunrise or sunset captures a moment of reflective beauty.  Perhaps a storm interrupts our well-laid plans.  Pollution _ local or global _ may cause indignation, but most of us happily step into the trees at a park and glance at a blue sky; smile and look away.  No rain, bright sun, things are good.  The way it always was, and always should be.

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  Fog is incredibly metaphoric but also intensely sensually real.

• Early science fiction was really about society, but it tried to avoid pure fantasy.  So for the most part almost all extraterrestrial stories _ from space opera to carefully crafted parlor mysteries _ took a blue sky as given.  Intelligence, it was supposed, required certain normalities, the atmosphere being one.  In doing so, it was simply following ancient and medieval convention.
• Until recently, air and blue sky just were, filling the universe wherever there was not solid land or water. Sophisticated ancient cosmologies imagined crystal spheres floating on air, Medieval European visions assumed breathable atmosphere continuously from heaven to hell, early science figured air filled all the empty space around the moon, sun, and planets.  Eventually, space was filled with ether, then vacuum.  Discovery that atmosphere is a thin shell around our sphere projected that other celestial bodies must also be surrounded similarly.  Only in the last hundred years were we informed that some planets, stars, moons and asteroids have none, some have superheated noxious gases, some have cold dry wind lacking oxygen, and some have nearly unimaginable mixes of peculiar gasses.  Few, so far, indicate an oxygen/nitrogen composition.
• Most air is nitrogen, but most effects of air are from water.  Extraterrestrial searches seek “goldilocks” planets _ not too big, not too small, just the right distance from a sun to provide liquid water and gravity to keep it in place.  Meanwhile, geologists increasingly believe our aquatic envelope has been provided by accidents like the moon’s creation, or just enough volcanic action to provide an aerosol sealant, or a molten core to generate a protective magnetic shield, and other exotic local accidents and solar cycles.  Water may not be nearly as common a component even at “perfect” planets as we like to imagine.
• And, of course, that all-important oxygen, which is only there because of just the right type of bacteria doing their thing for billions of years.  Incidentally providing a protective ozone shield for just-enough mutations leading to a relatively mild evolution without radiation poisoning.  Another just-right consideration.  Without that, blue sky pretty much vanishes, not to mention anyone like you to see and appreciate it during a lunch walk.

Rain is very common _ possibly weeks on end _ around here in late March.

• Do you ever consider how it stays the way it is?  How do water and oxygen keep heading back up and down.  People point to trees, but it is probably really viruses and bacteria and fungi, many in the oceans, that keep our oxygen level as it is.  It is waves and evaporation that keep water in the air.  It is an ozone shell that helps trap the water which floats towards space, a van-allen belt that keeps hydrogen from being stripped and lost.  There are so many complexities to maintenance of our sky that the mind boggles, even before we consider how many billions of years it has been relatively stable.   
• Every breath we take is an infinitely convoluted procedure to achieve continued existence.  Each glance we make into a blue sky is an insanely moderated chain of chemical and electrical reactions that somehow gives us experience from photons.  Every memory we have of storm or cloud or clear sky is impossible to comprehend as neurological storage.
• Most amazingly, we do not have to understand any of it to appreciate it.  Surely the earliest humans enjoyed blue sky as much as we do, at least unless they were hoping for rain.  So what if, like many other things, it is insanely more complicated than we think.  A child can appreciate it, with or without annoying wonder, and so can we.

Logic of Chaos

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Like a bird in a cage, we are happily protected as long as civilization continues to provide food, water, and shelter.

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  A hundred years ago, educated people believed that the scientific universe was a pretty rational place, ruled by action and reaction, cause and effect.  If you knew the positions and vectors of everything at any given moment, you could easily extrapolate everything else, forward and backward in time.  Only ignorant religious people thought an omnipotent intelligent god could overrule that sterile logic.  It was merely our feeble understanding of today that made life so unpredictable.   But eventually science rediscovered chaos and indeterminacy.  Sociologists and economists noted “black swan” events.  And now civilization is suddenly finding how disruptive a chaotic pandemic can be.
• Rationally planning the future is a wonderful fantasy that works much of the time.  It is analogous to an integrated circuit _ cheap and reliable, easily discarded and a new one acquired.  The flaw in integrated circuits is that they are integrated _ they cannot be repaired.  Even a trivial break can irreparably destroy its functionality.  Planned futures vanish just as easily _ a carefully prepared nest egg can be lost in a momentary market crash, the detailed construction of a perfect retirement shattered by an unfortunate medical diagnosis or automobile accident.
• Daily predictability is not applicable to the long term.  Nevertheless, each day, we do wake up the same age, in the same situation, facing the same problems and joys.  Our car will start, work will commence, the sun will come up, weather will conform to average.  Over the long run, those items may change a lot, but day by day they continue in the same old groove.  Unless there is a disruption.  And history indicates that an unpredictable disruption is almost predictable.
• Panic occurs when our ability to control the situation deteriorates.  Normally, we can be pretty sure that if we do not have milk in the refrigerator today we need to buy more for tomorrow’s breakfast, taken care of with a quick shopping trip.  Broken cars need a mechanic, rain requires an umbrella. We have a calming belief that we control that aspect of our lives.  Yet if a storm or disaster disrupts the supply chain we worry, people grab, stockpile, panic.  Tiny inconveniences like lack of bread or deep puddles culminate in mass anxiety.

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  Spring theatrics continue to advance regardless of the plight of the local human population.

• There is such a thing as “normality,” where we usually live.  But normality is not guaranteed.  It is simply inertia and cannot account for unexpected events.  Chaos also guarantees that nobody can determine the right bets to make _ hedging against the normal, as it were.  Maybe the price of milk will skyrocket, maybe it is tulips, maybe gasoline will be unavailable.  Sink resources into the wrong thing and you may end up with a refrigerator full of sour curds and a lot of lost opportunity.
• In any crisis, experts offer advice.  Most of what people want to hear is how to control the outcome.  When nothing is offered, or suggestions are impractical, we will follow any superstition to warm our hearts with an illusion.  Washing hands, avoiding eye contact with strangers, drinking lots of ginger ale _ whatever we hear and want to believe _ become necessary for peace of mind.  Because of the placebo effect _ a great deal of this superstitious behavior actually works to that end.
• In the modern integrated-circuit world, where everything has to go just right or nothing works, we have come to trust movie scenarios.  A coronavirus pandemic seems very like the Zombie apocalypse.  We will all soon be lurching around eating each other.  There is a rush of fear, a spasm of irrational behavior.  And then day goes by after boring day, and tasks must be done, and no bodies are littering the neighborhood.   And life goes on.

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  Extended contemplation of fragile beauty soothes my spirit regardless of other circumstance.

• There will be lots of chaos to come.  Scientists and preachers have been telling us for years, sometimes for thousands of years.  Chaos is one of the foundations of the universe.  But so are cause and effect and logic.  We need to be aware of uncontrollable unpredictable chaos, but we can also learn to mitigate its effects.  To some extent, we can even evoke control by determining what to focus on.
• As for me, equinox has arrived, spring blooms enliven the landscape, the sky is blue, and I still feel pretty good.  None of my neighbors is pounding on my door with a bloody detached hand.  If this is really the end _ I don’t think it is _ so be it.  A passenger on the Titanic can listen to the band playing and enjoy the music until the sea closes in.

Skunk Cabbage

An odd flower almost 4 inches high, inconspicuous in its native bog.

• Daffodils and forsythia get all the glory.  Let us rather compose an ode to the unloved, unnoticed, forgotten.  Around here, skunk cabbage provides such marvelous metaphor.  Early colonists hoped that its brilliant early lovely huge green leaves would provide a tasty and nourishing source of vitamins after long winters of snow and ice.  Great disappointment when they tried, and hence its name.  No industrial uses have subsequently been discovered.  It could go extinct without anyone noticing.
• Skunk cabbage grows in wet marshy places on which nobody wants to farm nor to build.  Lately, its environment has been shrinking because those habitats were either flooded with dams, or filled in for development.  Where it survives, it is quite hardy, remaining through the years in niches that seem all but impossible.  It is up early in March, flowers weirdly crunching underfoot of the unwary.  By April, its emerald presence is unmistakable, since it thrives in huge colonies. 

Early-appearing leaves look delicious and are easy to see

• Part of the excitement of looking at a skunk cabbage is that the flower is endothermic.  That is, it generates its own heat, which allows its early emergence.  Another part is just that the flower itself is so unique and strange.  And I wonder what insects it expects to come and pollinate at such a frigid time of year.  (Yes, I know I could look it up, but sometimes I like wonder to remain a bit magical and mysterious.)
• Thrill of the hunt occurs each late winter when I head into a local bit of woodland to see whether that patch of skunk cabbage still remains.  Like that O’Henry story about the last leaf, I am heartened to find it is still there, somehow.  Then I have a lot of sympathy realizing that I am probably the sole soul who will stop by to notice.
• And what is the purpose of skunk cabbage?  Again a lesson, because the only point of that organism, and probably mine as well, is the perpetuation of a particular genetic structure, or, in older parlance, that particular form of life.  Any given plant will be gone in another year, eventually flooded or buried, and possibly all descendants of this group will vanish forever without a trace.  Does that make it meaningless to have bloomed and grown now, for all its intangible effect upon the world?
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  Beauty is always available in mixtures of earth, water, and life.

• My own purpose relating to this plant is similarly in question.  I will not be able to save this environment, I will not be able to assure this plant remains, I will not be able to control sea rise or drought or continental drift.  Heck, bulldozers might arrive next week, toxic chemicals might have done their work before I arrive each spring to look.  No, I am helpless as a protector.  I can at least appreciate its effort and its existence.  I can see it as a vision, as a symbol,  as a connection to the past, as a hope for the future. 
• I am grateful for my relationship with the humble skunk cabbage.  I have followed it in various places for the last fifty years or more.  As a measure of my own life and as a harbinger of my eventual meaning.  If there is a bit of enlightenment which follows from my meditations, I am even more thankful.

A Time for Every Purpose

This crumbling structure once served some purpose of which it reminds us even in decay

• As I grow older, I resist binary division _ something being “this or that.”  And yet, it is such a natural and useful way to think.  An example is our experience of time as being either a “cycle or an arrow.”  Do we see this moment as a unique part of a journey, or a repetition of something we have done before and will do again.  In full complexity and contradiction, I realize that both perspectives are true and false at the same time, and moreover that time itself is a slippery concept not only beyond binary understanding, but beyond any comprehension at all

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  Crocuses in the spring claim that life inhabits a solar cycle.

• My essay is really about how to view my life (as an elder, I frequently waste time considering such things, rather than doing something useful.)  I have increasingly come to view my past as a series of stages on a long parabola of change.  There are lots of people who resist thinking of time as an arrow.  Their internal perspective is a perpetual cycle, in which they view themselves as forever thirty.  At twelve years old, they have planned their future, and they continue to map imagined days to come as they near eighty and beyond.  Working at a purpose from adolescence until death, doing the best they can, unwavering exemplars of ants on a mission.
• For fortunate survivors of life’s lotteries, time should be a varying gift.  Existence is remarkably different for a child, an adolescent, a young adult, a mature adult, an aged adult, and an old geezer.  And all the stops in between.  That biggest chunk of “middle age” also has its own subsets, some more definitive than other.  Ask any woman past menopause, or a professional athlete nearing forty.  People tend to refer to aging as a series of “losses”, but the proper way to see it is as ongoing fractal gifts which allow us to examine our universe in different ways. 

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  Apparently a farm from the 1800’s, actually from 1920’s, through various grand uses.

• Ancient Greeks were right in describing their immortal gods as silly, shallow people.  Endless cycles are simply monotony, good or bad.  Buddha strove to escape that wheel.   Masters of the Universe in our economic society are equally foolish, equally shallow _ old charioteers who claim they are just as good or better at whatever they always have done as they were when young.  Even if they are _ what a sad and claustrophobic trap they have set themselves.  All the cosmos to explore and they happily prowl a tiny cage of their own construction.
• Should we not fear death?  I suppose _ it is almost inconceivable _ except that we do approach it each night as we fall asleep.  Personally, I more fear incapacity, and I have always feared suffering.  Death is just an ending.  What we live is far more important.   When we define our lives as simply routine cycles _ go to work, make money, for example _ our whole being can be written in a few pages.  A journey, on the other hand, goes on and on through volume after volume, each amazingly different as each year and decade provides new challenge and response.  
• Western thought dreads the purposelessness of oblivion, hoping for “life after death” or meaning in the advance of civilizations.   Its myths teach of eternal heroes, salvaged from whisper by mighty deeds of honor.  Heroes whose memory will live forever.  It dreads the claim of science that the cosmos is temporary, that not only does everyone die, not only are all deeds and civilizations eventually dust, but also the universe itself will encounter a definite and complete ending.  Some retreat into hopelessness, or hedonism, or denial.  Everyone is affected.  Can there be purpose when everything is doomed? 

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  Andromeda flowers in this climate are useless except as beauty itself.

• Not all human thought is Western, of course, even though that dominates our current world.  Other cultures, and more ancient civilizations, survived happily and comfortably with a mythology and philosophy that easily encompassed temporary achievement and death.  Some animists thought that there were three stages of a person’s existence _ actual life, remembrance by others after death, and the final forgetting.  Others taught that gods and fate were fickle and much of went on in heaven was irrelevant to our common day to day reality.  All such peoples were not lost in morose contemplation of ultimate meaning.
• So I wake up in a world where there are truly troubles and my own small cares.  But there are also wonders around me.  I concentrate on the wonders, grateful for their experience, and honestly do not care at all what will come after I am incapable of knowing.

Seeking Spring Signs

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  Bare branches of forsythia cut to bloom after about a week indoors.

• March marches in with better sunshine, equinox only weeks away.  This is often a turbulent month, with high winds, unexpected deep freezes, and an occasional blizzard roaring in out of nowhere.  For me, March also heralds real new year, when my brain begins to unclog, casts off the pallor of imaginary hostage confinement by weather, and plans actively for good times to come.
• If I search diligently, spring emergence is ubiquitous.  Bulb shoots thrust higher by the day.  Rose and briar stalks streak red and green.  Buds swell on almost all trees and bushes.  The andromeda tree in front is ready to flower, and I have cut forsythia to force in our kitchen for a burst of color.  Garlic clumps dab emerald among fallen leaves, soon to be followed by more unwelcome mats of chickweed.  Already, in sheltered spots, ragweed stakes out territory.

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  Roses begin to demonstrate a few hopeful hints of what is to come.

• Fewer birds have overwintered near our yard this year, perhaps scared away by a nearly resident falcon which often perches on a dogwood tree out back.  I’ve not yet seen a robin, but they will return soon.  Crows and jays are beginning to screech.  Small birds flit about as they have all winter.  On the harbor,  waterfowl resume mating antics.   If I stop and pay attention, I can believe another cycle begins as always.  If I pay more attention, I realize that there is less wildlife than I remember.
• On a warm afternoon, clouds of gnats will puff in shafts of sunlight.  An insomniac bee may start making a futile search for flowers.  Spiders might produce webs.  In warming beds of leaves, all kinds of larvae stir after their long rest.  One day, suddenly, there will be ants and unwelcome termites, and other arthropods which I cannot name.
• Only the most ambitious and restless have begun spring chores.  I do know people who already turn over garden beds, while here and there chainsaws and leaf blowers pierce the lovely quiet we have enjoyed for such a brief respite.  But mostly it is too early to paint, too cold to put out patio furniture, much too winter to even think about flowers and grass.  However, the thought that all this activity will soon arrive in force is enough to make me grateful for a little longer period of rest, sort of like pushing a snooze button on the seasonal alarm clock.

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  Bay and beach look fine as summer, but are swept by bitter wind.

• The worst frost spell is unbound; I begin to dream of green fields and gardens and long afternoons on a hot beach with gulls flying overhead as salty drops dry on my skin.  Not too long from now, what will we do, where will we go?  I compose a wavering list of places to visit once again, to renew acquaintance with locations in the most pleasant weather imaginable.  Not memory, although remembrance is involved, but dreams of how fine it will be.
• Still, it is only March.  I have to rein back my thoughts and return to actual blustery conditions.  I continue to sit inside on too many dreary wet days.  All those wonderful spring-summer-fall marvels to come are _ well, just “to come.”  It is real easy to become fidgety and wonder why grey skies do not break open, why the beautiful promise of brilliant sunbeams is so often crushed by actual conditions when I step outside the door.  March by the solar calendar of our latitude continues defined as winter. 
• Then I return to the cold comforts of a season of hibernation.  Reading in warmth, able to sit and not feel guilty for not doing something _ anything_ more.  Enjoying thick hot soups and stews.  As always, when I try, grateful for progression in my life, for the fact that days are not always the same, for the variety of being.  Spiced with the meteorological variety offered by this month.