Author: Kate Hemenway

You can guess where my thought process is going from this title, on Saturday, December 16th, 2023, 5:19am and I am sitting at my desk without feeling even a little cold. Granted the heat is coming up, but that’s because it’s 5:19am and the thermostat timer said it’s time. It is New England. It is days before the winter solstice. It is 5:19am and it is already 35 degrees farenheit. It is too warm.

What US state is the floating piece of Antarctica compared to in size? I think it’s Utah. And the Arctic is experiencing rain!

Hunker down. Sell your snow blower to someone on the moon of Neptune that I just heard has been determined to maybe being supportive of “life”, whatever that means. For certain, it will be colder than here.

Last week, I “tracked” a deer in the utility cut. Its footprints were easily followed in the soft mud. I should be seeing them in snow, or, not at all because the ground would be too cold to soften.

All right. I’m blue. I’m sorry.

Let’s start again.

Last night I was headed to friends’ house. I was going west. I was following the most lovely, clear reclining crescent moon that I have seen in a long time. It held there in the clear night, in the lower western/northwestern sky like a smile. It led me to my friends’ house and then ducked behind a stand of trees that border their property. Thank you.

I did not photograph it, (nor did get up the night before and the night before that at 1:00 to see the meteor shower, I slept through) but I did capture the recent full moon with Jupiter off to its side.

This morning I obviously am preceding sunrise. Usually, these days, when sunrise, regardless of earth atmospheric upheaval, predictably occurs a bit after 7:00 am eastern standard time, usually I am raising the shades and opening the blinds. I love the free entry of sunlight. I love it so much that sometimes I end up in the dark early in the evening (in the winter; late in the evening in the summer), because I am in it and haven’t noticed that indeed it, here in Massachusetts, is no longer visible above the western horizon. In part that is because my personal western horizon includes quite a few rooflines and a nice number of trees, so the sun sets before it is sunset. It’s okay. I love sunlight and it stays with me, in my being long after its daily physicality has completed the up half of its cycle.

My, how I am wandering.

It is now 5:50am. I just heard a car drive by. When I was growing up, our apartment was above a NYC bus stop. There was never not a vehicle driving, stopping, wheezing, outside the windows. But most of our windows faced south. So the days brought sunlight freely, although my mother, as many do, had “sheers” hanging in front of the windows. Not for me, sheers.

Here are the homes of a couple of locals:

___________________________

Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your mind, with all your strength, with all your soul. And love your neighbor as yourself. (Mark 12:30-31, slightly paraphrased)

Good morning. This is one of those that I haven’t endured in awhile. It is 3:05AM. After lying awake for an hour and some minutes, I said to myself, if Maria gets up from her head against my leg, I will get up and write a post. It has been a month. This was a done deal, because Maria always gets up and leaves the warmth of bed at least once that I have noticed, in the times I would awaken for no reason other than that I awoke, within the middle of the night to go downstairs and use her box, or into the kitchen to drink some water from her bowl, or, perhaps just to prowl the house and to check on the whereabouts of Stella, who, six times out of ten, will be snoring on the couch. Both my cats snore.

Lately, I’ve been rereading a book by Wendell Berry. A book named The Long-Legged House⁽¹⁾. There is a chapter named, The Rise. It is about a flooding Kentucky River one year in, I think, the 1960s. I want to give you a paragraph from it (pg. 106): “If one imagines the shore line exactly enough as the division between water and land, and imagines it rising–it comes up too slowly for the eye usually, so one must imagine it–there is a sort of magic about it. As it moves upward it makes a vast change, far more than the eye sees. It makes a new geography, altering the boundaries of worlds. Above it, it widens the freehold of the birds, below it, that of the fish. The land creatures are driven back and higher up. It is a line between boating and walking, gill and lung, standing still and flowing. Along it, suddenly and continuously, all that will float is picked up and carried away: leaves, logs, seeds, little straws, bits of dead grass.//And also empty cans and bottles and all sorts of buoyant trash left behind by fishermen and hunters and picnickers, or dumped over creek banks by householders who sometimes drive miles to do it. …”

I woke up that hour plus ago with a thought about wisdom. Wisdom is available to everyone. Wisdom can be received. It can be mulled over. It can be imparted. To, within, from each of us.

But so, too, can ignorance. By the same participants.

We can be wise, and, sadly, we can be not wise.

Again from Wendell Berry’s The Long-Legged House: (pg. 60) “Since 1945 it has been generally acknowledged that the world is our dependent. It has been acknowledged, that is, that it is the dependent of those governments capable of atomic holocaust{or myriad holocausts, I would add}. But it is becoming more and more apparent, as we continue to contaminate the soil and water and air and to waste and misuse the natural wealth, that the world is also the dependent of private organizations and individuals… Because of the enormous increase in the economic and technological power of individuals, what once were private acts become public: the consequences are inevitably public. A man on a bulldozer can scarcely make a move that does not affect either his neighbors or his heirs…. {or this planet}

(pg. 61) “A community is not merely a condition of physical proximity… A community is the mental and spiritual condition of knowing that the place is shared, and that the people who share the place define and limit the possibilities of each other’s lives {and all created life}. It is the knowledge that people have of each other, their concern for each other, their trust in each other, the freedom with which they come and go among themselves.”

(pg. 63) “…For man is not merely “in” the world. He is, he must realize and learn to say or be doomed, part of it. The earth he is made of he bears in trust.”

_______________________________

⁽¹⁾Berry, Wendell: The Long-Legged House, copyright 1965, 1966, 1968, 1969; Harcourt Brace & World, Inc. NY

It is ending October. One more day after this one. I note the date for reasons of my own that have nothing to do with All Hallows’ Eve festivities. On Wednesday morning, when I wake up, it will be November 1st. This becomes a new morning. Have you ever heard Bob Dylan’s song, New Morning? It has leapt into my head with typing these words. It’s actually the title track on his album of that name, which came out (I looked it up), funnily, in October 1970. I remember buying it new, vinyl, hot off the press. I still have it, but no longer the mechanical means to listen to it, the vinyl album. A shame. But a choice. For neither have I the receiver to capture the tones from the record on the turntable, nor the audio speakers wired to the receiver to enable Dylan’s then young, comprehensible voice to fill the room I am in. I do have, in my head, him singing it, and I am enjoying it.

Can’t you hear that rooster crowing? / … So happy just to see you smiling/Underneath the sky of blue/On this new morning, new morning/On this new morning with you.

Speaking of words. I was thinking about words today, and writing. This time it is because of the novel I happen to be reading. It is a novel of beautiful, beautiful turns of phrases, and choices of words to describe action, to describe environs, and words to insert history that feeds/backstory’s the events of this particular novel’s story and main protagonist. It was, for the first 1/4 to 1/3 a novel that in this beauty and story pulled me along breath-held at how palpable and personal it was. I am now about halfway through. I am pausing. I am looking for something to do–Oh, I know, I say to myself, write a blogpost! The novel has lost my being and holds now only my eyes, as they skim the words, hoping for an insight into the protagonist and into her story that will grab them again and hold them steady, slow, in awe as it talks, and holds them between its very hands so they don’t blink and miss something.

Do you see what I did there? I was going to write a paragraph about how in the past few years I have read more than a few novels that have, with beautiful scene setting, magnificent phrasing, off-balancing themes, caught me up in paragraph one, and held me longer than the story being told could have on its own merits. So, you say, they did well!! No, because the bottom did fall out. I did stop reading despite the words that were as beautifully shaped as a work of visual or tonal art. I lost interest in the story. Or in the protagonist. In such cases, I am especially disappointed, because the artistry promised so much. It is like the carapace of a gone butterfly–no longer growing, promising caterpillar, and nowhere the dusty, iridescent wings present to be admired.

Do you see what I did there? I got caught up in my visuals. My similes. My metaphors. My images. I got caught up in Kate the writer.

This is what these disappointing novels–novels of artifice and poorly told, or absent story, or worst!! buried story–do.

Look at me! A literary critic!

No credentials. Consider my expressed thoughts, or not, as you wish. Thanks for reading this far.

And as a small, additional nudge, I find that literary criticism is also becoming a form of beauty that wanders far away from its reason for being. I spend my time, while trying to read this critique of a particular book or writer for insights into the book or writer, looking up words for what they mean, and puzzling out allusions for what their insiders-only message might be.

That is it for today, for the second to the last day of October 2023, a month of deep sadnesses around the world. May we remember them to encourage not repeating them, to not repeat them.

Good aftermoon! While I type this at 2:51pm Eastern time, someones somewhere in the north american northwest is, I believe, viewing the annular solar eclipse. So, pun intended. Here in northeastern Massachusetts the clouds have slid in, so even if an edge were going to hint at the solar-lunar event, clouds get in my way (who sang that, Judy Collins? who wrote it, probably Joni Mitchell).

This morning I went on a sustainable-routes walk in and around the east campus of UMass-Lowell, which borders the Merrimack River, the Merrimack Riverway Walkway, the Northern Canal, and borders and/or has acquired and repurposed a former nursing home/geriatric facility, hospital outbuilding, and factory buildings into classrooms, dorms, offices, an outdoor activities and bicycle shop, an alumni services building, transformed a grass swath into a pair of 1800 square foot green houses that it manages with a local farm management/food security nonprofit. There was also a discussion in her tour for us of the original dwellers of the shores of the Merrimack River, those indigenous communities who like everywhere in this country, in every country where colonialism took root, were rooted out.

We learned a good deal more about the neighborhoods, the past and future of the area, all located in the need for and the work towards ensuring sustainability and the many pockets of responsibility that word lands in, but I will stop here and provide no more descriptors that would be helped by photographs, and apologize, because I didn’t take any. So use your imaginations, and whatever impression you first garner, ratchet it up a level or two. The university, like the city, is mastering reuse, not perfectly, but increasingly.

I should also note that the guide, a newly graduated UML student and now UML-Graduate School student gave us a statistic pertaining to the greenness of Lowell, touting the large number of trees herein. I will not dispute her, but I would wish that there were many more trees, grouped in pockets throughout the city–grouped for purposes of supporting each other, and linked to other pockets in that distances between pockets are minimal, and assisted by something that is missing in a big way in this city, street trees. Native species.

And from there I go to where I went next. I went to a walkway halfway across the city that attends the Concord River. I entered the way just upriver from the mouth of the Concord River, the mouth being where it pours into the Merrimack River. I went with purpose of observing birds, because today is Fall Big Bird Count day to coincide, I would say a bit late in the cycle, with the birds’ fall migrations to their winter homes (there is definitely truth in assigning the appellation “snow birds” to northern USAers who travel south in the winter months). In the past several years I have participated in these–the fall one and the spring one. Never have I observed such a dearth of birds as I did today.

This is not good.

So this has become a blog post in which the photograph captions are as long as the textual paragraphs. What does this mean? I am not parsing. And you are having to deal with it. Oh. Well, you can, and may have already, stop(ped) reading.

Go outside, see if you can see a change in light of any kind related to annular eclipse.

See if you can spot birds in your local trees, at your feeders, on your neighbor’s roof. I pray you are successful. I think I’ll go out and check again myself.

Good Saturday morning. It is early. It is cool. I have had a cup and a half of coffee and am considering brewing another pot. (French press; I brew enough at a time that it is marked on the pot as 3 cups, but I only get 1 1/2 cups/mugs per brew, and some days I just love coffee especially much. Today is one. I’ll be back shortly.)

Tomorrow, I just read, summer returns–into the 70s here, and 80s by Tuesday. Across the street my neighbor’s brother’s Honda Element is parked and carries a pink bicycle on a carrier. The tires are even pink! Three, no four, no five shades of pink on that cycle–seat, basket, frame, pedals, tires. Only the handle bars are chrome. I am surprised there aren’t tassels streaming from the handle bar ends. Oh, there it goes –Element driving away toting the pink bicycle. I guess someone has been to see the Barbie movie. I have not. Have you?

So, where am I going with this? I am at sixes and sevens. Where does that expression come from? I looked it up. Many uncertain responses (how appropriate): The wikipedia one includes: “It is not known for certain, but the most likely origin of the phrase is the dice game “hazard“, a more complicated version of the modern game of craps.” Michael Quinion, a British etymologist, writing on his website on linguistics, says, “It is thought that the expression was originally to set on cinque and sice (from the French numerals for five and six). These were apparently the most risky numbers to shoot for (‘to set on’) and anyone who tried for them was considered careless or confused.”

And further, still from the Wikipedia entry: “A similar phrase, “to set the world on six and seven”, is used by Geoffrey Chaucer in his Troilus and Criseyde. It dates from the mid-1380s and seems from its context to mean “to hazard the world” or “to risk one’s life”.^[2] William Shakespeare uses a similar phrase in Richard II (around 1595), “But time will not permit: all is uneven, And every thing is left at six and seven”.

These explanations leave me just there, at six and seven, or am I at five and six? The choice leaves me at sea! Well, I will decide, since I am writing in the English language, I will stay at sixes and sevens. Although cinque et sice rolls off the tongue nicely, not having to use the throat as gutturally as sixes and sevens. Say them out loud, I think you’ll feel what I mean.

You know, we’re in a lot of trouble in this world. I stew over it. I plant little trees all over the place (very little, so that public works people won’t uproot them as wrong for the place, as not likely to thrive.) My backyard the willingest recipient of my experiments. And in among the plants I have in pots in the diningroom I now have four beechnuts in pots. I have faith one or all will emerge. I don’t know.

I also pushed a fifth beechnut into a pot in the backyard, the pot right next to the pot of rosemary, which is next to the pot of sage, which is next to the pot of tomato and basil.

Here is a painting I would like to share. It is called Braces’s Rock, and is painted by Fitz Henry Lane in 1864.

I saw it and was captured. I stood in front of it at the Cape Ann Museum for, oh, ten or more minutes. Paused. Immovable. At peace. And yet: Brace’s Rock (Brace’s Cove) is historically one of the worst sailing hazards on the entire New England coast. “It deceptively appears to be an entrance to Gloucester harbor. Nowhere on Cape Ann is the illusion of a peaceful ocean more pronounced that Brace’s Cove seen on a still summer afternoon.” (from Brace’s Rock Series written by Sam Holdsworth, in an online project under the direction of the Cape Ann Museum) For just that small space of time just I standing before that small ripple of water, that strand of beach. Inattentive to the beached, broken boat.

Oh the places I could go with a conversation about this. What do we see when we look? What don’t we? Do we not because we turn? because we blink? because we won’t? or because we can’t?

But I am stopping here. Because I began with a cool, early morning. The morning has aged two and a half hours. I just had a visit from some local faith based visitors. They have come to my door before, with tracts and smiles and Jehovah. We converse. They will come again. We will converse again. They are very nice. They are ardent. As am I in what I hold as my story with God.

As I am in what I wish.

May we find peace. May we understand love. May we give it.

Have you ever wondered why we change our mind, sometimes? Actually, writing that sentence, I wonder at the visual: I see a physical mind replacement occurring. I am sure over the years myriad cartoonists have drawn such an image — a face with two hands reaching above it and lifting out a brain so to replace or rearrange or change it. There’s that. And, there’s the question, what comprises the mind? Physicists and philosophers, neurology focused persons, and psychologically focused persons all have theories. But facts?

What are facts?

I looked it up:

A fact is a true datum about one or more aspects of a circumstance. Standard reference works are often used to check facts. Scientific facts are verified by repeatable careful observation or measurement by experiments or other means

And then I remembered something I just read this morning that talked about the “fact” that repeatable careful observations or measurements enacted to verify the factness of facts, are not directly applicable to real life, because randomness is everpresent, and randomness disallows the inviolability of a fact. Randomness does not happen the same way each time, nor is it from the same place, nor is it the same size, shape, color, tone, weight, ….. So how can a controlled test (and are not tests, by definition, controlled?) both allow randomness and enable arriving at a fact? Can it do either?

Also, we can’t forget that any picture we are in, any place we are in, we are in, so we can’t, in fact, see it all.

Let’s move on. It just began to rain, and thunder is rolling along beside it. The humidity had gotten too full, and over it flowed. Would that it would abate. But at this very moment, I simply feel the air around me weighs just a little more. Ugh.

The other day a Night Heron stood on a rock across the Concord River from us and watched, and watched, and watched, and dunked! Up he raised his beak, back he leaned his head, and down his gullet he let the fish slide.

And, then, a day or so after the Night Heron, I got to watch a hummingbird case out and then consume sugar water, then flip away, only to fly back, then away, then back, ….. Imagine the energy consumption, and then also realize the understanding this tiny bird has of its limits and of its resources.

Then imagine their resources–both the flora and the feeders, sliding northward to keep out of the heat, and the encroaching heat waves becoming faster, larger, longer, wider. So the hummingbirds’ gauges are constantly reassessing, because summer is longer and hotter and yet wetter. When is it time to leave turn south now? The air, heavy, presses down on their backs. They cannot fly as far as fast in their thousands of miles seasonal migration.

And the rivers: one year up–flood stage one year down–herons’ feet stepping along bottom muck and tossed trash, one month up one month down, one week up and one week down. Dabblers losing their rock outcrop perches to rushing, overexerting and overtopped waterflows, carrying with their streams the often poisonous waste we thought we’d contained, or buried, or disguised to be drunk by the dabblers, the divers, the dunkers.

Oh me.

The beginning storm I mentioned earlier, has come, poured, rumbled and left. It is cooler now. There is that.

Pedaling along the Concord River, just before where it pours into the Merrimack River, at a point where it is sliced by a small island, which once was connected by bridge to the east bank, but now stands untrammeled except for one I-beam continuing the past of this place, I stopped to watch and hear the rushing of this river currently running very high along its banks. And I glimpsed someone else doing the same.

What a day this has become! And, I will tell you, this the second post I began today. The first I discarded. It was not reflecting this day here in New England. Rather it was arguing my fears of our future, my fears due to our past.

But today, I am reveling in this present, our present.

Have I told you this before?–Violets and their leaves are edible, and not only edible, quite tasty. My backyard abounds in violets. Each year they claim a few more inches (I would say feet, but the property just is, I believe 1/20th of an acre, and much of that is taken up by my house, driveway, and a shed. Beside the shed in the northeast corner receiving full noon to evening sun is my vegetable and rhubarb garden, which also hosts a huge stand of daisies, and in which I have now planted a tiny horse chestnut tree. If it grows, I will be happy. If it grows, I won’t have a vegetable garden, but rest assured, that shift in plant life is at least a decade from now. West of that garden space by several inches, well maybe a foot, is the plum tree I planted last year to replace the now absent beehive. Ah, I miss the bees. And west of the plum tree and as the yard becomes shaded by the dogwood tree, begin now, the violets, and they only stop when they meet the well overgrown but still recognizable triangle of bulbs and perennials — daffodils, tiger lilies, a few tulips I have pushed in here and there, soapwart, pinkweed,–, and a wild mulberry bush/tree, the fruit of which the birds robins and I think finches in particular enjoy. South of that triangle and continuing under the dogwood and onto and on the west edge of my backyard are more violets along with a smattering of ferns, until the grass that is holding firm just about level with the back edge of my house. Then grass decorated with ferns (I am pretty sure my property’s water table rides quite high below the surface). There are many other wildflowers growing there too, pink ladies, plantains, jack in the pulpits, lord, so many — I should bring the wildflower book out back and mark off all the varieties here.

Then just outside the westside kitchen window is a plant I bought several years ago at the Garden in the Woods in Framingham, Massachusetts. If ever you have the chance to visit there, do. It is unique and it is beautiful. The plant’s name I cannot remember, but its appeal to me was the fact that when it rains its pale green, scalloped leaves, resting horizontally beside each other, and slightly overlapping one another, hold rain drops aloft, like a table of dew drops, but it’s rain. Perhaps someone can tell me what this plant is?

South of this to be reidentified plant is a hefty stand of ferns, interspersed, right now with some rogue goldenrod. Just south of this stand of ferns is a very abundant stand of goldenrod, stretching along the house for two windows. There are other perennials that share much of the space the goldenrod reigns within, at other times of the year, toad something or others, lilacs, Queen Anne’s lace, some fleabane daisies, other wildflowers, and, in season, several different bulb and rhisome plants. Then there is a rose of sharon that is shedding itself a bit more each year. I think I have maybe two more years of its friendly white flowers with magenta centers. There is also a hydrangea that each year, as the shade from two large weeping birches expands, loses more of its share of sun, and flowers barely, maybe one maybe two blossoms. There are also sedum holding their own in the shade of those same birches. and increasing in girth each year are stands of lance corporals, whose red lance is just beginning to emerge now out of their tops.

The southeast corner of this lot, along the bottom of the driveway holds an unusual plum tree that rebirthed itself about 8 years ago, and fruited for three years, but did not fruit this year (nor did many flowering, or fruiting plants who time themselves with the peaches — an early spring start, that was rained out this year), as did not the azaleas that front my back porch facing the dogwood tree and the vegetable garden, nor my neighbor’s forsythia.

So I have taken you on a haphazard tour of my equally haphazard garden/grass/wildflower/treed property. And just want to remind you, the violets are delicious.

Thank you for joining me!

Ahh, but predictions are–tonight it will storm. And I just got my basement almost dry — not fully, because the water table languishing under this house must be above its abilities to drink what has been given it for its thirst, and is having to share it with my house foundation. I am grateful it is not a flood here. I am also grateful it is not a dustbowl.

I have been reading Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer. Reading it I am again reminded of the bane of individual land ownership on the health and well being of all beings–those who grow in place such as trees, and grasses, and all flora, those who by creation roam a terrain or airrain (such a word?) or waterrain (such a word?), and those who are us–what if no one owned, and everyone shared? If no one owned, would there be such drive to protect? Would there be a reason for greed?

A world without greed. How beautiful.

And respect. This from the book stays with me: “Someone (in a class learning the Potawatomi language) asks: ‘How do you say please pass the salt?’ Our teacher…. explains that while there are several words for thank you, there is no word for please. Food was meant to be shared, no added politeness needed; it was simply a cultural given that one was asking respectfully.”

Assuming respect. So often I see enacted, and undoubtedly enact myself, an assumption of disrespect from someone else, and gear up for it. And how does one gear up for disrespect? Either defensively or offensively–in each case with tension and distrust. How is that we live in such an uncomfortable state as our very way of life?

Notice the bark of this beech. It is pocked. It is likely enduring bark blight, which has been damaging many beeches, a major tree in the US Northeast. Bad enough, but now! Now the beeches are being attacked by a leaf disease that is rapidly decimating them! The tree here is enduring it now. This particular tree was not affected last year.

“Historically, a blight called beech bark disease has been the primary threat to the species. But now, beech leaf disease appears to pose a bigger danger. First spotted in northeastern Ohio, it causes parts of leaves to turn leathery and branches to wither. The blight can kill a mature tree within 6 to 10 years. It has now been documented in eight U.S. states and in Canada.” [from the journal Science, on line edition, 10 November 2021]

I will go to one more topic. The might Mo — the Merrimack River. She is a caged being, shackled here and there by dams, canals, purification plants (to undo what we discard) and yet she rules.

I have seen the Merrimack River higher, seen it breach its banks, but I have never seen it so much of a force. This was after the rains in mid-July that wreaked havoc upriver and in Vermont and western New Hampshire.

There is much to be concerned about. But there is beauty and through it there is hope.

It is two days shy of Bastille Day. Who remembers what was taught about Bastille Day in school? Is it still taught? Who remembers the title of Charles Dickens’ novel that pertains to the events surrounding Bastille Day?

Read this explanation from Wikipedia. Interesting contrast in the event(s) being celebrated year over year:

Bastille Day is the common name given in English-speaking countries to the national day of France, which is celebrated on 14 July each year. In French, it is formally called the Fête nationale française ; “French National Celebration”; legally it is known as le 14 juillet ; “the 14th of July”.

The French National Day is the anniversary of the Storming of the Bastille on 14 July 1789, a major event of the French Revolution, as well as the Fête de la Fédération that celebrated the unity of the French people on 14 July 1790. 

France is in much heat right now, every meaning of that word. What will it be like in France on July 14th, 2023?

Theirs is not the only country in heat.

The world is in much heat, again, every meaning of that word. How can we each participate in cooling the heats?

How can we cool ourselves off without offsetting heat caused somewhere else to someone or something else? How can we be cool? In every meaning of that word.

Can we envision cool or not-hot? Can we exhibit it? Can we find within ourselves peace and care and wonder and bask in and share it?

I am thinking of how we opine. How I opine. What makes me so sure my view should prevail? How do I test it for validity? For value? For purpose? For accuracy? By what measure do I consider a differing opinion? Am I capable of learning outside of what I “know” to be? How do I “know” what I know? Can I get out of my own way to see what know is? Can I know what I know without my experience? Is knowing only experiential? If so, is it ever able to be all right? To the latter question I say I don’t think so.

So what to do?

Consider motive. Consider heart. Consider my motive every moment. Consider my reason for knowing and holding onto that knowing of a thing a thought a purpose a fact.

Consider getting out of my own way. Ask–ask who?–how to do that; if it can be done.

Joshua 24:15

Yesterday someone asked me, are you going to blog about your trip to Alaska? And I said, well I did! I did, but it was topical on loss, on loss this earth and all its elements continue to experience. It started with delight, local seasonal delight but it drifted northwest of here and downhill (figuratively).

I will try again. I will tell you about what beauty there is there. What beauty there is and could be anywhere, seen by looking, felt by touching, heard by listening, smelled by sniffing, tasted by I don’t know, tasting! And we can attend with expectation of surprise, of something new, of beauty, of worth. We can, any time we want–expectation is, is it?, without precedent.

Many things I’ve read recently seem to be playing with the idea, the physics and the philosophy of what one perceives is very much the product of what one brings to the moment. The fact of objectivity is? therefore? not fact. We can’t get out of our own way.

Well!! see, I have veered off the proposed path, even before stepping on it.

Alaska, the silence was what held me the tightest. These enormous shards in myriad shades of green, and the even huger white shards toss me into silence. Were I sitting among those trees. Were I sitting on that ice that snowpack, those boulders indigenous and erratic, and inclined my ear (inner and outer) toward an inch, a foot, 100 feet of it, I would hear myriad small, near and distant scratchings, hummings, huffings, and even whisperings. But at the feet of these giants, at their feet or far off in a body of water the dimensions of which I cannot fathom, I am placed in and brought to silence.