Life is Absurd, Beautiful, Backlit, and Passing

      These are our thoughts in the final days of November.  Though there is no escape from the final absurdity of life, I may with open eyes take the courage to see--consciously see--the particulars of our world.  
     Stopping to watch a creek, some dragonflies, backlit leaves, seeds, and a stone is like looking at pieces of art in a gallery. The demand is stillness.  And like individual moments of perception within a small canyon, art stops time just long enough for  my attention to catch up.  A piece of art, like one of these images, encourages a conscious attention to a moment brought to stillness so that this attention can maximize the experience of this one particular subject. The next moment is the next item in the gallery. 
     Camus said, "the point is to live."

     Four days ago on the last Sunday afternoon of the month, Harlin and I watched as several mated pairs of dragonflies attempted to deposit eggs on the surface of what may have appeared to their many-hundred eyes to be a surface of reflective water. It was not. And doubts remain as to the viability of Sympetrum corruptum eggs on top of a discarded piece of polished granite.

Variegated Meadowhawks (Sympetrum corruptum)

          And then the motion picture version: 

      Harlin sent us these next two of late-year butterflies and a flower:

Bordered Patch butterfly (Chlosyne lacinia) 
on a Cowpen Daisy (Verbesina encelioides)

Vesta Crescent (Phyciodes graphica)

     This is either the navel of the world or a smooth hole in a large chunk of limestone beside the creek.

World Navel or a rock

     These are light.

     A couple months ago on September 20, my father died.  The day after Thanksgiving, in the afternoon, I buried some of his ashes.

.

Small Patch of Light

4:18pm, November 10, 2012.  A falling column of cool autumn light catches a small patch of grass beside the road leading through our place and down to the Creek.  

Rorschach

Here above is an image created by the ants' trails leading out of the main nest.  These ants are mining tunnels down into a hard-packed gravel road near the front gate.

The devil in the garden is a white worm eating us from the inside out.

Election Day

     Who wins today's presidential election is obviously important, but when we try to decide on a candidate, we are left mainly with having to choose based on larger philosophical principles because the details (of healthcare reform, the economic bailout, or solutions to the debt problem) are really too much to fully understand and debate meaningfully.
     So we use broad philosophical reasoning to choose a candidate who is most likely to push forward detailed programs generally consistent with those philosophical principle we carried with us into the voting booth.
     And some things will change following the election.  No doubt.  But some things will not.  That's something we would do well to remember as we argue our way (and spend six billion in political advertising) leading up to the election and then in the hangover period immediately following it.
     That Thanksgiving follows this unnecessarily long and expensive process is somewhat appropriate.
     If sunlight still shines on a small hill country stream, I will remain grateful for that as well.


Please click here to see who your vote will spend its time with while it rests in the ballot box.

If design govern in a thing so small

(Fall colors in central Texas.)

(I like this boulder.)

November 2, 2012.

October

     Here's what we've been hearing many of the early mornings and evenings. If I am wrong in calling this an Eastern Screech-Owl (Otus asio), just let me know. I've learned that the bird has plenty of calls (barking, screeching, tremolo, whinny--depending on its location, sex, threat level, nesting status, etc.).  This individual appeared to have been in the large oak tree.

     Here are two of dozens of sites with an incredible variety of screech owl sounds:
http://www.allaboutbirds.org/guide/Eastern_Screech-Owl/sounds
http://www.owlpages.com/sounds.php

Male Belted Kingfisher (Megaceryle alcyon)

Eastern Phoebe (Sayornis phoebe)

Frightening moment for one of us.

Osprey (Pandion haliaetus) over the Creek.

Our most recent place.

Fall colors.

All things are a bit chomped this time of the year.

Little Walnut (Juglans microcarpa)

Seeds of the Little Walnut (Juglans microcarpa)

Getting cooler. Forty-three degrees yesterday morning (10/27/12).

October Clear

     A clean rain, a north wind, and then a new day.

     The wind stirs the waters.

     They try to lift out of the creek bed and fly the way of dried sycamore leaves in a gust.

     But water molecules that are held together by their hydrogen bonds stretch out across the surface of the morning pool, and as the crests of the waves are pulled down by gravity and the tension across the surface, the troughs of the waves are pulled back up--how gravity can lift something upwards.  Like a bed sheet held at either side by a pair of country children and lifted up and down quickly.

     Then when the wind's energy drops, molecular friction brings the troubled waters back to something near calm.

     Come on back to the waters or a broad oak.

     

End of September (mostly flora)

     A gray morning as complete unlike the past hundred and fifty or so days as one could imagine.  September 29, 2012.  Photographs captured mostly during the morning's eight o'clock hour.  Rain gauge showed not more than about an inch of collected rain, but more must have fallen upstream because we were able to hear Creek waters from up the hillside.

     Again, a casual look at this dried out countryside would not suggest such an abundance of flowers.  One might even be persuaded to believe that simply walking slowly with camera in hand could be the cause of so much sudden efflorescence.

We hate this invasive species in the garden,
but this morning all sins are forgiven.

Squash, tomatoes, basil, cucumber, Swiss chard,
red cabbage, broccoli, Brussels sprouts

     That’s what we were seeing the gray morning of September 29, 2012. 
     These are the images of flowering plants, textures, and patterns one sees on the last rainy Saturday morning of the month. A slow-falling rain drizzled throughout the night before, leaving leaf and petal with its reflective remains. 
     The purpose here is simply to record a few brief moments of visual observation. 
     (One could do less with his solitary time on the bank of a drought-shrunken hill country creek. In fact, one could do way less with his entire intellectual life. A cataloging of honest observations is the beginning of any hopeful search for wisdom. Its opposite is beginning with what might be called prescriptive or normative thinking. That’s the sort of thinking that places the thou-shalt cart before the here’s-what-is horse and ends up with any one of scores of fundamentalisms.      We can only imagine a world in which children are exposed to descriptive-thinking prior to prescriptive-thinking, for we have painful experience with its alternative. 
     Fundamentalist-thinking simply forgot to describe our situation in the world. What is nature? What is human behavior? Instead, it not merely jumped ahead to telling us what to do with nature and other human beings, but in telling us what to do it actually thought it was telling us about reality. If we are not careful (in ethics, politics, religion, education, science), we will be prescribing and ordering when we think we are describing, and then we will miss out on what reality is and ironically, then, how best to prescribe. 
     So we practice learning to see. Seeing and then cataloging the things of our world into an undifferentiated single list is a place to start again each day. It may be one of the only remaining rational antidotes to the fundamentalist-thinking infecting our personal and social lives in political, religious, moral ways.)