FOOL'S GOLD

“It is not I who seek the young fool;

The young fool seeks me.”

I Ching, hexagram 4

Stormy tonight. It's the school of hard knocks. At noon who would have guessed? The sun warming winter's bones, raking seed balls from beneath the liquid amber tree. I'm not good at guessing ages but maybe two years old, the little kid who makes his Chinese lady stop the stroller so he can get out and try to make friends with the autistic cat that hangs out around our front porch. I smile. When he sees I'm looking at him, he waves and I wave back. It seems a strange medley, I think, not one you'd hear on your iPhone or anything since no words spoken. It's all suspended on a sky hook, timeless.

Heavy rain has found its niche. It's 90% and a flash flood watch. From languid amber tree drenched in sun, world's worries gone, to the new reality of dank pelting, splash dappling endless dark.

It doesn't negotiate or issue ultimatums.

Maybe matter and energy are alternate forms of Dark Matter. Think fusion. It's one of those spare thoughts hanging up there. We'll have unlimited power and a replicator, like on Star Trek, and the Change? No problem. Sounds like a plan. Geo-engineer it. I think of the Polaris missile, it's guidance system, which paid the rent for a couple of years. To hear rain on the roof is somehow a comfort. I am not religious, don't worship technologies, missiles, mathematics, logical absurdities, though all these things obviously have a place. I dropped out of integral calculus when the “beauty” went poof: building bridges, missiles, rotary engine parts all so exact, calculable, so satisfying to have the right answer, to be right . . .

In the meantime . . .

The biosphere is humans and all the rest. Plants and clouds, rivers, elephants, seas and sea otters, mountain and mountain goats, volcanoes, tectonic plates, everything influences everything.

Yes, humans influence tectonic plates: water weighs heavily behind dams; fracking is a lubricant; there are jello bowl hydrogen bomb celebrations; snoring. The earth never sleeps. It has no ego.

We seem to be dominant. It's an illusion. Assembled out of recent events, born of cognitive limits, burnished with pride. A mirage. Who can remember what life was like before the discovery of fire, book matches? Days before trees and kindling.

Playground earth, our gold mine, is just about exhausted. Resource limitations, climate disaster and disease are not external threats but rather participatory dilemmas.

When the student is ready, the teacher appears. Hard knocks. No words. Ready?