ONE
Clouds dust the blue slate sky and a 'copter hovers, throbbing just out of reach in summer's heat. It's a charade quickly called off. A viewpoint in the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence perhaps. Stealth technology? Something hidden from TVs and cell phones, but here nonetheless.
It's a safari into the heart of space as the arrow of time vanishes, and our usual birds are elsewhere. The temperature has reached 104 degrees. A wet bird does not fly at night? In the settling sun, white floaters drift down like flour on water. Mr. Finch arrives at my table, looking for cookie crumbs
I had brought seeds here, and to the feeder a few feet away in the garden. Also some water for the small dish nearby. It had been the last resting place, sadly, for an exhausted yellow jacket. Now seeing it full, Mr. Finch goes for a drink. Then a bath splashing wildly, jumping, raising all feathered hell, a wet bird laughing!
And then robin's arrival.
At the flick of a finger from this lawn chair outpost, my Kindle fetches a report from the National Weather Service, a heat advisory for this weekend, out of the blue. From the ends of the world, a vast archive is plucked for the bits that will appear in my lap.
Einstein would appreciate robin's space-time bocce ball dimension, relativity in a tea cup, being the universe. My mind is not alone in losing its limits.
With its rainbow peacock logo, the NBC portal brings reports from Texas, flooding with hurricane Harvey:
“' This hurricane is something else. One minute you don't know if you're going to
live through it or your house is going to fall on you or whatever,' Victoria
resident Roger Saski said on Sunday. 'The main thing is we made it through
the storm,' he said. 'You know material things don't mean nothing when you
go through this.'”
As we have seen, climate is affected by materializations of money and power. And as for value, we understand:
1. importance, worth, or usefulness of something
2. a person's principals or standards of behavior, one's judgment of
what is important in life
Mr. Hummingbird 'copters in, red feathers outshining the metal flowers on his feeder, to hover at what he finds important. As I write, sometimes he hovers over this clipboard:
Nuclear weapons and oil revenue are more important than either our climate or civilization? What do leaders know who are just rogue waves? Should anyone be given unlimited power? Do individuals matter?
Sunday morning is a time for hanging onto my footstool with tiny claws --> Louis the lizard. As the sun moves, he runs to a favorite rock beneath the dove bird feeder.
Sit a mile in my lawn chair and patterns emerge. In the language of kids, songs outfox copyright, sung at conversational speed, skipping freely in the magic.
Suddenly out of nowhere, robin swoops and bombs Louis off his rock! Inexplicable. He'd been wide awake and still, looking at me. Maybe the rock is in the game. Robin's ball court would escape casual notice.
The planter box forms part of robin's habitus, which has to be seen to be believed. It is an airport with a covered terminal. The landing strip is on the patio at the east end. Hackberry seeds fall on the patio. Round, green, perfect spheres. Robin nudges one. It rolls. He chases and sticks his beak under, pushing again, following with another push to keep it rolling --> it's bocce ball, with robin winning, and I'm cheering!
Texas refineries cease to function, escalating the price of gas, 20 cents and climbing. North Korea gleefully flouts its Bomb, threatening our west coast and Texas. Our heat wave is an aspect of Harvey's Texas disaster, but summertime pollution will be mitigated by a law fashioned in Palo Alto that bans vehicles from prolonged idling. Like sumo wrestlers stomping before the match, leaders thunder thermogeddon. Exciting is it not! As though one might win.
The fossil bonanza dwindles. In its wake, our exhausted world is whipped on by frightened leaders, served by technocrats who have a tiger by the tail. Wisdom is water boarded.
Hummingbirds, spiders, doves, finches and robins don't get to choose. But we do. If material things don't mean nothing, what does?
With a lapidary saw, cut through a piece of plastiglomerate. Polish it. See the galaxies appear.
You are the only you. No one else occupies your space. Billions of galaxies, each with billions of stars, countless planets and no two exactly alike. If you reappear, it will not be in this lifetime.
The resources, energy and technology now wasted on wars and oppression can be repurposed. We can do much better.
Technology is on the brink of usable fusion power, fueled by abundant hydrogen which is readily available in the world's oceans. It leaves no residue of carbon dioxide, as from fossil fuels, or radioactive waste, as from nuclear fission. We now have the knowledge, if not yet the capability, for tracking and intercepting asteroids with earth crossing orbits. War is more important?
Life and water, gifts of the universe, precede the fiction of ownership. We can bring our resources and populations into balance. If civilization is not for making life better for all affected, what is a better purpose? How about supporting self realization, and thus appreciation of life itself. Why not replace the exploitation of people with recognition for attainments of wisdom. How about music, liberty, the pursuit of happiness. Why not redirect the energy and resources presently dissipated into a guaranteed income for everyone, and let work be a vehicle for personal expression.
Pollyanna? Not at all. We will align values with reality or cease to exist.
