What this photo does not show you

What this photo does not show you:

A blue-tailed dragonfly with whirring wings, hovering, darting – actually, there are two dragonflies, one chasing the other one in flight together, making curlicues and rapid ascents into the sky. Sometimes one lone dragonfly rests so very lightly on the tip of a thin green blade and that blade arcs yet ever so slightly closer to the surface of the water.

The soft summer breeze itself has just barely enough breath to move those very thin blades of the green bending plant growing up from the muck on the bottom of my pond. And the surface of the water itself is not quite still.

There are water spiders skating and then resting on nearly invisible outstretched legs. Each leg bends the surface of the water into a tiny circle.

And then as I sit quietly watching the pond, I feel the lightest whispers of a variable wind against my own skin.

And there’s more. I see wasps – blue-blackish - brown and yellowish – wasps here and there on the limestone rocks edging the small pond. The wasps with their flickering wings seem to appear and disappear like magic.

And I in the clear water, I can see goldfish. Very orange. Shining orange. Glittering like scaly, fish-shaped oranges swimming slowly in the pond. They too come and they go. They hover in the water like dragonflies in the summer air. Except that the fish are not really like dragonflies at all. They’re fish. With just a wave of a tail, one or another goldfish simply slips from my sight beneath the lily pads floating on the surface of the water. Who could even tell which fish is which except perhaps another fish?

And if you look carefully again at the photo, you might perhaps see two pale yellow water lily blossoms. You might see those pale yellow petals so very carefully arrayed on each blossom. And then you might wish to lean over the edge of the pond for a closer look. I have declared to you that the water lilies were a pale yellow, but those are merely words - hardly the very true colors of the water lily petals, after all. But for now, ‘pale yellow’ will have to do.

And in the next moment a single white butterfly flutters by, settling for a moment on a tiny white flower with an even tinier yellow center. It is only a miniscule blossom poking barely a half inch or so above the water - an itty bitty bloom arising from a curling strand of anacharis, an underwater plant that tangles in profusion beneath the surface of the pond. Perhaps you might even see, if you would look again at the photo that I took, a small portion of anacharis  strand along the surface of the pond near where the thin green blades arc. But I would like to encourage you to scoop up a dripping handful of those anacharis strands from the riotous tangle of this slithering, slimy underwater water plant so that you might gain more complete sense of a picture that only shows a much simpler surface of things.

And then I would ask you to look still closer, over at one side of the pond. There’s a spider’s web, woven from the finest spider’s silk and strung between some of those thin green blades of the bending plant and the limestone rocks that line the edge of the small garden pond. I have sometimes seen a long-legged spider waiting near her web - but not on this day.

And there might be a yellow swallowtail over by the border phlox. And perhaps a monarch sailing by somewhere beyond the corner of the frame of the picture and then dropping down over the fence into the neighbor’s yard.  And perhaps I should at least mention, that on a not so very long ago summer morning, as I sat on my patio in the summer shade, I heard a mourning dove calling.

Who could ever see and hear and touch it all?

But now and finally we come to where all of these wandering words that I have written for this post began:

It was the reflections of the thin green blades –

the curving

crossing

sometimes nearly straight

thin dark lines

against the reflected white-blue sky –

the blackness of blades that I noticed as I looked into my pond,

truly insubstantial lines

that I could never, ever touch,

real and unreal lines

living within a nether world immeasurably beyond my grasp.

And so from where I sat near my pond on a particular summer day, I thought I might try to take a photo of those curving, crossing, sometimes nearly straight thin dark lines. Of course it would be no more than a picture of a kind of illusion. An image only of thin dark lines wavering somehow, somewhere between me and the far side of the known world.

And then, on that summer morning not so long ago, I leaned back in my patio chair to look for what else I might have missed seeing around me. And I realized that I had missed seeing nearly everything. I couldn’t see everything. Or in truth, I could only begin to see everything.

And then I thought to try to tell you something about it.

And so this post is to remind myself and also to remind you of a simple reality: for so very, very  much less time than it took for me just to write these many words that you are now reading – in those few seconds as I sat watching the world by my little garden pond, I saw what I saw and then for a moment I imagined that I saw it all. The world not of many parts, but whole.

And then, just as suddenly, in the very next moment, with the splish-splash of my bare foot splashing into the water, everything vanished – all of it - everything. And then, there I was once again, just sitting by my garden pond. The world was before me as it had always been.

Dragonflies rested on thin green blades over the water.

And the water reflected everything.

Remembering in the rain

Audio

Remembering in the rain ~ 6:30

**

Text

I was walking across the Kaw River Bridge. The rain was coming steadily down, stippling the surface of the water below me. The trees along the gray river were distant and shadowy. There was a soggy sameness to everything around me, but, in truth, I wasn’t discontent.

It was just a steady rain. More than welcome in August. My umbrella had kept me mostly dry as I walked, but by the time I got to the bridge, my shoes were pretty wet. I turned to look over the railing and I saw a great blue heron standing on a rock in the shallow water near the bank of the Kaw River. The heron was near enough to where I stood up on the bridge that I could see that its gray feathers were completely soaked. But the heron simply stood there, motionless, just staring out at the river.

And then I thought of Audrey.

Audrey is a barista I know.  Our separate paths will cross at a coffee shop as we both head in different directions. Our actual time together will not be much more than a bit of conversation and a glass of iced tea passed from her hand to mine.

And so I had seen her once again, not that many steps ago. It had been just another forgettable Sunday afternoon at Aimee’s. I had been sitting at the counter with a couple of other older guys. I could see that it was beginning to rain as I stared out through the front plate glass  windows. There was a little idle conversation in the air. I sipped my iced tea. Just passing a little time.  

Audrey and another barista, Riley, were putting paper trays of eggs into the refrigerator in the kitchen area below where we were sitting, stocking up for the next day. There were jokes bantered back and forth from one side of the counter to the other about what might happen if someone dropped a whole tray of eggs on the floor.

And then Audrey picked up an egg from one of the trays and held it in her hand. Standing just a few feet away from three not very wise men sitting on the other side of the counter, she looked over and said, “Did you know that you can squeeze an egg in the palm of your hand as hard as you want and it won’t break?” She squeezed and a blur of yellow yolk arced just past Riley’s head. We all laughed.

“It wasn’t supposed to work like that,” Audrey said with a rueful look on her face. And indeed  the egg trick had worked a couple of Sunday’s  earlier. Several of us had passed around a raw egg and had squeezed it as hard as we could. The egg hadn’t broken - then. We speculated that it had something to do with the shape of the hand and the shape of the egg. Physics.

But on this Sunday afternoon it was hard for me to stop laughing at the failed egg trick. It wasn’t just the egg breaking, squirting its insides across the room. It was the look on Audrey’s face. The look was very nearly indescribable. Surprise doesn’t begin to cover it. And rueful is just another word. It was one of those times when you just had to be there.

After a few moments I was still laughing as Audrey cleaned up the mess. “This is the high point of my day,” I said. And then then after a pause I reflected: “But then, the day isn’t over yet, so who knows?”

Audrey and I had talked about what each other’s high points over the last day or week had been.

And then I had realized that I had been asking the wrong question. I changed it. “What was the most memorable thing that happened to you recently?” But that question was really no easier to answer.

And then it was closing time. The baristas had their real lives to get back to and I had a slow,   easy walk in the rain ahead of me. I really had nothing in particular in mind. I walked towards the river as I often do. The rain came down. The sidewalks were wet. Not very many people out. Cars splashing through puddles. Sometimes one day seems to blur into the next, but I still enjoy the walking, seeing what I will see.

And so, eventually, there I was, walking across the Kaw River Bridge in the rain. I saw the heron standing. And then it turned its head to one side and stabbed its long beak into the water. And then, almost like magic, a small white wriggling fish appeared in its beak.

And that is when I thought of Audrey.

That is how memory works. I don’t quite understand it. What we remember seems to slip in and out of our minds faster that we can grasp our forgotten moments. And even our more memorable moments quickly fade as we move from one place and time to the next.

And so then, on that rainy afternoon on the bridge, a moment of life popped into my mind. This time it was Audrey’s face. Her smooth, freckled cheeks. Her brown curly hair. Her hand, dripping with broken shells and slippery egg goo. And I could almost see it all in my mind. And especially, for just a moment, I had quite memorably seen Audrey’s eyes as she glanced with surprise into mine. And in those few moments as I watched the heron, I wondered what Audrey might have seen in my eyes.

But it was the rain was coming down, steadily. I continued walking, circling around until finally I was below the bridge. I imagined that the heron might still be standing on the rock just below the bank. I walked carefully towards the river in the wet grass - but not carefully enough. Suddenly the heron was flying away from me over the river, its outstretched great gray wings pulling through the rain with strong easy strokes. And in no time at all, it was just me and the river. I stood there watching the rain, my memories slipping in and out of my grasp.

I suppose that the memory thing is all a kind of trick. We see. We forget. And then, sometimes, we remember again. And then we forget all over again.

Life seems to happen in unexpected moments. And if we are lucky, we can laugh at each other and at ourselves. How indeed could we ever forget that life is full of surprises?  And laughter. If we are looking, we can see our lives in each other’s eyes. And then we move on.

bamboo 8

This is a photo/video record of the mobile - bamboo 8 - that I made this summer. (~ July 2018).To fully appreciate the mobile you will need to see it for yourself. It now takes me about 30 minutes to reassemble the mobile and fine tune the balance. I will put bamboo 8 back up again from time to time - if only to watch it move again for myself. But I also hope to show this work.

bamboo 8 cost less than a dollar in materials. The 8 bamboo canes grew in my friends yard. The garden twine comes from Cottin's. The rope for the sky hook was scrounged from the side of the road on a walk. The tools I already had.

The actual time it took to make this mobile was perhaps 15 hours over 3 days, but I could neither conceive nor construct this mobile without years of playing with gravity and balance and experimenting with various materials and ways of balancing and joining things together.

bamboo 8 occupies a space 8 feet deep by 25 feet in diameter. There are eight bamboo canes about 14 feet long wrapped at the approximate balance points with twine. Double loops of twine hold the canes together in their appropriate order. The fine balancing takes a light and careful touch. It all hangs from a sky hook.

To say the least, I remain surprised that I was able to make this particular mobile in my backyard and in such a relatively small amount of time. And it is primarily the movement that amazes me. Even in what appears to be still air, bamboo 8 moves. bamboo 8 is both stable and fragile. It will collapse in stronger winds. And the bundle of bamboo generally rests in the rafters of my garage. I have likely spent as much time reassembling the mobile and watching it move as it took to construct and balance it the first time.

So these are merely photos and videos. Enjoy looking at them as you wish. But whether flower or river or sunset or mobile - or even each other - the physical reality is the 'thing' to see and to experience. We live in space and time - not in the two dimensions of screens.

The full video record on YouTube

bamboo 8 approach - 19 sec

bamboo 8 cane shadows - 18 sec

bamboo 8 joints spin - 9 sec

bamboo 8 shadows - 25 sec

bamboo 8 joints - 12 sec

bamboo 8 sky - 1:50

bamboo 8 long wide shadows - 3:36

Kite and shadow

And so another day came so brightly,

the yellow sun rose high and warm,

the winds blew variable and lightly -

and I stepped out onto my front porch, my feet so bare,

the sky was so blue,

the true color of the clear, perfectly congenial air.

And as I watched and I waited

I could think of nothing quite better than flying a kite.

And since there was no one else around,

I went ahead and imagined someone -

a whimsical someone like you - to go fly a kite with me.

And so I carelessly imagined you, only you,

waiting expectantly for me at Central field.

You might be smiling as I unfurled my colorful kite

and then laughing at me as I untangled the line.

And then there would be nothing more for us to say

as we watched and we waited.

And then, and only then,

when I finally held my kite aloft, our breaths bated,

our eyes meeting and then quickly looking away,

at that moment there would finally and truly be nothing more

that two human beings could possibly do –

but hope.

So I closed my eyes ever so slightly,

the sun, the wind, the forgotten dripping of rain,

even those bygone tears fell so far out of time and mind -

and then I simply let go of reality with the freshening of the wind

and I quickly became the lively, lifting kite.

Your memory held tight the line, and love flew with bright nylon colors.

The ascending kite flew still higher, catching the wind, letting it go,

fluttering, flapping, streamers streaming -

the kite soaring with rhymes and reasons only the wind could secretly know.

And if I became the kite in the sky,

my imaginary you became the shadow.

And then in time we magically switched places.

And then it was I, bewitched, laughing and dancing, across the soft green grass,

the grass green grass so softly yielding beneath my feet

as I so carefree and carelessly ran underneath the bright colored kite

flying up in the sky blue sky so high.

And as I looked up, my eyes opened up so very wide and then they closed again.

I remembered the plans and promises that no one had ever had made

for this one unexpectedly glorious day.

All of our imagined dreams dreamt and undreamt so long and almost forever ago -

our unspoken hopes for loves both great and small

and perhaps only some few cares recalled,

those of no more moment

than a kite in a sky blue sky.

And then perhaps and yet again perhaps -

perhaps I hadn’t imagined you at all.

Only wishing that you were with me almost made it so –

but then you and I would only ever finally touch when

heaven and earth would truly meet.

Perhaps we might simply be waiting together, apart,

with only the wind whispering dying and undying words,

words that I might hear but never understand.

And there might nothing more that two human beings could possibly say.

But today – this moment only - is about the colored nylon kite –

soaring, swooping, dipping, looping, pulling against the string –

and the laughing.

And so, I will say this to you, my imaginary and truly love:

there have been some days past and there will be  more days yet to come

and perhaps we have yet to meet the day -

that one day when you, my heart, will hold a kite aloft on an open field

and I will hold the line

and then the wind will laugh and the sun will touch our faces

and love will fly

and our own imagined embraces will come true

and then finally the sailing kite and her shadow

will together so lightly touch the earth.

**
Click on the first photo and then right arrow to quickly view the kite flying sequence.

Wren

People talk about the circle of life. What we usually don’t say out loud is that the circle is a circle of life and death.

Yesterday evening as I was coming back from a trip to the compost pile, I heard the sounds of fluttering in the garage where two Carolina wrens had made a nest. Wrens are tiny, loud, soft rust-brown birds with their tail feathers cocked skyward. My wife and I had watched them flying in and out during the past few weeks. We had seen and heard them trilling from the wire leading out to the garage.

I looked into the shadows and saw a wren flapping frantically, spinning round and around upside down from one extended leg. As I got very close, I could see that the wren had gotten itself entangled in something from its nest. It must have been struggling for some time. The wren’s tail feathers had been beaten off.

I reached out my hand, closing it gently and firmly around the tiny body to try to calm it. I carefully snipped away the threads that had been wrapped tightly around the wren’s leg. The threads looked and felt like they might have come from some bits of plastic twine that the wrens must have used to line their nest.

I carried the wren out into the middle of our back yard and put it down in the grass. The leg that had been caught stuck straight out behind the wren. The wren flapped its wings, but it could not fly. The wren seemed as if it might be otherwise intact, but it could only bounce awkwardly over the grass. It was alive, but without its tail feathers and a severely dislocated leg it could not survive.

I placed the wren at the edge of the lawn on a bed of some dried surprise lily leaves near the peonies bushes and put down a small saucer of water near the wren. I set a five gallon bucket upside down over the helpless bird, still breathing and blinking its eyes. I weighted the bucket with a couple of bricks and I hoped, at least, that the wren could rest in relative safety and the dim light.

My wife was visiting family, so I rode my bicycle over to a friend’s house to ask him what he thought I should do. We talked of ways of putting the wren out of its suffering, but nothing seemed possible in the moment.

Night was falling when I returned home. I saw two mourning doves sitting on the wire near where the wren was resting. I didn’t raise the bucket to see how the wren was doing. I went inside and had a late supper. Eventually I went to bed.

In the morning, I went outside to check on the wren. The wren had passed away during the night. I buried the wren’s body in the earth near where its life had ended.

I must tell you that I felt more sorrow over the suffering of this one wren than I have felt about any other living being in a long time. It seemed all out of proportion, but perhaps not. It was life, however small. Yet if I felt about the suffering of each life in the world all together the way I felt about this wren, I could not live.

I set a bit of broken brick over the place where the wren’s body lay. I took some photos of the moonflowers by the garage.

And now I will not tell you more of my thoughts. I have told you what happened. You can try to find your own meaning if you want to.

As for me, I have some work to do and I’m glad for that. Sparrows are flying back and forth to a neighbor’s feeder. A robin was grooming its feathers earlier on the back fence. It looks as if it might rain again.

And this is just one small story in the circle of life and death.

Wishing you were here

I wanted to tell you something. Perhaps you might realize that because the moon is so far away from the earth and because light travels so fast, no matter the physical distance between two people on the earth, from the moon’s distant perspective you and I might simply be standing along a straight line merely a blink of an eye away from each other.

And so, when I woke up in the middle of the night and I saw moonlight streaming through the kitchen window, I leaned in slightly over the sink and looked up at the moon high above me. Suddenly, it seemed to me as if you might be standing right behind me. But when I turned around to look, the room was dark and you weren’t there. I could almost hear your voice whispering to me.

I turned back and leaned into moonlight once again. And then I found myself a thousand miles away, standing outside your bedroom window in the moonlight. I thought for a moment to peek into your window to see if you were asleep, but instead I just left some moonlight on your windowsill.

In the next instant I was standing once again in my own darkened kitchen. Turning, turning, I wanted merely to put my arms around you for just a few moments. Only for a moment and then I would let you go.

But even when we lived in the same town, it most mostly passing time that we spent together. We were close enough to hug, but we rarely did. We talked now and then. And when we looked into each other face’s and caught each other’s glance, we quickly looked away. We were close and not so close. I suppose that it was near enough for then, but we were also just passing each other by, going on with our separating lives into different distant worlds.

And still, tonight, I miss you.

I just wanted to tell you that when I see the moon shining so brightly, sometimes you come into my mind. I hold you so very lightly and then in time I go back to bed.

Wishing you were here - to put my arms around you, to hold you, and then, to let go once again.

I look at rocks

Sometimes, if I’ve got nothing better to do, I look at rocks.

I suppose that you might say that I’m just wasting my time by looking at rocks. But what else should I do? Watch the unhurriedly drifting clouds drifting unhurriedly across a sky blue sky? Or count the ripples rippling on the rippling river? Or be dazzled by the dazzling sun dappling and dazzling through the leafy green leaves? Or I suppose that I might simply recline myself lightly upon the earth and let the good old world turn at the world’s good old pace around and around and around me as I recline?

And then, eventually, as a matter of course, as day eventually turns to night, I might look up and out and far away and wait for the latest early distant starlight to twinkle into my blinking eyes at the dizzying speed of light. Or I could empty out the clutter from my rattled mind and simply gaze longingly into the face of a full moon rising. Or perhaps on some other day becoming night, might I again seek out a glowing new crescent of reflected sunlight in the descending indigo darkness?

I mean, after all has been said and done, just what, after all, in the world, would have been better for me to have done? And I am quite likely to have said too much already.

And yet, I confess, I am not finished with speaking. There are still so considerably many more barely notable opportunities for watching and wondering. Grass grows. Flowers bloom. Snowflakes fall in winter. And have you seen cottonwood fluff floating like dandelion seeds on a light breeze on a spring afternoon? And of course, one thing is hardly the same thing as another thing at all.

But I must still tell you even more. Have you noticed lately and yet again how so very many things just take their own sweet time doing whatever sweet thing it is that they do. And yet – and yet, I tell you this - if you blink, you might miss seeing some marvel altogether.

And yet I am not finished. I must also add still more uncountable things to what I must also recount.

There are all of those flying birds and those buzzing bees. And don’t get me started on those cottontail bunnies or those teeny tiny red spider mites scurrying around on limestone rocks on the levee by the river on a warm day in May.

It is indeed as Annie Dillard says so well in ‘Pilgrim at Tinker Creek’:

There are many things to see, unwrapped gifts and free surprises. The world is fairly studded and strewn with pennies cast broadside by a generous hand. But - and this is the point- who gets excited by a mere penny? If you follow one arrow, if you crouch motionless on a bank to watch a tremulous ripple thrill on the water and are rewarded by the sight of a muskrat paddling from its den, will you count that sight a chip of copper only, and go on your rueful way? It is dire poverty indeed when a man is so malnourished and fatigued that he won't stoop to pick up a penny. But if you cultivate a healthy poverty and simplicity, so that finding a penny will literally make your day, then, since the world is in fact planted in pennies, you have with your poverty bought a lifetime of days. It is that simple. What you see is what you get.   (p. 16)

And then I have finally come back to this. I had always meant to circle back around to the question of time. Let me be quite clear. My question is this:  just what is my time is good for? What I am talking about is the time when I am merely and simply looking for things for me to look at and see for what they are. That time is my own time. I don’t think of it as disposable time. It is my free time. Valuable time. Possible time. I am simply not about to carelessly throw away the gift of just-being-alive time.

And so, finally, here it is: If I have no other pressing obligations – no people to see, no places to go, no other things to do - that is, I mean, besides looking at rocks – I look at rocks.

Sometimes.

Consider the alternatives. Why, after all, would I waste my time on things I cannot do much about - like politics or the stock market and all of those other scurrying scurrilous current affairs?

Now, I know that you might say that I cannot do anything about the rocks, either. This is true.

But, at least, I find that rocks can be interesting. They are real things. I can stack them or throw them or just not be able budge them even one silly millimeter at all. I can look at them. Or, if I find just the right rock, I might skip it across the river. Of course the skipping rock probably wouldn’t even make it half the way across the Kaw River, even though that often lazy and quite brown river isn’t really all that broad. And then, at some point, that skipping rock would just sink like a stone. That’s life for you.

But in some bit of easy time in between the so-called hard times and hard places, I might just take a look at the very substantial rocks at hand and just wonder about rocks. You know: real, hard, old, unmoving rocks.

I mean, just how has paying attention to all of that virtual jibber jabber been working out for you lately? And have you actually spent any time looking at rocks in your own dear time?

But pardon me.  I meant only to talk about my own sweet time. Not yours.

And here’s just another bit of a conundrum about time that I would like to share with you. After all of my careful attention to the wonders of the natural world – and time - I have often discovered that just utterly wasting a little time, now and then, turns out to be the very best thing I could have done with my time. Who knew?

But, once again let me be clear. I don’t necessarily mean that the time I spend looking at rocks is wasted. Nevertheless, my reasoning finally comes tumbling down to this quite obvious absurdity: In the end, for me, looking at rocks often turns out to be neither a complete waste of time nor the best thing I could do. And so what else is new?

Therefore, if I have nothing better to do than to look at rocks, there seems to be nothing better for me to do than to look at rocks.

QED

And one postscript: Now your time, of course, is your own precious time and I do understand a little something about pressing obligations. But if you want my advice, spend a little time looking at rocks. And let’s face it, you could do worse.