Daily Window

• 2012-08-06

  August 6, 2012

  This morning it’s sort of a leftover sky, left over clouds that seem to have spread thinly over the blue, fading it out and looking sort of like a raft of white gauze curtains blowing over the blue.  The sun is peeking through in several slots, making bright stripes on the grass, among all the shadows.  My heron statue just happens to be in one of the bright spots, making the stone look warm and nearly alive.  There is a stillness that seems to be waiting for wind to ruffle through on the way to deeper clouds.

   

  Today the news said the new Mars rover, Curiosity, landed on the red planet without mishap.  Hooray for NASA!  A marvel of engineering and audacity, this rover will surely find out new things about our nearest neighbor.  All the explosive steps, and there were a bunch of them, went off right on sequence, and Curiosity began its mission with the message … I landed!  I loved seeing the picture of all the people hugging in the control room!  Hugs are truly appropriate for such an accomplishment … need for the celebration of human touch!  I wish Curiosity a long and useful life on the planet Mars, sending us data and pictures of a place that might at some time in the future be marked by the footsteps of human beings along side the treads of robot explorers.

  from …   My God,  It’s Full of Stars

    

         5.

   

  When my father worked on the Hubble Telescope, he said

  They operated like surgeons: scrubbed and sheathed

  In papery green, the room a clean cold, a bright white.

   

  He’d read Larry Niven at home, and drink scotch on the rocks,

  His eyes exhausted and pink. These were the Reagan years,

  When we lived with our finger on The Button and struggled

   

  To view our enemies as children. My father spent whole seasons

  Bowing before the oracle-eye, hungry for what it would find.

  His face lit-up whenever anyone asked, and his arms would rise

   

  As if he were weightless, perfectly at ease in the never-ending

  Night of space. On the ground, we tied postcards to balloons

  For peace. Prince Charles married Lady Di. Rock Hudson died.

   

  We learned new words for things. The decade changed.

   

  The first few pictures came back blurred, and I felt ashamed

  For all the cheerful engineers, my father and his tribe. The second time,

  The optics jibed. We saw to the edge of all there is— 

  So brutal and alive it seemed to comprehend us back.

   

  Tracy K. Smith 

  This poem celebrates another stellar accomplishment, the Hubble that takes such stunning pictures capable of showing up so much more of the universe than we ever knew before.  I hope Curiosity fires our imagination the way Hubble’s images have, that we get more and more human from knowing more about what is out beyond or own small world.  Hooray for the success of Curiosity both the ship and the quality!  Hooray for all the scientists and engineers that extend our reach and open our eyes to sights we have never seen before!  Hooray for the continuing of exploration, expanding our horizons, fueling our dreams! 

   

  Having trouble with formatting … hope to have it worked out soon.

• 2012-08-04

  August 4, 2012

  Well, I am home, and glad to be here.  It seems as though I had been away forever.  It started out as vacation for my husband’s reunion and to see everyone in Tulsa, but ended up with my Mom being very ill and going home to take care of her.  She died, from a short bout with cancer, on July 19th.  It’s so hard to know what to say, I will miss her, and was glad to be with her, and the people from the hospice care were all truly helpful and wonderful to us.  I am sure I am not any where finished dealing with my feelings, or getting through this time, but being home is certainly going to help, and getting back into some sort of my routine.  I postponed my eye surgery to go home to Mom and so I still have that to do and will get it set up again, but I wanted to have a few days of normal things before I started anything else out of the ordinary.  I missed being in touch this way with all of you. 

   

  So today it’s like looking at a new backyard, even the most familiar things look new again.  There is a LOT of shade now that it’s full summer, and all the trees have all the leaves they are going to have.  The crepe myrtle are raining down tiny pink and white curly-petaled flowers.  You can watch them fall down kind of like flower rain.  The grass is remarkably green for having so little sun, but there has evidently been a lot of rain while I was gone.  The cane is summer-tall but not blooming yet, though the stalks are mostly green now, and my husband has evidently been very good about cutting down the new ones, as there are not any new ones poking up at the moment.  Michael took the canoe with him when he came home to take some more of his stuff, so now the water bowl sits on an old cooler and I have only seen one blue jay and one mockingbird take a splash in it.  The yard is very quiet, even the cat is not in evidence.  I guess it’s probably too hot for a lot of activity.  There are huge banks of white cloud across the deep summer blue that sometime give us a few moments of overall shade, but nothing looking too stormy yet.

   

  This is a difficult day to find a poem, too much I want to say, too much I need from all those words that have been written and yet sometimes seem too far away. 

   

  From Mala of the Heart

  I know a cure for sadness.

  Let your hands touch something that

  makes your eyes smile.

   

  I bet there are a hundred objects close by

  that can do that.

   

  Look at

  beauty’s gift to us —

  her power is so great she enlivens

  the earth, the sky,

  our soul.

   

  Mirabai

   

  This one, the beauty of creation just outside my window, the thought of so much love in the world I can reach out and touch it with words, connect to the people I love with this morning note that comforts me, the routine of that connection I have missed and sorely needed.  A gift that will always remain beyond words.

• 2012-06-20

  June 20, 2012

  A scream in the night … as least that’s what I thought it was when I heard it.  Sitting up late, after 1 am, I heard someone screaming or some loud noise and thought perhaps some neighbor was in trouble.  When I went to the back door and opened it, the screaming stopped … then there was a loud confused rustling in the trees, I could not tell from where, and the cry sounded again.  I realized it was a bird, and from the sound of it a large bird, and the cry it was making was like a very loud  plaintive two-toned call.  I never heard anything like it before, and it flew off, still making that enormous ululating call, sounding lost in the night, searching for home, in terror of never finding it again.  Standing on the back porch in the warm muggy night, it seemed like a voice from another world, someplace lonely and wild.
   
  So, of course, being me, I had to find out what made that sound, and though it took awhile, I discovered it was a common loon, not so common to me.  I did not realize this was part of their range, I think of them as northern cold-weather birds, not inhabiting some warm humid night on a southern bay.  We have lived here a LONG time and I never heard that call before last night, and I am often up in the night, heck, I never heard that call in the daytime either.   Though I was alarmed at first, I am glad to have heard something I never expected to hear.  I have read about them, read poems about them even, they seem to be a bird people are fascinated by, and from their call I can see why.  I love the internet where you can find so many answers, and I found that some of their calls sound like wolves baying at the moon.  The call I heard is a yodel, or that’s what the experts have named it.   The only bird call I have heard that rivals it in oddness and volume is the laughing call of the pileated woodpecker.  We surely do live in a world of wonders. 
   
  And so, today it’s a poem about a loon, actually very close to my own experience, as the poet was reading in the night when she heard it as well.  Sometimes the best thing about poetry is that you recognize your own circumstances in it and know you share some experience with another human beings.  Makes you feel a little less lonely, and a little more joy to think of that sharing …
   
  The Loon
   
  Not quite four a.m., when the rapture of being alive
  strikes me from sleep, and I rise
  from the comfortable bed and go
  to another room, where my books are lined up
  in their neat and colorful rows. How
  magical they are! I choose one
  and open it. Soon
  I have wandered in over the waves of the words
  to the temple of thought.
                                              And then I hear
  outside, over the actual waves, the small,
  perfect voice of the loon. He is also awake,
  and with his heavy head uplifted he calls out
  to the fading moon, to the pink flush
  swelling in the east that, soon,
  will become the long, reasonable day.
                                                    Inside the house
  it is still dark, except for the pool of lamplight
  in which I am sitting.
                                I do not close the book.
  Neither, for a long while, do I read on.
   
  Mary Oliver
  
  Something so alien, so haunting makes lovely poetry, doesn’t it?   And who better to write it than someone who has spent her life with the wildness of nature as a daily companion.  And I like her “long, reasonable day” and her response to that weird wild call is to just sit and hear the echoes of it.  After hearing it, I went in and went to bed, lying in the dark thinking how astonishing even the most ordinary place can be.
   
  We are going on vacation tomorrow.  We are going to see Linda and Lee Ann and to my husband’s reunion, then we will see the boys and Kaci and Shawn in Oklahoma for our mostly annual July 4th visit.  We are leaving … very early, it’s a husband thing.  So this will be the last note for awhile, until after July 7.  And then on July 10th, I will have cataract removal surgery on my right eye and it will be a few days after that I suppose before I will be back to normal enough to do the morning note.  Anything having to do with my eyes makes me nervous as I try to imagine life without being able to see what I see every morning.  It makes me nervous, in a different way, to be so long without the early morning writing, but at least when I come back I might have some new things to say.  I will miss this … intimate connection with you but I will be thinking of you, and collecting things to talk about and perhaps even new poetry!

• 2012-06-19

  June 19, 2012

  Grom … the Russian word for thunder and there is a lot of it this morning, rumbling from far away and closer, seems the whole area is socked in with clouds and intermittent rain.  In the night rain poured down on and off like someone flipping a switch, hard rain for a few minutes then a trickle, then just dripping off the leaves, and then hard rain again and the cycle repeats.  I sort of imagined a line of rain bubbles trailing over us, bursting, then emptiness until the next bubble burst.  This morning even gray light and the rain-darkened leaves and branches drooping under the weight of water.  The birds all sheltered somewhere else and too cool for cicadas.  Even the gulls that usually come in a little from the bay are absent. 

  I am always looking for a poem about rain … one that shows some new thing that rain brings … 

  Rain 

  Toward evening, as the light failed
  and the pear tree at my window darkened,
  I put down my book and stood at the open door,
  the first raindrops gusting in the eaves,
  a smell of wet clay in the wind.
  Sixty years ago, lying beside my father,
  half asleep, on a bed of pine boughs as rain
  drummed against our tent, I heard
  for the first time a loon’s sudden wail
  drifting across that remote lake—
  a loneliness like no other,
  though what I heard as inconsolable
  may have been only the sound of something
  untamed and nameless
  singing itself to the wilderness around it
  and to us until we slept. And thinking of my father
  and of good companions gone
  into oblivion, I heard the steady sound of rain
  and the soft lapping of water, and did not know
  whether it was grief or joy or something other
  that surged against my heart
  and held me listening there so long and late. 

  Peter Everwine
   
  Now it is raining again, hard, another bubble burst, and an evening darkness taking up the sky, the sounds of all the water, drumming on the canoe, splattering from the trees, even running off the roof to splash on the back porch making almost a roaring equal to the thunder.   You can feel the deep thunder in your own chest, vibrating as the windows do with the bass of it.  There is little wind so that sound is not added into the mix, the only movement of the leaves is the water falling on them from great heights. 

  We need the rain … the fear of drought begins to crawl into us now when there are just a few weeks without rain, the dryness edges into our sight and we begin to suspect trees are dying, and crops withering in the fields.  The deep darkness of a good soaking rain is welcomed and we do not hurry the clouds away to get a glimpse of the sun.   We give up the sunlight to have our continuous green, a small sacrifice, and for some, who love the rain for itself, no sacrifice at all.  I just saw a blue jay plummet from an upper branch to land huddled on the smooth curve of the canoe and slide off, catch wing and vanish.  I don’t know whether it meant to land on the canoe and it was slippery or whether it fell out of the tree and slid off, but since it flew away, I hope it was all right. 

  The darkness is expanding, more rain is coming.  What is it about rain that seems to make us nostalgic, or melancholy, or filled with the quiet joy the sound of it sometimes brings?  It may not be the rain but what is inside us that goes out to meet it and bring it home.

• 2012-06-18

  June 18, 2012

  A morning of early noise, cicadas and birds, early heat, already kind of breathless out there, early light, while the sky looks full of cloud they do not seem to be hiding the sun.  Later they say rain is coming, but, again, I’ll believe that when it starts falling.  The stealth rain was not forecast and yet watered the yard some, and often forecast rain just passes us by.  There are new shoots of cane coming up through the leaf litter, spears that have not opened to leaves yet.  It was a nice weekend, lots of food and family and fun. It was an opportunity for me to use my new dishes and napkins and such, bright colors and festive.  It’s good to have a pleasant break in the routine. 

  Some beautiful pictures this weekend included several pictures of rivers, a vast oxbow of water in one of them, a swiftly flowing river, a river slowly pushing out into the gulf, you could see the silt carried by it.  They all reminded me of a poem I had written several years ago, mostly about getting older, but about rivers as well.  The end of this week we are leaving to visit my husband’s sisters and attend a whole school reunion for his high school, and after that we will go spend July fourth with the boys and see Shawn and Kaci and their boys.  I guess I remembered this poem because it’s a kind of looking back … 

  Natural Process

  Stepping again into a river
  it’s never the same river
  the next moment
  a new river
  and the next
  and after that … 

  The water is clear
  moving makes it so,
  when it slows
  toward a bigger body
  it’s full of … stuff
  collected on the way. 

  Aging is natural
  and incontrovertibly
  irreversible,
  inevitable as dawn
  irrefutable as time
  incomprehensible. 

  It’s the stuff of life
  that makes youth
  irretrievable
  silt of events
  sift and swirl
  making mud of us 

  in that mud
  all that we are
  makes food
  for other lives
  we pour ourselves
  into more and more 

  until at last
  we become vast
  by disappearing 

  S.  Crowson

  I hope we become vast, by giving, by sharing, by ending up part of something bigger than ourselves, part of continuing life, and knowledge, and the particular will we have to join our lives to others.  In a long life, we gather up so many things, so much … stuff, our connections to others live in those things, are reflected in what we keep, we turn into hoarders of experience, we touch those things and remember kindnesses, and absent friend, and family far afield yet still connected to us.  Every place we connect brings us more connections and on and on until we can experience being joined with the world, with what is out there, and what is inside as well.

• 2012-06-17

  June 17, 2012

  No stealth rain this morning, just blatant sunshine, so clear and bright it’s one of the blessings of the day, Father’s Day, and Sunday.  It seems to me the a lot of times father’s miss out, they do not get to spend as much time with the children as mother’s do.  As both my father and my husband were sailor’s and away from home for great stretches of time, this was particularly true of them.  There were all kinds of ways to include them, letters being the most common, but even letters and in our case, tapes of the children, did not replace the day-to-day intimacy of being there.  Yet, their work made all that day-to-day living possible, the safety of it, the permanence of it.  Even in hard times, it did not occur to either man in my life to leave, to go and live by themselves and not be responsible for anyone else, not have anyone depend on them, not have to give up anything that they made.  They both shared and worked and seems to me rarely got the kind of thanks they were due.  Perhaps the very work that made so much possible, kept them away in more ways than were fair. 

  I cannot answer for my kids, but they have told me that lessons they learned from their father involved integrity, and hard work, and being responsible, and doing the right thing even when you would rather not.  All those years of getting up and going to work every morning, and never complaining, it’s astonishing.  For my husband, years and years of work without ever even so much as being late, and a handful of sick days in all those years, when there could have been so many more.  For my dad, all those extra jobs which had so many reasons but some of those reasons were lessons for us in all kinds of things, art, and music, and dance.  One of the reasons I think that for us any kind of creativity is worth making room for, worth giving time, worth giving a trial. 

  There do not seem to be poems about fathers the way there are about mothers, and a lot of the poems for fathers seem to involve struggle, and competition, and anger, even sadness, in a way the poems for mothers do not.  Again, perhaps it is that distance that is part of the life of being a father, or perhaps we all need someone to struggle against to learn who we are, or need someone to measure up to, or someone to make the ground of our life a place of safety, of trust. 

  The poem for today is quiet, and demonstrates a father’s love … 

  Those Winter Sundays 

  Sundays too my father got up early
  and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold,
  then with cracked hands that ached
  from labor in the weekday weather made
  banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him. 

  I’d wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.
  When  the rooms were warm, he’d call,
  and slowly I would rise and dress,
  fearing the chronic angers of that house, 

  Speaking indifferently to him,
  who had driven out the cold
  and polished my good shoes as well.
  What did I know, what did I know
  of love’s austere and lonely offices? 

  Robert Hayden 

  For today, and every day, for all the fathers providing love’s austere and often lonely offices, happy Father’s Day.  Though we may not always remember to thank you for that daily work, we appreciate it, and know it’s part of your love, part of being the dad, part of our lives that like the air we breathe is essential and rarely gets noticed. 

  Happy Father’s Day to all the fathers, may your special day be just that … special!

• 2012-06-16

  June 16, 2012

  A stealth rain … lying in bed I thought I heard a bird outside rattling the bushes as they do some mornings, but after listening for a minute I decided it must be raining, and it was.  A very gentle rain, collecting on the roof and dripping off, more like a trickle.  This went on for a bit and over the next few minutes it slowly began to rain harder, now you could tell it was raining, but still hardly wet the porch, but the end of the driveway, out from under the trees has a few puddles.  Reminded me of the quote from Shakespeare about mercy “The quality of mercy is not strained; it droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven upon the place beneath.”  So we got a gentle mercy of rain this morning and our place was grateful. 

  The pictures from one of the cameras downtown show big black clouds building up and gray streaking the early morning, though here there is more blue showing, there are enough white clouds and haze to make the yard mostly shady with occasional stripes of sunlight.  The cat is making his careful way across the yard, shaking his feet off at nearly every step.  He does not like to get his feet wet, but seems this morning finding out what is going on over here is worth the trouble.  He has been cruising the margin of the cane for a few minutes now.  I don’t see anything in there, but perhaps I am not looking with the eyes of a cat.  The rain was just enough to make everything quiet, no cicadas this morning and only a little bird song. and no lawnmowers … yet. 

  In the night, for several nights now, maybe a week, a frog has sung its song outside the study window, for hours, from exactly the same place each night.  I have not seen it, but feel intimately acquainted with it, lying in the dark hearing its small croaking tune rise into the night, barely pausing for breath, reeling out on and on, making darkness its stage, and the night its audience.  This morning its gone, sleeping in the heat of the day, even the rain not enticing it to sing again.  In going through poems this morning, I though a poem about frogs and love could start the day, as the frog’s song has started each night lately. 

  Green Frog at Roadstead, Wisconsin 

  It is the way of a pleasant path
  To walk through white birch, fir,
  And spruce on a limestone trail
  Through the quiet, complacent time
  Of summer when, suddenly, the frog jumps
  And you jump after him, laughing,
  Hopping, frog and woman, to show
  The stationary world its flat ways.
  Love is a Frog, I grin that greenly
  To your green eyes and they leap
  At me. Up, I will enter the Frog World
  With you and try the leaping ways
  Of the heart that we do not fail to find
  The sunlit air full of leaping chances. 

  James Schevill 

  I am fairly sure our frog is black, and so tiny you could not imagine it would have such a large continuous voice if you saw it.  When I go outside in the early afternoon, sometimes the little black frogs look like crickets in the grass until you realize they leap like frogs, with such perfect abandon that they come down again flat on their bellies, splat, not at all like the lightly leaping of an insect.  You have to admire them, their strong legs propelling them in a leap that ends in falling so flat, yet they keep going.

• 2012-06-15

  June 15, 2012

  We seem to be in a lull this morning.  Earlier there were lots of birds singing and chattering and carrying on, but now everything seems quiet, even the cicadas see to be slow starting.  You can hear the ubiquitous sound of lawnmowers in the background but they are not close at had, which is good because today is Mikayla’s day off and she is feeling under the weather.  I was hoping she would get to sleep late, but in the summer you are often awakened at ungodly hours by yard crews trying to beat the brutal heat of the middle of the day.  And if I did that work, I would do the same thing so there is no way you can even be annoyed by it.   If we did not have the Hernandez brothers come at least every couple of weeks in the summer, our yard would look a LOT worse, because, while my husband has great intentions, the work is really just too much for him now, even though he is battling the cane because the crew, in their fifteen minute mowing and edging and blowing, just don’t want to deal with it and will only trim around it, and I don’t blame them for that either.  Three of them do the yard so fast, one to mow, one to edge, and one to blow and bag if needed.  They have that routine down to a science.  In the front they use the big riding lawnmower they got last year, but in the back with so many trees they really use the weed-eater mostly, we don’t have that much grass by this time in the summer … too much shade now. 

  In the summer, when we were kids, days lasted forever, even though the summer seemed to melt away fast as ice cream, each day seemed an abundance until we were called in at dusk.  Sometimes, we would sit out on the trunk we used for a step and watch the fireflies slowly filter into the yard, and occasionally we’d catch them in jars to put on the dresser between our beds.  And in the night, Mom would come and retrieve the jar and let them out, if she remembered we had them.  Some morning they were still there crawling around the leaves we put in for them, their long slender bodies dark in the daylight, their beetle wings closed. This morning’s poem is a young girl’s remembrance of summer evenings …  

  Young
   
  A thousand doors ago
  when I was a lonely kid
  in a big house with four
  garages and it was summer
  as long as I could remember,
  I lay on the lawn at night,
  clover wrinkling over me,
  the wise stars bedding over me,
  my mother’s window a funnel
  of yellow heat running out,
  my father’s window, half shut,
  an eye where sleepers pass,
  and the boards of the house
  were smooth and white as wax
  and probably a million leaves
  sailed on their strange stalks
  as the crickets ticked together
  and I, in my brand new body,
  which was not a woman’s yet,
  told the stars my questions
  and thought God could really see
  the heat and the painted light,
  elbows, knees, dreams, goodnight. 

  Anne Sexton

  I recognize how this feels even though our circumstances probably couldn’t have been more different, it’s the summer, when you are beginning to know you are going to change, but before you have done it.  The summer where everything is just the way it should be, even for just a little while.  Where you are in that pause between seasons, both the world’s and your own, where it has been summer long enough to be relaxed into it and not so long yet as to be boring, where your body is still something familiar and not changing, or full of new feelings, new changes you don’t quite understand.  It reminds me of a line from a song by Dessa, where she says a flat-chested, gap-toothed girl was the best thing she’d been so far.  And I understood that feeling, though I am more … myself now that at any time except maybe that far back, maybe the two times have more in common than first appears. 

  The summer sky today is changing while I watch, the sky here often does, the same green land, but the never-routine sky, blue or white, gray or hazy, the elements in constant flux, something to remember, even about things that are a lot harder to see than the sky.

• 2012-06-14

  June 14, 2012

  So much bird song this morning after a night full of frog song, it seems this is a noisy time of year with ever creature looking to find someone to share life with.  There is one frog that over and over croaks from the same spot in the back yard and goes on for hours as soon as it’s dark and for most of the night.  By morning, the birds begin to sing and the frog goes to sleep, some something is always making some kind of music, and this morning the cicadas will be adding insect chorus to the other songs. 

  Here is a short poem, one that in this place and time is easy to understand …  

  Everything Lush I Know 

  I do not know the names of things
  but I have lived on figs and grapes
  smell of dirt under moon
  and moon under threat of rain
  everything lush I know
  an orchard becoming all orchards
  flowers here and here
  the earth I have left
  every brief home-making
  the lot of God blooming into vines
  right now then and always 

  Kimberly Burwick 

  And here, even in winter, there is … lush, so that the green here is the green of every place, especially the places that don’t have their own green.  It’s the morning that does this, the new perspective, the way seeing in the morning colors the whole day.  Oh, you often can’t get back the serenity of the morning view, but something of it carries over, like a secret color that shines from everything.  I think that’s why it’s almost impossible to write this later in the day, I can never seem to get back to this perspective where the “lot of God” blooms into the day and I can actually notice it.  The morning is like the smell of rain, that taking up of the dust in the haze of moisture just before the downpour, it’s the anticipation, and the rain is the actuality.  After the downpour, there is still moisture but you can’t get back that smell of anticipation, it’s been overwhelmed.  But the experience of every morning is the “right now then and always”, something that is a brief home-making created by notice, by the brief cataloging of what is blooming in the “lot of God”.

• 2012-06-13

  June 13, 2012

  Shadowy morning, lots of clouds, deep shade all over the back yard.  Two blue jays are chasing each other through the trees, making the little branches bounce with their takeoffs and landings.  It’s daylight but the kind of daylight that has no bright sun, clouds all along the bay this morning delaying the sunlight.  Before dawn, the mourning doves were out with their owl like mantra, and the mockingbirds were serenading the world with stolen song.  Last night after the sun went down, there was some little frog outside the window, crooning the same two notes over and over like a rough heart beat.  I couldn’t see it but heard it until I fell asleep, imagining it was one of those tiny black frogs with a big voice.

  Most of the time when I read a poem, I get some sense of where it is going, but this morning’s poem surprised me into laughing out loud!

  Origin

  The first cell felt no call to divide.
  Fed on abundant salts and sun,
  still thin, it simply spread,
  rocking on water, clinging to stone,
  a film of obliging strength.
  Its endoplasmic reticulum
  was a thing of incomparable curvaceous length;
  its nucleus, Golgi apparatus, RNA
  magnificent. With no incidence
  of loneliness, inner conflict, or deceit,
  no predator nor prey,
  it had little to do but thrive,
  draw back from any sharp heat
  or bitterness, and change its pastel
  colors in a kind of song.
  We are descendants of the second cell.

  Sarah Lindsay

  Well, I guess we would have to be, yes?  But just saying it brought in a whole wealth of conclusions besides the obvious one.  Could we exist without conflict, without the concept of predator and prey?  If we did, we wouldn’t be … us.  We would be some other species all together.  I would like to think we could get out of that rut, but I imagine it’s cell deep and there is no getting around it.  We can choose how we react, how we modulate those influences, that’s what civilization is … an attempt to moderate the “second cell” influence, to be more than just an organism responding to its environment.  When you see hummingbirds at a feeder, you realize that those beautiful jeweled birds are mean!  They fight over access to the feeder, over territory, but they can cooperate as when you see one lead the most aggressive off so the others can dash in an get a drink, and they take turns doing that.  So descendants of the “second cell” can cooperate even on such a small scale as hummingbirds.  This year in our yard, the cardinals and the blue jays both have nests somewhere in the yard and pretty much leave each other alone, only occasionally having a squabble.

  Also, reading it again made me think of how many times in the old Star Trek that the crew found a planet “paradise” like the one worshipping Vaal, where everyone was virtual immortal and happy but not progressing at all and rejected it, found it unappealing, even though to ancient civilizations it would have been the equivalent of heaven.  I guess we just have to deal with our heritage and make the best we can of it, use the conflict, the influence of predator and prey to make our own response, our own way in the world.  Conflict or competition may be responsible eventually for getting us off planet, open new worlds, even drive changes to solve problems right here.  While we might sometimes like to deny it, Sarah Lindsay is right … we are human, and definitely descendants of the second cell with all its trouble and glory.