nature
>All that I cannot understand
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| Adele Holmes @ F-Stop Magazine/ |
Gary Presley considers the symbols and mysteries of nature @ Fringe.
I live in a place where the wind blows, not constantly but nearly so. Only on the hottest, most oppressively humid days does it stall. Only on a hard winter morning, all things ice solid beneath the weight of a sagging Arctic high-pressure system do I see branches hold still. In the summer, the wind is from the south and in the winter from the northwest. In the summer, it generally is pleasant enough, sometimes cooling, sometimes like the hot breath of a hair dryer; in the winter, it always hurts.
I have only lived in this particular house for a year. I never thought much about the wind in the other places I have lived. The constant wind here reminds me of my grandmother, a woman who liked the wind, perhaps not liked so much as she felt the wind cradled her in a familiarity. I know she seemed to like nothing very much. My grandmother was a native of the Appalachian foothills of east Tennessee, but she lived seventy years or more on the prairie. When I was a boy we lived in the deep hill country. When she would visit, I would listen to her complain of not being able to see the horizon, of being closed in by the hills pressing against Spring Creek valley, a place all the more isolated by its thirty mile distance from the Mother Road, Route 66.
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The wind in this place is still new to me, even after a year, a thing both understood and surprising. I first began to notice it because the room in which I write looks to the east, and there is a point in that direction where the land slopes downward in a dramatic fashion. The marrying of terrain and prevailing winds means a consistent updraft works its invisible magic outside my window nearly every day, a magic lifting and cradling of two birds common in this part of the world, red-tail hawks and vultures. Each day there is a festival of birds riding the wind, sometimes at eye level with my window, lingering, always lingering a hundred feet or more above the ground as they ride the updrafts.
>Tipping us into the unknown
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| Dan Shepherd @ F-Stop Magazine/ |
Nuria Sheehan remembers the comforting presence of nature @ Anderbo.
I woke to the soft slide of wet grass under my legs as my mother pulled me up by the arm, dragging me across the open field where we’d spent the night. The sky was dark, a fragile pre-dawn light just beginning to pierce the fog. Struggling to focus my eyes, I could make out hulking shapes nearby. Cows. Behind us, my mother’s friend Violet was quickly gathering the blankets. And something else was there too, a shadow or presence that my disoriented mind tried to comprehend. If I had actually seenit, the looming kachina, I would have believed all the wild stories I’d ever been told. I would have believed that I lived in a world filled with strange magic and living gods.
But the field was too dark, my head too fumbled with sleep. We got in the car and I knew I had missed it.
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )The day before, as we crossed Nebraska, our ugly old car had started to seize and stall. Pulling off the highway, we stopped beside a gas station in a small town. Traces of early October snow spun across the parking lot in tiny cyclones. Violet had joined us on this trip from Wisconsin to Tucson, where my mother and I were going to spend the winter, or the year, or the rest of our lives. Violet, as usual, thought everything would be fine with the car, that it was just overheated, that it would start after a few minutes, that the world would unfold helpfully before us. But the engine wouldn’t turn over.
>The life of ants
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| “Geckos at Ant Hill” by Denva Whiting |
Deborah M. Gordon @ Boston Review on the disorganized and messy world of ant colonies.
It is easy to imagine that the lives of the ants resemble our own. An ant might feel, as people sometimes do, lost in the crowd. If you look at a city from far away, you see a hive of activity: people going back and forth from home to job and collecting packages of food and things produced by other people, things to be stored in their chambers or turned into garbage taken away by other people. Each person is a tiny speck in the flow of a system that no one has much power to change.
Our fascination with ants has led to engaging stories about them, from the Iliad’s Myrmidons to Antz’s Z, as well as a growing body of research by biologists. Though the ant colonies of fable and film often are invested with the hierarchical organization characteristic of human societies, a real ant colony operates without direction or management. New research is showing us how ant colonies get things done without anyone being in charge. Ants, it turns out, have much to teach us about the decentralized networks that operate in many biological systems, in which local interactions produce global behavior, without the guidance of any central intelligence or authority.
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )Many of our stories about ants concern how hard they work and how they are reconciled to the anomie of life as a pawn in a larger system. Sometimes we imagine that the ants like it that way. Proverbs 6:6 admonishes the sluggard to emulate the hard-working ants. In Aesop’s fables, the ants show perseverance and foresight. Homer’s Iliad tells of a race of myrmidons, ants transformed by Zeus into selfless human soldiers. T. H. White, writing during the Cold War, sent the young King Arthur into an ant colony that is a totalitarian hell, with microphones blaring commands.
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