Archive for March 2011
Natural Art
Nature, the artist, was in grand display over the weekend. In a fascinating display of the power of a process over a span of time, and the physics of solar energy and absorption of said energy by dark objects, check out this leaf. Note the tiny columns of ice that formed where holes were present in the leaf.
I also captured beautiful design in the air bubbles frozen in the ice on the lake. This kind of thing is all around us. It behooves us to pause more often and take note of the artwork created, completely free of any human contribution.
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Busy Fun
I haven’t claimed time to write this weekend amid the wild fun and games, eating too much delicious food, and exploring the late-winter ice of the lake, so I will offer one quick snapshot from yesterday’s hike. The north woods of Wisconsin, with good friends, is a really wonderful way to spend a weekend!
With Friends
This morning we find ourselves at our favorite place, with friends. We headed out of town yesterday on a trip to Hayward, WI for the weekend, where our children and two families of friends have gathered. There isn’t much in the way of viable snow cover to enjoy, but there is a lake-full of frozen water. With the moon looming large overhead last night, we wandered out on the lake for an exploratory excursion and found a few marvels of leaf impressions melted up to an inch deep, and a couple sticks that we extracted as if executing a full size version of the battery-operated game of physical skill, “Operation.”
photo by Mike Wilkus
Then we gathered round, but not around the fire. The center of attention was Julian’s new iPad, on which we instantly composed eight bars of a joint composition on electronic instruments. Fun with friends in a fun place at a fun time of year.
Happy supermoon Saturday!
March Gladness
What a difference a year can make. It’s March Madness time again, and for reasons that escape me, I have developed little interest in the drama this year. I am intrigued that the big college basketball tourney has failed to capture my attention, after several years previous in which I found myself trying to see every game. I’ve not filled out any brackets this year, so I don’t even know all the teams playing.
It turns out to be okay with me this weekend, as I am scheduled to be out of town with friends. We’ll be heading up to Hayward and I expect will do very little watching of sports on television. What else we will be doing is hard to know, what with the snow cover fast dissolving around these parts.
I sense, eating and the playing of cards. For me, this year it is March gladness.
Just Write
“Just write,” I was told. So, write is what I did.
Sometimes, I just ramble on and on about things that don’t even make much sense to me. One standard instruction to writing students is, “Write what you know.” Maybe that is why I write things I don’t understand. I know all too well about how little I really know.
Usually, my writing is something of a composition of sounds that form in my head. Songs, without the music. Prose.
Trying to navigate the plethora of trivial minutiae that presents itself at a steady, heady pace on a daily basis amid the unending onslaught of news being reported about the scale of unimaginably real calamity that has befallen our fellow humans after a devastating earthquake that was bad enough on its own, yet amped up beyond comprehension by a tsunami that, as time passes, is at risk of being diminished in significance by an unprecedented nuclear event that is threatening to live up to the worst case scenario that brilliant minds have been warning about since the time this dangerous science of monkeying with radioactive substances became harnessed to create electric power that enables the manufacture and use of uncountable options for plugging in devices to occupy our attention and complicate the simplest of tasks by transforming them into increasingly bizarre rituals of detaching ourselves from the real world and bringing on a mind-numbing amount of new trivial minutiae that mysteriously becomes the master of our precariously fractured attention span which makes it difficult to mentally process what the people are currently suffering while all around us are nuisance ailments and ridiculous inconveniences mixing in with usual responsibilities of remembering to put the trash out or turning the lights off at a decent hour in order to get a healthy night’s sleep in order to carry out our little morsel of responsibility to society, since we can’t just give up and stop living because the people in Japan have been warned to stay inside their homes to avoid exposure to radiation, even though they don’t have a home to go into because a giant wall of water obliterated everything in sight and they are living a stone age existence without the convenience of plugging in their hair dryers or plying their skills of virtual bowling on their Wii and instead are wandering around in search of living relatives in a way that exposes how important family must truly be at a time when there is nothing to plug in and no where to plug it in and no power available even if you did plug it in the way we do in places where disaster has yet to strike and life goes on as if nothing so extraordinary is likely to happen as long as we navigate the plethora of trivial minutiae that presents itself at a steady, heady pace on a daily basis…
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Fading Scenes
Most people will be celebrating the melting snowpack in my region of the world this week as temperatures climb up into digits we don’t see much in the winter. In many ways, I am as ready as ever for the next season of the year, but strangely, I am also feeling a little melancholy about the loss of all the incredible photo opportunities of winter’s snow-scape…
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New Life
It is probably not obvious, without my explaining, how little I have had to do with horses over my lifetime. Granted, there were horses boarded in one of the barns on the farm where I first lived. It seems to me, such exposure early in life could just as easily have spawned a deep interest in horses. Instead, I felt no particular attraction.
In my lifetime since, I bet the number of interactions with horses could be counted on one hand. That is, until our visit last fall to Ian’s Forest Garden Estate in Portugal.
Still, even after two weeks last September discovering the wonder of horses, I sure never sensed how moved I would be to unexpectedly see a picture of the newest member of the herd. Sunday afternoon I saw the first picture that Ian posted of their new foal, Gretel. It was incredibly moving.
Just one still image, but speaking those thousands of words. I immediately –urgently, even– began hollering for Cyndie. Her response overshadowed mine, exponentially.
Something deep within me senses the powerfulness of horses now, and the incredible significance of such an event; something beyond my current level of understanding. I don’t think I need to fully understand. I just accept what I witness.
Congratulations, Ian, and welcome to the world, Gretel!
Comparing Pain
I find it interesting to contemplate the coincidence of timing for significant events, and how the measure of significance is a relative one. What is deemed to be newsworthy changes quickly, but the events play out anyway, regardless the attention paid. The impact of death of an individual is lost to all but the closest people, if it happens at the same time that thousands are killed in a catastrophe.
Political conflicts, where interested parties often struggle for attention to bolster their cause, fall off the radar in the shadow of cataclysms that demand response from countries around the world.
Today there are people facing the prospect of not having any clean water to drink, their world in shambles, rumbling with aftershocks and a looming nuclear meltdown. I cannot think of one significant thing in my life that doesn’t pale in comparison. What may have been important to me last week, just doesn’t hold that same measure in comparison to events in Japan.
May all of our petty concerns be revealed for the trivial nature they really are, every day, regardless the number of coincident catastrophes that come about to present more dramatic reference.
Eat Well
I can never remember, is it, feed a cold, starve a fever, or the other way around? Doesn’t really matter. Cyndie’s solution for most any ill is, feed it. I have been bed ridden for a couple days now, allowing a cold to do its worst. I have also been facing waves of food coming at me. I am at the mercy of both. For one thing, the food feels good on my throat. Then there is my desire to accept the love that Cyndie is delivering in the form of food. Most of all, it distracts me from feeling punky.
It’s just a run of the mill cold, but it is reducing me to a whimpering seven-year-old boy. What boy doesn’t like food being brought to him? It does align with my ongoing child-like attitude. However, I do look forward to feeling my old health returning soon. Time to grow up, I guess. Again.
Relative Something 