Learning and driving on

Nature in springtime is a beautiful thing.

In this part of the world the transformation from winter to spring is delightful. Cold and drab seem to last a very long time, and I kind of get used to the world looking and feeling like winter. It's not a bad thing, but it is winter. And then spring arrives in a rush of rebirth. In the wake of boring old winter springtime is sensory overload. Delightful sensory overload. Pretty flowers, pretty green grass, pretty leaves, pretty babies. Pretty everything.

Since waving goodbye to Uncle Sugar's Yacht Club I have been blessed to spend a great deal of time out of doors and away from the ape-lizard accommodations where most of us spend nearly all of our lives. Mind you, my daily explorations of nature's reality have been limited to a very local area. I'm familiar with this area and the rhythms of this place have seeped into the core of my being. I feel intimately at home here.

Now you might think that I'm an expert on nature's work here on my familiar stomping ground.

Ha!

Nature surprises me every single day. She is always changing things up and showing me things I've not seen before. Sometimes things which have been certified as impossible by The Committee For Excellence In Ape-Lizard Certification.

The video above is a case in point. This lovely bouquet of breeze-ruffled tickseed appears to be threadleaf coreopsis, Coreopsis verticallata. According to The Committee, it's not allowed to be here. We're allowed to have Coreopsis tinctoria, but not verticallata. Nevertheless...

An important lesson -- for me at least -- is that what exists in nature's reality is truth. Nature doesn't exist in television or film or books or VR video or in this blog. What I can see and touch and smell and taste an hear is real, the other stuff is a poor and incomplete imitation.

Where am I going with this? I'm not entirely sure. Just a reminder, perhaps, that all of the things we see in various magic image machines are woefully incomplete representations. The actual people, places and things they mimic are fundamentally different in reality than they appear in two dimensional dress. This is probably a good thing to keep in mind.

Now where was I?

Oh yeah, springtime!

Spring is a time of rebirth, but death is also part of the process. Predators consume prey, even when the prey is cute. The bullsnake will seek out, find, and consume recently hatched Say's Phoebe chicks. Doesn't matter whether we like it or not. Nature does nature stuff on her own terms.

 

One way an ape-lizard can describe nature is to say it is round. It is round and full and closes a continual circle of birth, livin', death, and rebirth. Nature's holistic cycle is the place in which we live, and we are part of it whether we like it or not. Whether we believe it or not. To paraphrase an oft butchered quote, you may not care about nature, but nature cares about you!

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This spring has been a surprisingly hard time for me. There have been moments, minutes, hours, and even strings of days where the sledding has been impossibly hard. Looked at and analyzed intellectually, my path is curious and interesting. Where do some of these roadblocks come from? What is their true nature? Why is the struggle so hard at times?

Many if not most of the what and why questions are simply unknowable. In a very real sense they do not matter. My job is to suck it up and drive on.

None of that makes sense, does it?

It's not all hard all the time though. I get slammed with beautiful life adventures every day.

I paused while writing this to capture some video of the pre-dawn morning. Another microscopic slice of beauty, even though my phone camera lens had a slight coating of three year-old fingerprints.

The last couple of days have been filled with adventure and I have some fun things to share in the next couple of posts.

Be well and embrace the blessings of liberty.