March 17, 2012

It is certainly green enough out there for St. Patrick's Day!  And all the Irish everywhere make a day for celebration, a day to remember a green place that many of them have never seen, and likely never will, but have made their home in some other green country, or desert, and carry the green inside them wherever they may be.

It's sunny enough, clouds cover and uncover the sun, like a quilt with holes worn through with use, the fluff escaping from the background blue.  The day is quiet enough for all of that, except for the squirrel who is out there giving someone hell, sounding like a hoarse crow grinding out the same note over and over.  I don't see it but I can hear it just fine.  For a long while I did not realize it was the squirrels making that unlovely sound, and blamed it on the birds, but once in awhile you can see the squirrel sitting on branch its tail thrashing and its mouth open making threat to the cat or one of the dogs that visit.  It makes sure its well out of reach of either one before beginning its scold.  The striped cat is too . . . corpulent to climb trees and the dogs bark but have no chance to catch the squirrel and it knows this.  So it's safe to vent its spleen on others in the yard.

There is a gentle breeze wandering around this morning, touching things, moving them about, making leaves flutter, and twigs sway.  The more leaves the more motion because in winter it's a lot harder to tell when there is just a little breeze, but this time of year every breath makes something twitch.

Shaking the Tree
 
Vine and branch we’re connected in this world
of sound and echo, figure and shadow, the leaves
contingent, roots pushing against earth. An apple
 
belongs to itself, to stem and tree, to air
that claims it, then ground. Connections
balance, each motion changes another. Precarious,
 
hanging together, we don’t know what our lives
support, and we touch in the least shift of breathing.
Each holy thing is borrowed.  Everything depends.

Jeanne Lohmann

Everything depends . . . Dawn is always telling me that for me everything is a "depends" question.  And you are right, it all depends, all hangs on something else, there is nothing in isolation, we all connect.  Everything we do touches something or someone and we may not even see the connection, kind of like the butterfly wind analogy for the weather, a butterfly flaps its wings in Chile and we get rain here!  Chaos theory, just a scientific way of saying we can never know everything because there is chance in the world, and so many connections.  Einstein liked to say "God doesn't throw dice."  But suppose God doesn't need to throw dice because chance and connections were built in at the beginning, fundamental and impossible to predict, then even God could be surprised, and will never grow bored with creation.  That would be a good thing because from early times the stories of bored godheads never ended well.

Today with so much wind, there has to be thousands of butterflies flapping somewhere stirring up the uinverse and making waves!  And even God is smiling!