Waves on the inner harbor of Honfleur (taken by Leslie)
I have been mostly deaf all of my life, so I pay more attention to sound waves than may be healthy.
For the same reason, I pay way too much attention to light waves as I stare at people’s lips as they talk.
I talk with the universal accent of the congenitally deaf, and a big piece of my learning how to talk was touching the throat of my mother as she taught me the various sounds people make when speaking English.
Waves in the Cape May inlet
I learned most of them, but I’m still struggling with “r”. Grrrr….
Waves allow us to know what’s going on with the things not actually touching us. (Well, sound waves are mechanical, so I guess one could argue that the air particles need to touch our ear drum, but the particles are not the wave.)
Basil flower on a winter windowsill
We do not observe waves directly–we see what our brains allow us to see, forms and sounds that keep our breathing bodies from quickly becoming carcasses.
Still, as I catch a glimpse of a patch of snow glinting in the optimistic light of a March sun, my eye converting waves of light that only I have seen, I realize how little any of us can know, and how much of the universe casually exists outside our senses, our imagination.
So I write about it, to no one in particular, for no particular reason.
Bee on a dandelion….the cherry blossoms are still a month away
If you have never stuck your nose completely into a cherry blossom, a blossom that burst open only a few hours ago, you cannot know the intensity of joy possible by bees, or by us.
We cannot know what bees know, but if I had to choose between words and the inexplicable joy felt when I buried my face in a fresh patch of cherry blossoms, well, I’m throwing away my keyboard and running away with the bees.
After giving myself to the first cherry tree blossom of spring, I saw a young child, no more than 8, pick up her even younger sister, about 2–she carried her to the cherry tree, to sniff the flowers. She may have seen me do the same thing.
The father, smoking a cigarette, barked at her: “There may be bees in those flowers–get away!”
She slinked away, now fearful of bees and cherry blossoms. Just as well, I suppose–a child in love with flowers and bugs is going to have her heart broken when she earns what is expected of her later.
Crocus breaking through the frozen ground
Not all things are possible, but these things are:
You can eat bread, real bread, made from flour you ground with your own hands.
You can drink honey wine, made by the yeast you put in a carboy mixed with fruit and honey.
You can watch the tide fall, then rise again.
You can see Orion tonight if the sky is clear.
You can eat pesto made from basil grown in a classroom, fed by light from the sun and the breath of you and your students.
You can bury your face in early spring cherry blossoms.
You can rake clams, take their lives, and eat them, no matter what sins you have committed.
Winter basil on the windowsill.
What do you tell an 8 year old child holding her very young sister whose just been told by her father that bees are to be feared?
Do you tell her of the honey bee waggle dance? That bees will find her tree, and tell other bees, and that they will all be so intoxicated with the smell of the cherry blossom that she will not be noticed?
Or do you let her Dad stand silently against the tree, puffing on his cigarette, tend to his own children, his own myths, his own ignorance?
Monarch on my finger, late autumn at Two Mile Beach
My Dad is dead. He loved bees. My Mom is dead. She loved bees. My sister is dead. She loved bees. I will someday be dead. I love bees.
Maybe it’s the bees that are killing us. Maybe it’s not. But if it is, I’d still love the bees.
Spine of a dead and decaying horseshoe crab. My reminder.
Occasionally I will stumble upon an exhausted bee, dying on a flower. Too tired to move, but still alive enough to thrust her tongue into the nectar. I leave those bees well enough alone. Should I be gasping my last breaths with my nose buried in a blossom, I trust the bees will return the favor.
The last sound I heard my mother make was laughter–she died two days later, while I held her hand.
The last few hours of my Dad’s life, he laughed. I heard it, and I held his hand as he died.
I did not hold my sister’s hand–she was killed by an errant Christian missionary who left her broken on the edge of a Michigan highway–but I bet she laughed a few minutes before she died. I know she sang. She always sang. Always.
Everything we know about this world outside of us, whatever that world is, we sense through impulses sent through our nerves.
While our interpretations are complex, the mechanisms are not. Nerve impulses travel as action potentials to the brain, each action potential identical to the next.
The piercing of a nail in one’s foot, the smell of a loved one, the sound of the waves lapping the bayshore all come down to simple signals sent along simple axons, then interpreted in complex ways.
The signals themselves differ only in their frequency, not their magnitude. The sensations differ only because the signals hit different parts of the brain.
The nerves are not conscious, of course, and most of their signals are ignored by the part of the brain that makes you consciously you.
But you can, at only moment, choose to focus your attention on a particular set of nerve signals.
Lichen on a cedar Adirondack chair.
Right now, as you breathe in, the nerves along the trachea are triggered to life, sending signals that the brain interprets as a gentle swirling in your chest.
If you focus on it, you can feel the miracle for what it is.
(And if you don’t, the miracle will happen anyway….)
