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.
Went clamming this morning–chilly dawn, quarter moon, and tame tide meant I may have burned as many calories as I raked up for dinner. But that’s not why I clam. After a week under fluorescent lights hearing folks reveal what they know to be true, I need to feel the back bay wash my over my feet to remind me what’s real, to feel my fingers become clumsy as a toddler’s as they grope into the mud to pull out another clam, to feel the human world of words dissolve in the chatter of geese and gulls. If you do not know what’s real, if your feet never (literally) touch the earth, then you will believe anything. And most of us do.
***
If you grew up in the States anywhere but a farm, chances are pretty good you learned of natural cycles through your church. While our dominant culture thrives on linear growth, most religions honor the cycles of life and death.
Science is the closest thing we have to true religion in public school these days, technology the furthest. Science seeks the mystery, technology exploits it. Very little science happens in schools.
***
We’re in the dark days now, and will be for some time. The dying sunlight reminds us, if we care to see, that all things fall apart. The sun has shifted, the shadows have lengthened, the cold darkness creeps in.
Delaware Bay in winter, North Cape May
If your child spends most of her waking hours either in school or in front of a screen, she will learn to live in a world without tides, without death, without the slow grace of our sun. She (like so many others) will fail to discern the natural world, the one we’re all tied to, from any of the multiple artificial universes available to her. Of all the Commandments, the wisest may be the first:
You shall not make for yourself a graven image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth; you shall not bow down to them or serve them.
What we see and smell gets down to molecules, which get down to mass/energy, which gets down to the unknowable. Science requires a basic faith in logic, in math, in entropy, in our senses, and ultimately a humbling recognition of our place in the universe. Science promises death.
School and the economy it now serves requires a disconnect from the natural world and ultimately a basic faith in what somebody else tells you. Our culture promises immortality.
Horseshoe crab spine, North Cape May
I’m going with death.
There are no standards or Commandments on a mudflat.
