Yearly Archives 2015

Competition, as we know from Darwin, is built into the very fabric of existence. At a baseline level, it’s been all-out war from day one among plants and animals who compete fiercely for food sources, water, and the sunlight that helps them grow.

Nothing symbolic about this competition: If you’re a plant, you need to claim your little piece of soil and sun and cling to it with utter tenacity. If you’re an animal, you either succeed in escaping predators and tracking down prey or plant food for your daily sustenance, or you die.

Nature is very unforgiving. It merely shrugs as all living things navigate the carnage of daily competitive existence.

Darwin sketched a scenario of remarkable creativity and cunning as living things learn from and adapt to the forces trying to eliminate them...

I had occasion to watch a quintet of deaf people have a little social gathering at my neighborhood pool one afternoon last week. Though they also used their voices and formed words, it quickly became evident that their intense and ongoing gesturing with their hands was not due to a common Italian heritage.

Though I could make out an occasional word from where I sat at only a slight remove from them, their speech was not quite clear and it was apparent that they were complementing their verbalization with sign language (or vice versa, actually). I felt a bit like a voyeur as I subtly gazed their way while otherwise keeping my nose in a book, but writers being natural voyeurs, I wallowed in virtually zero guilt as I took note of the following:

1. A couple of people arrived with small ice chests and bags out of which they produced plentiful food and drink...

We are so used to schtick, spin and PR in this world that we hardly want to believe anything anymore. Or believe in anyone.

“What’s your game, and what are you trying to sell?” is our default stance, aided and abetted by a media inordinately pleased with itself in finding contradiction upon contradiction in every human being and endeavor. And truth to tell, that job is easy, because we are all as shot-through with contradiction as clay pigeons on a rifle range. Always have been.

All of which begets jaundice and jadedness as our modern coins of the realm, and everything that would attempt to circumvent them by a measure of sincerity or goodwill we either ignore, shout down, or almost worst of all, treat with an “Isn’t that precious?” irony that becomes virtually indistinguishable from cynicism, the last refuge of the fallen idealist.

So within that tableau of dialogue-stoppers and despair, what are ...

I’ve been steeped in tides on two different occasions over the past several months, luxuriating for several days each time on different coasts, watching the tides do what they seem to have been doing for quite some time now.

I’ll bet you know the drill:

The tides come in…

The tides go out…

Kind of repetitive and boring, eh?

Truth to tell, for all the time I’ve spent seaside, growing up in southern California and then living on the beach for a couple of years in my adult life, I haven’t investigated the science of tides all that much. I have always vaguely understood them to be controlled by the moon with some kind of mysterious gravitational push and pull, but beyond that, I have enjoyed tides mostly as a balm for my soul, a kind of hypnotic transitional happenstance resembling the passage from day to night and back again, summer to fall and so on.

The rhythms of nature.

But of course, science ...

I’m no photographer and my now hopelessly outdated iPhone 4S is not much of a camera, but when you’re on vacation at one of the many dazzling garden spots of our world, it is right and proper to send a few postcards to friends and loved ones. Since I didn’t quite get around to doing so on this past week’s journey to Puget Sound (you noticed your empty mailbox, did you?), I’ll make up for my oversight now with a few snapshots that I hope you’ll enjoy.

So without further ado (and with brief accompanying commentary):

Ebey’s Landing is part of the National Park Service outside the town of Coupeville on Whidbey Island. Among its delights: a fort, a trail that hugs spectacular coastal cliffs, and a rocky beach that at some points gives way to tiny stones which make the incoming tide sound like the world’s noisiest bowl of Rice Krispies.

Morning comes to Samish Bay…

I think these are lilies ...