• Nature - Odds & Ends

    How (and Why) Do They Do That? Notes on the Murmuration of Starlings

    May 2, 2021 - By 

    One of my go-to lines whenever I behold some unbelievable scene of nature that I am compelled to believe because I am seeing it with my own eyes is, “That almost makes me believe in God.” In many ways, I have woven a whole theology around that sentiment, about God not as a being but as energy, not a noun but a verb, an expression, an animating essence of all things large and small, dark and light, a perfect marriage of the transcendence we strive for and the immanence that we are. I think that may just about be it…

  • Nature - Odds & Ends - Personal Reflections

    Summer Fecundity

    July 2, 2016 - By 

    The not unpleasant smell of rotting fruit alerts the senses when one ventures into my backyard on these early summer days. “Our time is now,” that well-known maxim exhorted by coaches in pre-game locker rooms across the land, is nowhere more true than among the two prolific plum and pluot trees in said yard, which, like some urgent stream after a storm, can’t expel their bounty fast enough. I need a crew available at my immediate beck-and-call to scoop up the falling flesh that relitters my yard every day, no matter the removal effort that left it clear just hours…

  • Nature - Odds & Ends

    The Sunflower in November

    November 6, 2013 - By 

    Foolhardy? Courageous and dignified? Or a case of simple blind programming, of life seeking more life, more oxygen, more photosynthesis even in the face of decline? These two lone sunflowers poking up out of the colding November soil just outside the bedroom door look more than a little forlorn to this observant and anthropocentric human who sees clearly the fate that awaits them as the soil grows colder still and the sun toward which these struggling seed pods yearn retreats farther into the southern hemisphere. Talk about a doomed mission. And yet. *** Everything that is is first given a…