Tired of watering and mowing, and thinking of, maybe, helping out the over-stressed earth a bit by sitting in the boat and watching the wind play over the water like that wheat in Witness? A tremendously great idea, for sure. The hard way, of course, would be to make one of the great movies of our time. Cost you millions, and chances of success would be slim. The easier way might be to haul a dump truck full of river rock out of a river bed up in the mountains, lay it down oh so nicely on the slope in your front yard, chunk chunk chunk, sell that 5 HP mower at the next garage sale, ka-ching!, put your feet up on the deck, look out over the valley and the lake so blue and knock back a few cold ones with the proceeds. Ahhhhhhhh! Good on ya! And, don’t worry. The earth has you covered, behind your back…

Maple Trees Making a Comeback

And you thought grass was a problem?

It’s really an intriguing environment, don’t you think? I mean, look. There’s good solid ground cover (Rock, I mean, how solid is that?) to keep water from evaporating.  Check! There’s a slope to draw the water down from the road (just above). Check! There are good entrapment possibilities for organic matter (no need to haul it from the dump at $50 a yard).  Check! There’s a method for concentrating rain just where you need it and keeping it from getting too spread out (no need for plastic hoses and trickle emitters).  Check! And how did the maple find it? By putting out a kazillion seeds and letting the wind take them where it will, which just happens to be into the same cracks that the water finds, imagine that. Imagine that. That’s the kind of planet you are a part of. You might not say that it’s clever, exactly, but what is going on is as clever as clever can be, if you get my drift.

Three Young Hawks Hunting Together

Sometimes this earth does something just because it can.

And then, when circumstances have changed, the earth is there to heal the gap. Now, compare that integration with this …

Little Brown Bird Waiting for the Universe to Unfold as it Will

Some individuals try to fly from the nest just a wee bit early and wind up sitting in the grass and trying to be very very still and opening and closing their beaks to make sounds beyond the reach of the human ear.

This is a lucky bird. I spent five minutes looking for the nest it fell from, with no luck. Obviously, that’s not the luck. The real luck was that the cat really couldn’t care less and sat on a chair and observed, and then got bored and went inside. The other lucky part is that the poor mite’s mother came along (perhaps she heard the humanly inaudible tweeting), perched nearby and said something or other to it, over and over again. I wished them well and went up into the hills. When I got back an hour later, the two birds had it worked out with the universe. It’s a risky universe, but it has staying power. Sometimes it works out. That is as physical, or as spiritual (take your pick) a component of the universe as this …

Three-Dimensional Form of a Bird Tweeting

Either that or rubble fallen off of a cliff at the intersection of two Eastern Pacific mountain chains, Quesnelia and the Cache Creek Terrane, south of Lytton, British Columbia. Some of these might be Okanagan rocks. Some might be from a newer volcanic chain that washed up on shore. At any rate, they’re both crumbling with the weather.

I bet, if you have ears to hear, that makes a sound. That sound makes a thought. It’s all one universe. It’s not broken up into parts.