Here’s a wasp on some desert parsley two days ago. Check out the scaly covers of her wings.

Here’s a willow on the same day. Note the scaly covers of her catkins.

Our ancestors saw these as the same thing. It was a principle of the world, in the way Newton’s Second Law of Motion is today. What remains beautiful about it is that it is an abstraction created using the stuff of the world itself. Stuff like, well, this:

Beach Rock at Ozette, Makah Illahie

… or this …

Mount Hood at Horsethief Butte, Yakama Illahie

Over the last 3.5 years of this project I have learned again what I knew as a child in the Similkameen: to think as the Earth. Look at all the little wasps in these young ponderosa cones!

Look at the force cracking the wasp’s wings open on the willow, written in the stone below!

Every day I grow more humble at what my ancestors knew and passed on. It’s here…

… and here …

… and here.

I am walking with them. Not in the way of a ghost story, though. We’ll leave that to Mary Shelley. More like this…

… and this…

Aging can be humbling.