The shadows are beacons of optimism.

I sometimes wondered, when I pondered upon shadows when thinking of the atomic arrangements of those objects that make us believe in reality, that when a shadow affected an object, it somehow somewhat changed that object's atomic arrangement. Say, it made it a different object from what it was before the shadow was projected upon it.

And so my scientific friend says it does. And it is clever the way he says it does. The shadows, you see, are a product of the game between photons and dimensions. In a two dimensional world, there would be no shadow, but there would only be height and length, no depth, no surface except one upon which light, or photons, could be projected upon.

With the addition of depth, in its play with time, we find the basic elements of reality. We find reality as we know it, life as we know it, its rocks and its plants and its people. A basic thought: Without light, there is no photosynthesis. Without photosynthesis, there is no oxygen. Without oxygen, there is no life. Just carbon, carbon, carbon.

Shadows are the product of three dimension intruding upon the path of photons. Photons are the bearers of life. To recognize -emphasis on recognition- a shadow from surrounding objects, means somewhere somehow photons are impacting 3-d surfaces. When these surfaces are plants, the result is photosynthesis, oxygen, life, and its shadows.

meditations 9/19/08

I took a cantaloupe and split it in half. I ate that half with a spoon. The fruit was delicious; the seeds plentiful; I left the seeds in the empty fruit shell, and covered them with dirt. I placed the pot out on the front garden, to settle under the sun and rain. Within days, little green things began to sprout.
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That man was a mystery. Everything he did was mysterious. He would come home and throw himself on the floor. He would stare at you with his pale eyes and skin from the depths of darkness. Who knows what thoughts occurred in that mind of his. He sometimes howled and sometimes yelped without reason; and in conversation would blurp out facts on some erotic practices conducted by some isolated ethnic cultures. I always thought it was the way the man made his women. He was a mysterious man, after all.
In fact, the word ‘mysterious’ was bestowed upon him by someone else. I told him one afternoon, as he lay sprawled out on the front stairs. He didn’t care whether there was dirt, cigarette ashes, and possibly spit on the ground on which he lay. He was mysterious you see, and I told him how someone had said precisely that about him, about how he was ‘mysterious.’
Naturally, he asked me who said it. And I, the clever beast, said,” That, too, my friend, is a mystery…”
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By the time the lizard hit 15 it didn’t speak to its mother. Sunken in the slivery strings of drug addiction, the silent mourning gulps of alcoholism, the heavy smoke of misbehavior, the deviation, the perpetration, the insolent derision and contempt with which he viewed the state of affairs, the apathy, the antipathy, the anarchy of his actions; all that, consequently, had opened a gap so wide between himself and his mother the lizard no longer spoke to his mother, by the age of 15.
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Take some flour, as much flour as you want, then add a proportional amount of baking powder and salt. You got your grain and your rising agent. Use some oil for the shortening, so that the flour, wet, does not stick to your hands nor the surface on which you bake it, and also so it holds all the contents of the mix together. Add some water. Mix. Add some more water. Mix. Mix until you have bound all the flour in the bowl into a ball. Then add a little more water and knead. If you add too much water, to the point when the dough is sticky, then you can either add more flour or knead it until the moisture has dissipated or evaporated. If the right amount of water has been used, where only a little sticks but the rest can be manipulated, then knead, knead, knead until you know that all the contents of the mix have been mixed together and proportionally in all its parts. Any bit of flour that is left unknead will attack you after it has been baked. It will be like the cocoa powder than didn’t quite mix into the hot milk. You have to therefore knead, twist, cut, punch, knead, twist, cut, punch, cut, stretch, knead, twist, press, pull, press, crush, twist, knead, punch, ever so much, until it has all been mixed proportionally into a beautiful, moist little ball. Then punch it some more till flat, and bake.

Migration

    The bird flew fairly low in the sky. Its song was weak and muffled in the cold, grey tree. It looked thin, haggard, and lost, as if it had taken a greyhound bus to a different town than expected; as if its instincts were somewhat off-kilter and its fate therefore out of balance.
    The bird was red with bright, black shining eyes. Each eye seemed enveloped in a tear; tears that never fell from the eye. The bird looked haggard, weak, and cold chanting softly to the burning wind, hanging on to the branch with little claws that gripped with its last strength.
    "Poor cardinal..." I thought, as I observed it from the foot of the tree. It peered at me from the depth of its avian soul. It seemed to ask me to retrieve it and store it in an empty shoe box to the warmth of my room, or basement. In my own eyes I answered that I had no box to place it in, and no food to feed it, and that my roommates might or might not enjoy the sight of a cardinal. Perhaps if you had been a chickadee… I told it with my eyes.
    I remembered my errand and walked away from the sad sight of the lost cardinal. I left it to its fate in that cold, grey winter afternoon. By the evening I had forgotten about it. We had Cornish hens for dinner, which I ate down to the bone without question nor regret. The taste did nothing to allude the memory of the forgotten bird...
    The following week, I walked the same route of the previous week. I ran the same errand from before which carried me next to the selfsame tree. The branch on which the cardinal once stood was now empty, but the day remained cold and the wind strong and merciless.
    I looked around on the ground to see if I could find its fragile little body. I found nothing but the wet grass where it would had fallen had it fallen. I continued the errand, keeping the bird in mind. To my surprise, a small cardinal lay a few yards from the tree, along the trail. It had no feathers. Ants had supped off its tender skin and beady eyes. The bones appeared dusty and trampled.

The sight inspired but a single thought: "Wherever it migrated this time, even if lost, would have much better weather..."