Roses

All the roses on the patio are magnificently in bloom. Joan picked them out years ago, we don’t do any special care, but they perform wonderfully year after year. In another part of the yard we have a survivor from her youth, over 60 years ago .

All life is amazing. For most people, flowers are especially beautiful. Roses please us because of years of careful selection and breeding. A common joy it is too easy to take for granted .

As I think and write my mind feels with interesting (to me) dimensions, echoes, lessons.  A rose is a trigger to “deeper” issues. But I ignore that today. Sometimes one should just accept and enjoy the world as it is, this moment of now .

An important aspect is simply visceral. I took no special trip, I am looking at no formal media presentation. When I go out there is heat, sunlight. If I’m not careful, thorns. Scents, in back of me birds crying and a tiny chipmunk running by. In a word, “existence’ itself. Unadorned and infinite .

Finally there is memory and transience. And “this same flower that blooms today tomorrow will be dying.”  Long ago summers recalled, rose gardens elsewhere. Even the sad certain knowledge that this is all to vanish, finally retreat to winter to come .

All this from some common roses in a small backyard. Ah, a lesson there I am sure, but I shall not pursue it today .

Goonies

Police in the United States have generally been respected, at least in the last 50 years or so, even if regarded a little cynically. For the most part they are neighbors with a tough and stressful job, long stretches of boredom marked by moments of unpredictable terror. Most of us can sympathize with their occasional overreactions, rudeness, and even civil transgressions. Understandable .

ICE broke all the rules .

Nazi Stormtroopers are imagined as lean, mean, hard, cold, nasty, and effective. The image of ICE is more that of a gang of mumbling rumbling Michelin men, always moving in fat, deeply swaddled herds. Angry for the sake of being angry .

At some point in the past ICE agents were due appropriate sympathy as trained professionals, going into difficult areas to find “the worst of the worst” violent criminal alien gangs. A necessary job to mop up what local government could not handle .

But now? Local law seems adequate to handle and turn over the worst of the worst. The goon gang seems to be ignorant, obese, overenthusiastic thugs egging each other on to violently seize inoffensive women and children. Only to fill quotas. And an awful lot of the new masked faces in a bloated force simply resemble poorly trained, bitter unemployables, grateful to act badly while unidentifiable .

Goonies. And not in a funny movie .

Tick Terror

Lately a litany of ills has people around here huddling inside in fear. Deadly fevers from mosquitoes, flesh eating bacteria in the water, invisible plagues in the air. Ticks with strange and horrible diseases .

The common denominator is that the culprits are tiny or invisible. Also ubiquitous if you are in the wrong area. It’s quite difficult to avoid water at the beach, air on the patio, or grass in the park.

Ticks are my favorite public overreaction. Mosquitoes invisibly come from anywhere and bite you right away, germs are generally thinly dispersed, flesh eating is quite rare. Ticks cannot run, jump, nor fly. They’re quite slow and deliberate, and take a pretty long time to climb to wherever they want, dig in, and begin to feed. Lots of opportunity to find and get rid of them if you look.

But folks imagine them as some miniscule land variant of the great white shark. Stalking the grasslands ready to pounce. Dropping from the sky on the unwary. Cleverly racing up legs to hide under socks or shorts. Evolving to be impervious to insect repellent .

The good news for me is that most park visitors remain on paved road. To them, grass is toxic, woodland trails forbidden. I ignore the signs and check now and then, always when I have finished my hike. No problem. But – well – the trails are lovely and empty for us adventurous types, apparently courting death or worse .  I often receive incredulous stares from the crowds on the macadam.

As I often tell my 10-year-old grandson, the great thing to be really truly afraid of here on Long Island is not ticks, mosquitoes, bacteria, or sharks, but cars and the impatient maniacs who drive them.

Daffodils

By Memorial Day, drifts of golden daffodils are long gone. Waves of various flowers are now culminating with rose blooms. Yet the memory remains .

Most of us in the northern climate love daffodils. They are reliably perennial, even spreading into thick patches, in sunlight or various degrees of shade. Before grass greens in the fields. Massive, interestingly shaped, more long-lasting than the earlier crocuses.  Left forgotten and untended for years, usually surviving.

My gardening wife gets a little annoyed that the residual leaf bunches clog the garden as they store energy for the next year. I dutifully tie them into tiny tidy bundles to leave her room to put in lots of annuals – which are themselves beautiful but a lot more work. For example, I never have to weed or water daffodils …

Is there a deeper meaning here? Nope. I guess I wish all introduced species acted so civilly in the ecology. Daffodils are simply a spring delight, something to cheerfully remind us that time is passing. And that the temporary joys of our life are as miraculous and wonderful as any long-term dreams .

Like all the varied displays of the seasons around here, in itself beautiful, meditative, and ready to settle me into my place in the rhythm of the years .

Note: I usually write essays a few months ahead to allow them to settle and for editing.

Mentally Obese

I’ll use the ancient politically incorrect connotation of obese to mean someone who is excessively fat from enjoying eating way too much with no regard to health consequences. That may damage an individual, but what I will call a “mentally obese” person may endanger a society .

In a consumer driven culture, most of us are “mentally fat”. We acquire too much and may desire even more. But we have limits to our greed, some self-imposed, some forced on us. Many folks honestly believe that what they do not own cannot be enjoyed. They must possess a thing before they dare appreciate it.

The worst mentally obese people are not simple consumers, but titans of industry. They must have more and more and more regardless of consequence. They think they are “lean and mean” but they are a social tub of lard, wallowing about in plans, risks, and ambitions .

They remind me of Marx’s observation that the end of classic capitalism would result in a few gargantuan monopolies owned and controlled by one survivor each. These days, it is not hard to imagine such a scenario where the CEO has no employees at all – only AI agents. And, for that matter, no CEO .

Perhaps, Marxist dystopia is only a temporary stage. With current IPOs, our mentally obese masters of the universe are well on their way to the ultimate end. 

Equilibrium

Balance and equilibrium are often regarded as synonymous, but I regard balance as more static, equilibrium as dynamic. A rock perched on a pinnacle is balanced. A healthy pond is in equilibrium. 

That boulder will not move until something disturbs it. A tightrope walker, on the other hand, maintains equilibrium with constant adjustments or plummets off the wire.

So when we are told to balance our lives, it’s not very useful. Maintaining dynamic social and personal equilibrium is what’s essential. Work, friends, wealth, health, and so – all the usual suspects in constant movement, tension, countertension, and adjustment .

I realize that I’ve exaggerated somewhat. But my point is that whatever one labels it, the condition is fragile and when lost hard to regain. Once that boulder rolls into the valley it would take stupendous and often impossible effort to put it back. As far as a tightrope walker …

We live in a crowded world of homeostasis where we usually take equilibrium for granted. Sometimes that causes us to do rash things with consequences far beyond what we intend with one relatively minor effort. Once equilibrium is destroyed it may never return in the same form. Just review any ongoing ecological or social disaster .

I’m grateful for the massive, seemingly effortless, equilibriums in my own life, and try to be conscious of how fragile they are .