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 .

Spectacle

Now seems an age of spectacles. Huge crowds attend sports events, electronic extravagances in stadiums, concerts, and crazy oddities like “Burning Man”. A thirst for the exotic, satisfied continuously by spectacular technology .

Yet many spectators are really not on site. They view the show on tiny screens, or even large screens, with none of the crowding and hormones that make a live event so noteworthy. Yet they count it as a spectacle nonetheless .

I’ve grown more sedate, although I still do enjoy the ideas of some spectacles. But older and more fragile, I’m quite content to be an armchair adventurer most of the time. The revelation for me has been how much spectacle I can create in my immediate surroundings, by careful and total immersion in the moment. Truly listening to bird calls, rapidly staring at patterns of leaf shadows in a breeze, even staring for minutes at an ant or spider. 

The whole world, properly seen, is a constant surprising miraculous spectacle. That’s really why I continue to draw. A sketch forces a trance-like state that squeezes my concentration to the point where whatever I am looking at is spectacular. With luck, that intensity carries over when I am done .

Giant spectacles are grand real marvels _ I’m not knocking them. But I find that without all the muss and fuss I am usually surrounded by equivalent possibility. True wonder .

Certainly Flexible

In our teenage years, we become convinced we know everything and are consequently certain we are always right. We may learn more as time goes on, we may change our minds, but we remain just as certain all the time.

Science constantly tries to break this tendency. The worst scientist is one who knows what, how, and why. In many other careers, it is equally important to acquire knowledge, apply it, think out of the box, and flexibly move on to better understanding .

On the other hand, in society and politics, changing one’s mind is a “flip-flop” and a sign of horrible dishonesty. “How can you have deceived me so?” Friends, families, elected representatives are supposed to remain frozen in attitude and belief, as we once thought we knew them .

It’s understandable. After all, the core of a society must be relatively conservative to function at all. We need to believe that lives have fundamental organization. Total chaos is unsustainable .

The only thing worse than an ongoing movement in what we are certain of, is to be frozen at one point until a sudden internal revelation forces us to reject all that we know, start over, and be absolutely certain, once again, that we are right in whatever new belief.

Like most of our leaders .