23rd Small Stone: Dragon Puddles

Welcoming dragon year to a world with darkened moon and dripping sky, circles widening and disappearing in shiny puddles. 

Misplaced Earthquake and Typical Hurricane

The East Coast friends and relatives have our sympathy as nature turns vicious there, first delivering an earthquake in Virginia, which propagated in the harder rock so that it was felt much farther away than it would have been out here.  Then we have Irene, the hurricane that has New York planning to shut down the subways on Saturday perhaps.  And Amtrack and the airlines are canceling travel right and left.  So it's a good time to settle down with a good book and a hurricane lamp to enjoy a nature-induced break from modern life.  That's what these natural disasters impose on us.  The outdoors we ignore most of the time suddenly appears, renders us house-bound or nearly so, but wakes us up to the power and majesty of nature.
Quite a few of my friends attribute all this to global warming but I recall hurricane Hazel's destruction when I was in junior high school, walking home as limbs crashed all around me, half pushed and half pulled by wind gusts that could not keep a constant direction.  I arrived home wet through but exhilarated.  My mom, though, was appalled and thought the school should have kept us there until the winds died down.  No doubt I could have been killed by a falling limb; some of the ones I saw fall were over a foot thick.  But I am glad I didn't miss the immersion in nature's reality.   I hope that wherever you are, you can manage to contact nature regularly and don't have to wait for disasters to make it happen.

Cold Rain in California

My students from Portland feel happy and at home right now; we’re having a bout of cold rain. It brings back a time when I came out to California for a meeting at Asilomar, in Pacific Grove, near Monterey. The meeting was held in April. It was snowy back East, and all of us going to the meeting were envisioning sunny California. Today the bicycle race, The Tour of California, just raced down the coast from Seaside (Monterey) through Big Sur to San Luis Obispo. It’s some of the most beautiful coastline in the world on a sunny day. But they had the same storm we’re having, and many riders got hypothermia and had to quit the stage race today. Not sunny California after all, sullen gray-green water, curling with dirty white foam, streaming headwinds, cold water. I wonder how rain has affected each of us, how it has shaped our feelings about West Coast living. Do you revel in it because we have so little weather? Do you hate it and get hypothermia of the spirit?