Crunching Sounds

Imagine having a soundtrack playing as you go through your life. We have those soundtracks – some we create and some are given by the world. Life for me has included music from the piano, the flute, the cello, the guitar. I can calm myself down with Beethoven or Tchaikovsky. I can jazz up my day with The Beatles or Marian McPartland.

But recently I’ve been thinking about gift sounds – the sounds of nature. There’s bird song and wind song and the rustling of leaves. There are crickets chirping. There’s the sound of ocean waves or water running in a stream or the rushing explosion of a waterfall. If you lived all your life next to an enormous, raging waterfall would you eventually become deaf? Would the sudden silence be unbelievable? Or would it happen so gradually that you wouldn’t notice?

Too many sounds in today’s world aren’t nice at all. Consider people saying hateful things to each other. Consider the sounds of gunfire. Consider the roar of flames or floodwaters. I was home one day when a hail storm arrived. It sounded like a freight train coming and then Mother Nature spent a few minutes throwing ice rocks at my house. The cats hid under the bed. I watched and listened in awe.

Unless you live in the middle of a nowhere wilderness you are going to deal with city sounds. Traffic. Sirens. Horns. Engines roaring. I read an article about electric cars and how they are so quiet that the car folks worried about people not noticing them and walking in front of them and getting run over. I don’t know how anyone could not notice something that big coming at you and walk in front of it. But the car folks started exploring how and what sound to add to electric cars so folks could hear them. I see more and more electric cars these days but if they make a certain sound, I haven’t noticed. It’s too noisy out there.

Once Hubby and I took a very early morning airplane flight and I looked forward to a nice, quiet, comfy nap during the flight. It was not to be. The airplane was totally silent except for the one woman who proceeded to carry on a loud conversation. I don’t know if her seatmate participated because all anyone on the plane could hear was her. I wanted to strangle her. Good thing I am a nice person as she lived and may still be keeping people awake for all I know.

So sounds are part of life. Here’s an average soundtrack. My work/employment days started with the clock radio snapping on. The classical station always started the day with military march music which used to make me want to call up that DJ and say that only soldiers want to start their days with military march music and maybe even some of them would like something else. How about soft piano music to slide people gently into the day?

These days – maybe sad to say – my day starts with the news – which is mostly bad. No details are necessary. You can check this out for yourself. I’m weaning myself off daily news as I don’t want to hear all the political election crap as none of these folks have a thing to say that I want to hear. Since I want to hear problem-solving solutions and they want to trash each other, I turn it OFF! YAY! There’s an old saying about silence being golden.

My day then may continue with the sounds of toast popping or milk pouring. I may listen to the loudest possible rock and roll as I tool around town and then switch to gentle harps or crashing cathedral organs. All those amazing choices are at my fingertips. WOW! The day almost invariably ends with TV sounds. Yep. Hubby and I are evening TV couch potatoes. And with luck the cat joins us at bed time and treats us to the sounds of ecstatic purring. And I think of gentle rain and soft breezes and imagine whale song and coyote song and owl song and sleep comes – quiet and peaceful.

Crunching Pictures

I’ve liked making pictures since I discovered my first box of crayons. Decades later I’m still pushing graphite, ink, and paint across various surfaces. Creating these things is a source of happiness. So is viewing the work of others, so art museums are among my favorite places.

What makes a piece of art good? What makes a piece of art valuable? There’s a movie titled The Last Vermeer starring Guy Pearce. It is based on the true story of “Dutch folk hero Han Van Meegeren who swindled millions of dollars from the art world including the Nazis by selling them forgeries of Johannes Vermeer paintings and is considered the most successful art forger of all time.”

The exposure that Meegeren’s Vermeer paintings were forged suddenly changes their value from art worth millions to art that is worthless. Yet the forger had the talent to fool experts. Sadly, he used that talent to mimic the work of others rather than create his own unique work.

I saw a PBS American Masters program about painter Edward Hopper. You can see many of his paintings by checking them out in Google Images.

Then I watched actor Ed Harris’ movie Pollack in which he starred as the painter Jackson Pollack, most well know for his drip paintings. You can see many of his paintings by checking them out in Google Images.

I read an article in the latest Atlantic magazine about the work of artist Jean Michel Basquiat. The article explores whether paintings discovered in a storage locker were original Basquiat paintings or forgeries. You can see many of his paintings by checking them out in Google Images.

These artists’ works are examples of very different creative pieces yet each are worth vast sums of money. Certainly some folks might think that only the Edward Hoppers are any good because of his works’ realism and they are entitled to that opinion. But that brings us back to what is good and who decides that. Each of these artists produced artwork that is different. Unique.

Here’s a painting I created as part of the local library’s artist in residence program. It has value to me as a fun thing I created and showcases my love of trees. It belongs to the library as all their artists in residence donate some of their work to the library. Does the library keep and safely store this collection of art? Do they consider it of any value? I don’t have a clue.

I’ve seen the work of many artists who will never be known by anyone other than their friends and family and maybe some of the folks in their community who see a local exhibit. Does this make their work worthless? In my humble opinion, the quality of art and its value is in the eye of the beholder. Art is the expression of each unique mind that creates it and you can like or dislike or value it as you please. I will not compare a Rembrandt to a Picasso because that would be like comparing an apple to a cactus. They are different and they both serve a useful purpose.

Go to an art museum or browse Google Images. Look at the work of Hopper, Pollack, Basquiat or any other artwork. Can you appreciate what you see as the wonderful work of creative minds?

Crunching Words

I love words! Words are marvelous! It is astonishing to think that twenty-six letters and some little punctuation symbols can say so much. The Oxford English Dictionary estimates that there are around 170,000 words in current use, with an additional 47,000 obsolete words. In fact, there’s a book and a movie about the creation of this dictionary titled The Professor and The Madman. Fascinating viewing and reading.

I remember learning to read in first grade. Suddenly, those scratchings that I saw Mom and Dad reading made sense. Suddenly a whole new world exploded before my eyes. I could read my own stories and I could read as long as I wanted instead of waiting for bedtime stories.  It’s entirely possible that I spend more time reading than anything else that keeps me entertained. And if I did nothing other than eat, sleep and read, I could not read everything that I’d like to read in this lifetime.

Words make sense to me (unlike numbers that I wrote about in my last blog posting!) I recently read about a man who struggled to read. He could read each word but a sentence was incomprehensible to him.  A teacher asked him if he could visualize the words in his mind. That had never occurred to him. The teacher read him a sentence and then helped him visualize what was going on. Suddenly the sentence – made sense! When I’m reading, there’s always a movie playing in my head, giving me a visual look at the story. Words and pictures inside my skull: awesome.

Another movie to check out titled Words and Pictures starring Clive Owen and Juliette Binoche.

Sadly, there’s another side to words. As a child I was taught: sticks and stones may break my bones but words can never hurt me. I know that was meant to help me cope with nasty people and their nasty words. But it lets those nasty people get away with uttering their nasty words. Fact: hateful words hurt. Why not teach that fact to children. There’s far too much hate in the world. Excusing any of it as childish or just human nature is wrong. WRONG.

Words are about communicating and if you have a problem, you communicate it calmly and ask, politely, for help. That’s how problems get solved. Problems do not get solved with hate speech. Problems get solved by calm, rational discussions along with cooperation, and compromise. Do you want to be a creator of solutions or a creator of problems? Do you want to make things better or worse?

But let’s get back to the joy of words. Here’s a word memory that I cherish. I remember this fifth grade teacher and her name: Mrs. Coyne, because she had flaming red hair and she taught us about the Japanese art of Haiku. The haiku is a Japanese poetic form that consists of three lines, with five syllables in the first line, seven in the second, and five in the third.

We got to write our own haiku. Any chance to be creative got my mind going. I don’t have those long ago haiku but I’ve been writing them ever since. Here’s a few.

The swirling sound of….. The wash of the wind in the….. Trees makes my heart sing.

Quiet purr of cat…..Gentle coo of pigeon hum…….Bumble bee murmur.

Lightning flashes silk……The sky is cold gray velvet…….. Clouds like corduroy.

What if cats lived for……..dancing? What if coyotes…….and whales sang duets?

I’ve no formal training in writing poetry but I’ve occasionally given it a go. After a visit to Mesa Verde in Colorado I wrote:

Far Point

I walked slowly

in the twilight at Far Point,

savoring the mauve and purple air,

gazing at the sunset.

Cream and gold clouds scaled the sky.

A single star quickened over

shadows of distant rock towers.

There will never be another sunset,

another evening sky like this one.

I want to capture it –

hold it forever in my mind.

Dreaming of skyscapes,

surrounded by empty stone homes

and Anasazi ghosts,

I slept in a quiet, solitary nest

and knew a brief moment

of certain peace.

Need something to keep your mind occupied? I like making an alphabetical list of words with the same number of syllables. Easy: single syllable. Much harder: four syllables. I’ve had to look up some words as my mental dictionary was lacking. Had to look up K to get kaleidsoscope. Had to look up Z to get zirconia.

Another movie about words: The King’s Speech. Check it out!

I could write about words all day. And I’d probably put some of you to sleep. SO I WILL NOW SHUT UP – AND GO FIND A GOOD BOOK!

Crunching Numbers

Before those of you who love numbers and arithmetic and algebra and geometry and trigonometry and calculus and any other way to use numbers get grumpy, let me say that I agree wholeheartedly that numbers are very useful. But some of my earliest memories and right up to present ones make me VERY GRUMPY about numbers.

Some stories:

In elementary school I liked arithmetic. I have no memory of learning to count or any instruction in addition or subtraction. But I could do it. Comfortably. Then along came multiplication. It infuriated me that 2+3=5 but 2×3=6. Why did a + between two numbers mean one thing and an x between the same two numbers mean something else? Everyone told me not to worry about it. Just memorize the multiplication times tables. As a fourth grader, I thought memorizing times tables from 1 through twelve was ridiculous. But I did it. And I’m embarrassed to say that it was years before I figured out what that x between numbers meant and why it worked the way it did.

In high school I was confronted by algebra and geometry and trigonometry. AAAGH! I have a good memory so I survived those classes, but I can’t say that I really understood what I was doing. I could not apply any of those number systems to my real world. They were just abstract things that I perceived as torment.

Sigh.

Some years later along came an awesome movie titled Stand And Deliver starring Edward James Olmos as teacher Jaime Escalante. He taught calculus to his students and changed the nature of math education at his school. It’s a superb movie. Check it out. Mr. Escalante says about calculus, “It’s easy! Anyone can do it!” There’s a teaching scene in the movie where Mr. Escalante says: “A negative times a negative is a positive.” So many years after high school, I am still annoyed that I could not understand algebra. So my dear Hubby bought me a math book and, believe it or not, I started going through it. Got to keep those aging brain cells working! So I got to a chapter on negative and positive numbers. And there’s that line from the movie: a negative times a negative is a positive.

Why?

 If (7) × (9) = 63 why doesn’t (-7) × (-9) = -63? Why does negative 7 times negative 9 equal positive 63? I asked Hubby and he said, “Well it’s a rule.” This takes me right back to memorizing times tables. Sigh. From my point of view the rule makes no sense. It has no basis in reality. There’s probably a basis somewhere, but I may never get there.

This makes me want to destroy all numbers by gathering them up and tossing them into a black hole. Let’s let black hole gravity crunch numbers so they go away. And quit bothering people like me. Sigh. The nearest black hole is too far away: 1,560 light years. It would take 37,200 years to travel one light year. More numbers to ponder.  Sigh again.

Now we come to the study of economics. A dear friend teaches college economics. She is superb and very patient at answering any economic questions I’ve asked her and recommended some great books.

Still.

Our economic system is nuts. Not because it doesn’t work – it does. But it could be fairer and more sensible. It’s like inviting ten folks over for dessert and dividing the chocolate layer cake so that everyone gets a fair piece. In our present economic system, one person gets 90% of the cake and the other nine get to figure out how to share the 10% that’s left. That’s not fair and so we have strikes by furious workers and we have arguments about minimum wages and paying folks the same wage for identical skills and experience regardless of their gender. Arguments and arguments and chaos while the arguments get argued.

Sigh.

If you like crunching numbers, I am in awe of you and I congratulate you. But I’m just frustrated and likely to remain so. Maybe I can gather up all those annoying numbers and find a big truck to crunch them by repeatedly driving over them until they are crunched down to infinitesimal dust. And I’ll bet some folks know that in mathematics, an infinitesimal is a quantity that is smaller than any nonzero positive real number but is not zero itself. It is often denoted by the symbol “dx” or “dy” and is used in calculus to represent infinitely small changes or differentials in functions. AAAGH!

Comp Coop Grump Grate

Poet William Butler Yeats wrote: “Things fall apart; the center cannot hold; / Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, / The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere / The ceremony of innocence is drowned; / The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity.”

Sounds like a description of our times although Mr. Yeats published this in 1920. Students of history know that this was just after World War One. World War Two was still to come along with all the other wars since then.

The world is a mess and I have to remind myself to consider history. It’s been a mess – for a long time. It’s been a mess – always?

What does my silly title mean? Comp stands for compromise. Coop stands for cooperate. Grump stands for grumpy. Grate stands for grateful.

There are a lot of grumpy people on the planet. All they do is complain. Yes, there’s a lot of stuff to complain about and be angry about. But complaint without ideas for peaceful action – for fixing things is pointless. Saw a piece on the news today that a whole bunch of Americans think violence will occur during the upcoming election.  There are folks out there whose morals and ethics tell them that sending death threats to people they disagree with is OK.

My reaction: disbelief. For a long time now I’ve been sending what I hope are telepathic messages being received by someone from the planet Vulcan (home of Mr. Spock) to come and get me. Please!

When I see a problem, I want to solve it. If all someone wants to do is complain or react with violence – no thank you. Count me out.

That’s where Comp, Coop and Grate come in.

We ought to be grateful for a lot of things. We take too many things for granted. Next time you flip a switch to turn on a light, think about the infrastructure that makes that possible. Next time you turn on a faucet, think about the infrastructure that makes that possible. Think about the people who produce our food. Imagine life with no electricity and no clean, running water. Imagine starving. There are folks on this planet – today – who live like that. Do you want to go there? Or should you give a quiet thought of thanks to the folks who make those things we too often take for granted possible.

We solve problems with peaceful cooperation based on compromise. You cannot have everything that you want. You must give in order to get. Recently an elected representative, who shall remain nameless, caused chaos in the U.S. Congress because another representative had cooperated and compromised with people of differing views. I want to fire this nasty, self-centered, uncooperative (let’s be blunt here) causer-of-chaos jerk and all who behave the way he behaved. These people are not doing the job they were hired to do. In any other business, they would be long gone. That they are not – and are supported by many Americans – is insanity.

As you movie through the coming days, what will you do? Who will you be? Will you be an angry grump? Or will you be a grateful, cooperative, compromiser? Count me in as a person who wants to solve problems peacefully. I want to Coop and Comp. I don’t want to be part of the problem. I want to be part of the solution.

Visiting Yoda

For those who aren’t familiar with Star Wars, Yoda is a Jedi Master, an alien who spent his last years on the planet Dagobah, a swamp-covered world. Other planets in the Star Wars universe include Tatooine, a desert world; Hoth, an ice and snow world; and Endor, a forest moon. It’s interesting how many of these worlds are single-ecosystem worlds.

In the real world, we don’t know if there are any living worlds with single ecosystems or multiple ecosystems like Earth. To discover even one would be astonishing. I often smile to myself and think I’d like to be an exobotanist, studying the plant life on many worlds. Swamp planet Dagobah seemed to be portrayed as a creepy place: soggy wet, thick with fog, crawling with snakes: a place one would not want to visit. Too icky!

Google says: “A swamp is an area of land permanently saturated, or filled, with water. Many swamps are even covered by water. Swamps are dominated by trees. Other plants include duckweed, water lily, pickerel weed, cattails, wooly sedge, soft-stem bulrush, royal fern, and water horsetail. The animals living in and around the freshwater swamps include frogs, turtles, otters, and beavers.” Sounds fascinating to me, not the least bit icky. I want to visit a swamp. All one would need would be the right protective gear.

We are privileged to live on Earth, a multi-ecosystem world. I’ve visited forests, prairies, deserts, jungles, mountains, oceans, and I’ve been awed and fascinated by everything I’ve seen. How lucky we are to have all this wonder surrounding us.

Author Kim Heacox says that “Walt Whitman wrote: ‘It doesn’t take civilization long to use up a continent.’ From the moment the Mayflower Pilgrims stepped ashore, the American wilderness was doomed. As pioneers, they cleared forests, channeled rivers, drained wetlands.” We’ve saved some of that in our National Park system. Would we otherwise be one big concrete and metal city like the Star Wars planet Coruscant? Imagine the complex infrastructure required to support life on a planet that was nothing but city. Wonder what the basements of all those buildings would need to contain to support life?

The natural world is what makes life on this planet possible. We need plants and animals to create the necessary systems that keep humans alive. Scientist James Lovelock developed the Gaia hypothesis, named after the ancient Greek goddess of the Earth. As originally conceived the ‘Gaia’ concept envisages the Earth as a super-organism that operates to regulate its own environment to keep it habitable for all life. Lovelock has never argued that the biosphere consciously anticipates environmental change, but only that it automatically responds to it.

We haven’t done a very good job of protecting our planet and our planet is responding with disasters. Our short-sighted actions have started to catch up with us. Environmental problems are manifesting right now. Not tomorrow, not later. NOW. How we can be surrounded by all of nature’s beauty and not want to cherish it is beyond my understanding. How we can accept pollution and destruction of the natural world is incomprehensible.

Walt Whitman wrote “I believe a leaf of grass is no less than the journey-work of the stars. Now I see the secret of making the best person: it is to grow in the open air and to eat and sleep with the earth. Every moment of light and dark is a miracle. Re-examine all you have been told.”

We’ve been taught to think that swamps are dismal places. That’s wrong. Why are wetlands and swamps important? Far from being useless, disease-ridden places, wetlands provide values that no other ecosystem can. These include natural water quality improvement, flood protection, shoreline erosion control, opportunities for recreation and aesthetic appreciation. According to one source, wetlands continue to be lost at a rate of about 60,000 acres annually due to overdevelopment. Swamps and other wetlands are specific ecosystems that are abundant in biodiversity and biodiversity is fundamental for humans.

John Muir wrote “Nature’s peace will flow into you as sunshine flows into trees. The winds will blow their own freshness into you and the storms their energy, while cares will drop away from you like the leaves of autumn.”  I commune with nature every day whether it is working in my garden, watering my houseplants, enjoying the birds at my bird feeder or bird bath, caring for my cat, walking the neighbor’s dog, collecting autumn leaves, photographing the ecosystem where I live, painting plants, animals, landscapes. Maybe one day I will get to explore a swamp and I will think of Yoda and smile.

The Morrows

Clara and Peter Morrow are characters in Louise Penny’s Inspector Gamache mystery novels. These characters especially interest me because they are artists: painters. These are not graphic novels so there are no illustrations in these books. The reader is left to imagine the paintings that Clara and Peter create based on the author’s descriptions.

Peter’s paintings sell. He chooses a subject and then somehow magnifies his subject multiple times and that is what he paints. While his paintings sell for a lot of money, it takes him a very long time to complete one so even though they sell, his work doesn’t make a huge amount of money for living expenses.

I have fun imagining Peter’s paintings. Since I have an art background, I know a bit more than a non-artist reader might about techniques. I assume that Peter’s using oil paints and that these paintings are very large. He’s probably using a lot of glazes which means that he’s mixing his oil paints with linseed oil. This thins the paint and makes it transparent allowing the artist to create many layers of colors which creates amazing color affects. And waiting for a layer to dry so that another layer can be added takes time, hence the reason why it may take Peter a long time to finish one painting.

What isn’t clear is how Peter magnifies his subject matter. So I used Google Images to look at microscopic images. There are lots of them. Scientists have magnified everything you can imagine from body parts and plant matter and rocks, and all sorts of chemical molecules. If you didn’t know what you were looking at these photographs are very abstract. Microscopic stuff looks like designs made with intertwining lines and shapes and colors. Inspired, I created a few abstract paintings using photos of microscopic stuff for my subjects. My paintings are very small, no glazing applied. I just wanted to experiment.

Clara settles on portraits for her subject matter. Sometimes, according to Ms. Penny’s descriptions, all it takes is a dot of white in the portrait subject’s eye to bring a portrait subject to startling life. You might wonder how a single dot of color would accomplish that but that is entirely possible. How color is used makes amazing differences in the look of a finished artwork. What colors, how much of any given color, what color is next to another color. All these tiny different choices matter.

I’ve challenged my art students with a specific color lesson. I ask them to choose five colors that they dislike, that they think are awful colors, and to create a picture using those colors. Then we discuss whether those pictures are awful because of their color choices.  And what they learn is that there’s nothing wrong with any group of colors just because one person doesn’t like them.  It’s all about how those colors are used in the picture.

That brings up the subject of what makes a picture good. Is it inspired, special, a masterpiece, as opposed to just another piece of average artwork? That’s a complicated question. There’s many a story in art history of artworks that were vilified when they were created and are now considered masterpieces. The work of Vincent Van Gogh is an example. Vincent sold one painting in his lifetime and his work is now worth zillions of dollars. Beauty – and quality – truly are in the eye of the beholder. Artwork that inspires one person will make another person yawn, or cringe.

Descriptions of Clara’s art also inspired me. I’ve done portraits of interesting subjects to use as teaching tools to show students a variety of possible styles and techniques. Are they good? Special? That’s for viewers to decide for themselves.

So you might try Louise Penny’s novels. They are awesome stories.

And the next time you look at paintings, ask your self why you do or don’t like them. Take a few moments to really look. Don’t just glance, snap a cell phone photo, and walk away. Absorb the details. What’s the subject? How did the artist arrange the objects in the picture? What color choices were made? Can you say what makes a difference in your opinion?  It’s complicated, and that’s part of the fun of looking in the first place!

More Stuff Stories

It’s funny how little things can bring back memories. How quickly a memory can be formed and kept forever. I wrote an earlier blog titled Stuff Stories but decided I wanted to say more.

I’m looking at a piece of hand-made pottery. It’s an owl to commemorate the owl I once saw flying through a mountain meadow. It flew by in total silence, gone in an instant. It also looks like a sci-fi Star Trek character, owl-like people called Shelliac from one of my favorite Star Trek Next Generation episodes.

 I’ve also got a little wooden chest that belonged to my grandmother. She kept sewing notions in it and so do I. I still have toys that wear hand-crocheted clothes that she made. I crochet and do other thread projects like knitting and weaving thanks to encouragement from her and Mom. I’ve a knitted afghan that I started and Mom finished. Her stitching varies enough from mine that you can tell where I stopped and she started. I’ve also got an embroidered picture that Mom started. I finished it after she passed away. I treasure those things that we made together.

A neighbor visiting my house, looking at all the stuff, said there’s got to be stories attached to all these things. Indeed there are. There are two china cats and a stuffed toy cat that came from Japan. In my mind’s eye I can see where I bought them and the people who smiled and sold them to me. In one Japanese store, one young girl took my money, another wrapped the toy, a third handed me my change, and a fourth handed me the wrapped toy. I still wonder how much they got paid for their customer service teamwork.

A very long time ago child-size dolls were popular for a while. I wanted one but they were expensive.  Mom hand-sewed me a child size doll. I still have the doll. I named her Alice. She sits in the spare room with a teddy bear on her lap. Mom and I like teddy bears. I have a brown bear that my grandmother made and a panda bear that Mom made. Mom mailed me the panda bear in college. What a treat to open the box and find him squished inside!

I liked my college pottery class. I especially liked hand-building pots but struggled with wheel throwing. It takes some real upper body strength to control a rapidly rotating ball of clay, get it centered on the wheel, and shape it into something lovely. Many years later, I persuaded Hubby to try a wheel-throwing pottery class. I knew he had the strength and coordination. Would he find it interesting and fun? He did. I love his pots that we kept and I’m proud of the ones he bestowed on others as gifts.

These days I’ve got quite the stack of artwork tucked in various places around the house. I still have the portfolio that I took to job interviews after college. I also have drawings that came from my first college drawing class and they remind me of that professor who I did not like. I recently took some of those drawings and reworked them. I like the reworked ones better.  I guess I learned a few art skills beyond that class.  I’ve recently sorted through my art supplies and I’ve got all the sketchbooks organized so that I can draw in them. It’s something pleasant to do and who knows, maybe one day someone will find a sketchbook of mine interesting to look at long after I’ve passed on to other art studios.

Just Saying

My cat Cleo and I carry on conversations every day. We manage to get across our views and needs easily. We communicate by sight, sound, and touch.  Our conversations are simple. She tells me very clearly what she needs and wants and I tell her the same as well as thoughts on what I’m doing and why and how she helps me as she follows me around the house. We get along quite well, even when I have to tell her that – NO – there are places she cannot go – like the garage where she could get in all kinds of difficulties. Like getting stuck in a car’s engine compartment or poisoning herself licking some chemical. Most of the time I tell her that she is wonderful and she tells me that she likes me too when she purrs and cuddles on my lap.

Clear, honest communication: it’s wonderful.

Recently I’ve read some fascinating info on communication between trees. To communicate, trees send chemical, hormonal and slow-pulsing electrical signals, which scientists are just beginning to decipher. Trees share water and nutrients through networks. They send distress signals about drought and disease, for example, or insect attacks, and other trees alter their behavior when they receive these messages.” Scientists call these mycorrhizal networks. German forester Peter Wohlleben dubbed this network the “woodwide web,” as it is through the mycelium that trees “communicate.” A mycelium is a network of fungal threads. Mycelia often grow underground but can also thrive in other places such as rotting tree trunks. A mycorrhiza is a symbiotic association between a green plant and a fungus.

More useful, mutually beneficial communication: wonderful.

The only way I can participate in this type of communication is to treat the trees on my property with the best possible care. Sometimes that means just leaving the trees alone. A friend once kidded me that she thought my ancestors were trees which I took as a huge compliment. But I wonder what it would be like to talk to a tree. Here’s what I’d like to ask a tree. Can you sense my presence? What does photosynthesis feel like? Do you sleep during the winter or are you awake? If I touch you can you feel my hand? Do you have emotions? Does sunlight and rain make you happy? Does autumn feel good or sad? Do you fall in love with other trees?

Communication with dogs is entirely different than with cats. Cats often seem fearful and suspicious of others while dogs seem hugely and joyously enthusiastic about everyone they meet. We’ve been able to interact recently with friends who have a new dog and this dog, Millie, seems to approach everyone and everything with utter and total happiness. Interacting with her is a delight. I am impressed by her trust in strangers. Interactions between humans are not so easy.

Imagine a world where everything is sentient which means responsive to or conscious of sense impressions; having or showing realization, perception, or knowledge : aware of self and others. Imagine talking to plants and stones and seashells and whales and mice. The conversations I can imagine are fascinating. And if we were all sentient – every single thing – and knew that our best existence depended on each other, how might we react? Would we react with kindness and concern and caring for each other’s wellbeing?

Human communication is fraught with difficulty. Fear. Mistrust. Prejudice. Hate. Sadly those problems seem unfixable. Yet at my delightful quilting group meetings, as we stitch a quilt, we talk about everything under the sun and we regularly agree on ways to solve the world’s problems. Put us in charge and everything will be FIXED. Beautifully, sensibly, kindly, and knowledgeably. I’m certain there are other small groups out there who have similar conversations. Why do such groups manage to talk about all kinds of STUFF and solve it amicably? Because we care about each other. We recognize that our best existence depends on each other. Even if we’re not in agreement on something, that caring for the groups’ wellbeing matters.

Clear, honest communication: it’s wonderful.  We need so much more. Just saying.

Rusted Trust

One of the childhood lessons my folks taught me was not to trust strangers. Don’t be tempted to accept toys or candy from strangers. Happily, I never encountered that situation but the advice was still good.

It also applies today.

Consider the folks dying from accepting and ingesting drugs.

Sad.

Consider the lies and half-truths people tell to get others to buy something or vote for something or believe something.

Sad.

Consider the latest technology: so-called AI or Artificial Intelligence. I don’t want to read or look at or listen to something created by a computer. At what point will humans be unable to think because we’ve turned thinking over to machines. Yes, computers still need human programmers. But will that need also go away as machine learning increases?

Sad.

I have a brain and I like to use it. I like thinking! I like pondering and planning and imagining and day-dreaming and inventing. I don’t need a machine to do that for me. As an art teacher, I constantly encourage my students to think and to create and I give them tips on how to do that using their eyes and their hands and their brains.

I believe in honesty and integrity and facts. We accept a lot of nothing from people who are happy to say WHAT they want to do but not the important HOW. If you can’t tell me specifically how you want to solve a problem, you have nothing to say that interests me.

I’ve been reading a biography of Samuel Adams by Stacy Schiff titled The Revolutionary. Here’s a quote. “Deeply idealistic – a moral people, Adams held, would elect moral leaders – he believed virtue the soul of democracy. To have a villainous ruler imposed on you was a misfortune. To elect him yourself was a disgrace.” We ought to be able to trust our leaders: elected officials, police, doctors, teachers, clergy, bosses and coworkers, even friends and neighbors. Do you feel trust for all these folks? I don’t. Any one of them may lie to me, cheat me or even shoot me. My greatest right these days would seem to be that of a target.

Some of us think that we should hide things we don’t want people to know. Why not tell people why you want what you want, or think what you think. Then listen to their response as to why they want or think something different.

Some folks don’t want children to feel guilty about some of our history. If someone in your neighborhood is caught robbing a bank, do you feel guilty? If someone is jailed or fined for speeding or drunk driving, do you feel guilty? Do you feel guilty for wrongs committed by others? I don’t. What I do see and think is that problems need to be discussed by multiple viewpoints – and specific solutions offered and tried.

Our history includes both good and bad. What’s special is that many of us have worked tirelessly to fix what is bad and that effort is also worth national pride.

Gentle readers, trust, once lost, is very difficult to regain. Trust matters. We must ask for facts. We must demand that opinions be accompanied by verifiable facts. We must require honesty and integrity and common sense, knowledge and logic, with verifiable facts. Don’t let trust rust away until it is completely gone.