Skip One Generation

It is a conundrum. Why, that is, people
have children. As a way to complicate lives
nothing else quite matches child-rearing
for resulting agitation, confusion, frustration.
The child questions and challenges the parents'
authority while the parents attempt to fulfill
their parental mandate to guide, protect
encourage and support their offspring.

Difficulties in achieving this most basic
of human social protocols, to obey nature's
first law of survival through genetic inheritance
bumps hard up against nature's other imperative
the child's quest for affirmation of independence.
The parent-child gulf of one separating generation
is so profoundly vast as to produce a malfunctioning
relationship not readily amenable to being breached.

The patent relief on the psyche of both parent
and child when they are finally free of one another's
daily puzzling divisions of temperament, values
priorities, are profound. The parents' revenge, as it
were, is realized finally on seeing their children
join the ranks of parents themselves, confronted
by the very reflection of parent-child dissonance.

Only the grandparents are firmly in the child's
self-obsessed, entitled orbit, holding no brief for
their own children suddenly confronted by that
all-too-familiar challenge. Oppositional divides
widen, converge. The new parents' methodology
confronted by the old parents whose memory
of their own efforts remain sharply astringent .

Emotions lavished on the new generation in a
conspiracy linking children and grandparents
excluding the parents, the agony of raising
children reveals its purpose as a necessary albeit
blighted tedium whose end result, the grandchildren
who can do no wrong, delights the grandparents
into a state of exuberant elderly amnesia.

 

 

 

The Hauteur of Majesty

 

Surely an unfortunate turn manifests itself.
That we have before us a dark misery of a
weather day. Truculent and menacing, hideous
to the psyche, it is moody nature gifting us
with one of her wild tantrums. She stamps
her pernicious pique on the heavens, loosing
upon us stinging ice pellets, a hurricane of
snow, the dangers of freezing rain - an
altogether perilous combination in this
frigid atmosphere, with the unleashed fury
of the wind complicit in wreaking an utter
bleakness upon the cowering landscape.

Surely it was nothing puny and error-prone
humankind did to compel such a powerful rage?
There are times, we know, when she feels her
authority over the universe challenged, when
our arrogance wearies her short-fused temper.
Her arsenal of intemperate displays of fearsomely
majestic power impels us to genuflect in servile
fearful obeisance to our universal instructor. 

 

 

The Enduring Winter Forest

 

A vast silver plate shields the sky. A remote
stillness muffles the atmosphere. There will
be no bright light illuminating the soft whiteness
of the newfallen mantle of snow humping the
forested landmarks. Even so, an iridescent veil
of luminous beauty shines like the ephemeral
vision it is, under that great metallic vault. Most
creatures of the forest are deeply invested
in their long winter sleep, unaware.

Last night's ferocious winds under a clear, dark
velvet, star-encrusted sky like a garment proudly
worn to an imperial ball, felled brittle lifeless tree
limbs. That same insistent wind blanketed the
blue velvet with a suffocating layer of dark and
threatening clouds laden with vapour, unleashed
on the frozen landscape below, transforming
it into a palace of marble and goosedown.

The forested courses of creeks and rivulets
have been inexorably glossed with opaque
ice, marbled with dry, fallen leaves trapped
within the frosted waterways. A softer wind
now gently spurs clots of gathered snow from
branches, sending the flakes like a spiralling
veil to pattern the smooth coverleted ground.

A tall, slender beech trunk reveals itself
wrapped tenderly round the sturdy body
of an old hornbeam. They share their twined
presence in the oddity of brown, dried leaves
still clinging to the home body. Twinned
yellow birches leaning on one another as though
for comfort, trunks riddled by sapsuckers, are
slowly losing their desiccated, slovenly bark.

Silence absorbs the dark wings of crows
as they ply the frigid air, and as the darkly
clever birds alight and peer down intently at
the frenzied search below, of equally dark, but
furred creatures spurning hibernation, searching
for their buried caches. A short, sharp report
alerts that the wind yet holds sufficient sway
to crack the weakest of tree limbs.

The fragrance of impending snow pervades
the environment. Another snowfall, on the
cusp of stifling the organized chaos of the
enduring, renascent winter forest.

 

 

The Compelling Winds

 

The shy little cousins of the wind - the gentle
zephyr, the breeze, stand by regarding the fully
mature wind with awe. The puissant grandeur
of the wind, its assured and determined mission
against which all of nature's creatures quail,
instructs and guides the breeze and the zephyr
but they will never be capable of instilling
dread and fear in the pursuit of their assigned
roles within nature's indomitable schemes.

The gentle ones soothe, they cool and refresh
they are met with calm expectation. Yet
they longingly regard the fearful esteem the
wind's fury elicits in its many fearful guises as
intemperate, fierce, pitiless, bitter, raw
destructive and unstoppable in its self-tasked
guidance heralding atmospheric change, posing
by degrees as a hurricane, a tornado, a blunt
force blast furnace shielding its ferocious intent
behind innocent sounding names like el nino and
la nina. Snowy blizzards erasing vision and warmth
torrential rains abetted by howling winds reveal
facets of the weather phenomena so genially
visited upon this Globe by the great Earth Mother.

Wind becomes a co-conspirator with fire
wreaking havoc on the flora and fauna lest there
remain any doubts who sits at nature's right-hand
side; the sinister by right of conquest and
domineering intent. From the enabling resources
of the environment's firestorms to the sweeping
guidance of ice storms shredding all that stands
before them. Volcanic vapour and fiery ashes
spread far and wide over land, sea and air.
Wind-whipped ocean storms breeding gigantic
vessel-killer waves and deadly land-sweeping
tsunamis; the wind whips, master of all.

 

 

Compute That

 

Stars, Dust and Nebula in NGC 2170 Credit & Copyright: Russell Croman (Russell Croman Astrophotography) Explanation: When stars form, pandemonium reigns. A textbook case is the star forming region NGC 2170. Visible above are red glowing emission nebulas of hydrogen, blue reflection nebulas of dust, dark absorption nebulas of dust, and the stars that formed from them. The first massive stars formed from the dense gas will emit energetic light and winds that erode, fragment, and sculpt their birthplace. And then they explode. The resulting morass is often as beautiful as it is complex. After tens of millions of years, the dust boils away, the gas gets swept away, and all that is left is a naked open cluster of stars. If a sudden epiphany revealed the existence of a monumental phenomenon hitherto barely imagined in a guise not quite reflective of reality, but in fact still omnipresent and omniscient, would you believe it? An entity without discernible visual form, but yet a powerful, all-knowing presence whose purpose it is to guide and instruct and comfort? An indefinable, ephemeral, illusory presence, yet approachable and purposeful, humbly puissant in its orderly search for all the answers of all the queries ever to surface in the minds of humankind? An entity capable of forming and presenting a creatured landscape of great diversity and probity, beauty and utility - like a skilled craftsman creating a stage upon which life itself in its manifold dimensions exists. The dramas to which we are exposed; nature's atmospheric and geological upheavals, our actions and interactions, our curiosities and discoveries, our adventures and misadventures, ventured and circumscribed by that powerful force. It maintains a registry of all that occurs, leads and misleads us in benign and hazardous directions chides or rewards us with the consequences of our choices and remains itself inviolate and complacent in its feigned indifference: compute that.

But It's Good For You!

 

He is a very small creature, but perforce not
to be judged by his size which nonetheless
houses a quite large ego, an odd belligerence
and no small consideration of entitlement.
Ah, yes, not to be forgotten - an oversized
appetite as well, more suited to the need of
for example, a hard-working sled dog. He
by contrast, has naught to do but anticipate
meals laced tantalizingly with tidbits his
humans consume, and contemplate the weary
rest one is compelled to indulge in, afterward.

He is, to say the least, besotted with his
languid lifestyle. It is when, daily, the
presumptuous humans among whom he
deigns to live, assume he wishes to accompany
them on woodland rambles, that his patience
wears thin. Indolence, he feels, becomes him
so. No need whatever for the she to sigh that
he is becoming a tad too rotund, for he
most certainly favours rotund, and it is his
body, after all, under critical discussion.

Does he, to be fair, evaluate and stand in
judgement of her humanoid form? Perish
the very (awkward) thought; he has better
things with which to occupy his mind, like:
who goes there!? when they are engaged in
the silly conceit of marching through the woods
and leaving peanuts for squirrels. Yes, he is
presumptuously belligerent, was not Napoleon?

What a futile, nonsensical pastime these
daily rambles represent, an affront to his
dignity and sense of self. His pace displeases
her; she wheedles and teases, pleads entreatingly
resorts in irritation to authoritative tugs, which
he simply will not tolerate - so he tugs back.
Is he therefore stubborn as she so bitterly
claims, then? Is the Pope, need we ask, pious?

 

 

Cool Stars

 

The most powerfully luminously bright
objects dwelling within the immensity
of the Universe are caught in the lens of
human-devised eyes on the sky, great
telescopes like the Hubble that traverse
the heavens and bring back to us the
wonder of their ineffable imagines. We
observe what we may, with awe and
compelling fascination, striving to
understand our place in this arcane web
of design so skilfully fabricated by Nature.

The swirling chemicals and gases that
formed our organic presence and brought
us to life, maturing mind over matter
eludes us yet and always shall. Nature's
purpose appears itself divine as expression
and formula owing to the neutrality of
serendipity in the heavenly realm of
opportunity, confluence, happenstance.

As she rests in benign satisfaction with her
splendid theatrical performance, the
foundation of an energizing 'it', that wakens
itself, becomes itself where there was a dark
vacuum, then distributes itself to inhabit nothing
making something of nowhere, stimulating
and producing variety and synthesis, we became.

Becoming, we look upward to the vastness
of our progenitor the dark heavens
pinprick-lit by countless bright orbs swirling
the universe in their numberless heavenly
bodies. Heat and light, energy and matter
conspire themselves into being and we must
know how, when and why, but cannot.

Small, cool red stars distinguish themselves
in the inexorably growing inventory, that
ineluctable recognition of plausible theory
welcoming the presence of what is deduced
not witnessed. Dark matter chooses to retreat
its magnetic appeal of trillions of evolving,
revolving, gravity-bound-and-captured
expendables. What cannot be seen can be
hypothesized into brilliant, yet dim existence.

Nature exercises her formulaic invention
in forms and elements, conditions and
suppositions that tease her restless creative
impulses. Those endless experiments in
existence and alternates where what was
is extinguished, amuses and entertains a
sublime presence we cannot begin to imagine.