soothing...

for a (selfish) little while.
We drove out to the lake this afternoon and went for a long walk along the sandy edges. It was warm and there was a cloudbank on the western horizon: dark clouds high up and lighter clouds -- with bright bright sun edges -- down lower, long thin strands sitting just above the trees across the bay and the light streaming through around them. We walked and remarked on all the animal prints, the gulls and ducks and deer and occasional raccoon, all of their little feet everywhere in the sand at the water's edge. The slough was quiet, the water low at the end of summer, all the trees and bushes starting to yellow a bit as summer ends.

On Wednesday someone new to our department took his class outside, a first year class on environmental issues. They were sitting under one of the big old oaks outside our building and heard two crows being raucous. They looked up to see the crows attack and kill a chipmunk -- which dropped into the middle of their class circle, dead, its eye pecked out and bleeding. The crows kept yelling at the class until they left. Welcome to Schopenhauer.

Nature is a Mother, all right, but right now, as I look out my window at the lake, she's a calming one. The water is smooth and glassy and the sun is setting with just a few trails of cloud on the horizon. We are lucky -- and happy -- to live where there are not many other people (except the obnoxious neighbor with the "I am afraid of foxes" Los Angeles-size lights on her house that shine up everyone else in this bit of rurality) and where there is a big lake that is slow to rouse and so most often the visual equivalent of calm and soothing. I will very happily live with that characterization of calm and soothing tonight, selfishly, as I pull away from reading about the continuing sadness in the south and look out to the 15 or so mergansers dipping and shaking in the water off our little point.

I will fall asleep tonight wondering if there is anything young Mr. Jabbar Gibson needs that I can possibly send or provide.