OF LIGHT AND AIR

Let me say at the outset that I'm not a nice guy right across the board, there are politics, bureaucracies, bony heads etc. to be addressed, after all, so it's more of an elective thing with me; but when it comes to natural beauty-- well, I'm putty in mother nature's hands.

Like this morning, when I was out moving closer to the house a stack of year-old mixed firewood ready to burn this winter, using the wheelbarrow to move the larger pieces and just arm-carrying the smaller pieces to a stack of smallwood nearby. As per my plan, all I had to do was get an armful of smallwood and carry it between the big old oak and an old cedar to get to the smallwood stack. Piece of cake, firewood-movingwise, but with the first armful of smaller pieces I turned to take that route and saw, inches away, strung between the oak and cedar (I must be getting better at hyperception), a perfectly proportioned garden spider web, an armspread wide, glistering gold and red on the sunlit air, with the architect sitting big bright green in the middle, waiting for breakfast.

I'm a sucker for the beauty of spider webs and all the work and deep wisdom it takes to build them, so no way could I barge through that (self-generated!) tour de force. Instead I went around the oak and the stepladder that's on the other side there and stepped over the pile of firewood on the ground by the ladder, a pile that has to be moved also, to reach the smallwood stack and deposit my armful there. Then I went back around pile, ladder and tree to get another armful and another and so on through the morning, the bright green webmaker all the while observing me bending and rising, coming and going around, that large vague shadowshape out there in the vast elsewhere, perhaps grateful in some cosmically spiderial way for the sparing of that artwork from needless destruction, but all the extra work I was doing was a grain in the oceans compared to what that anciently learned architect had wrought of light and air between two trees.

Made my task seem easier, actually, so I was grateful too.

LOUVRE OF THE MOMENT

Out this morning among the new pepper plants, wanted some slender bamboo stalks to use as props for when the peppers get too heavy, so went to the bamboo stash I'd cut earlier that was now dry and leaning between a couple of firewood cords, a perfect spot for the full morning sun to beam all its glory on for just that brief moment, so I couldn't go that way to get to the bamboo stash because there was a work of art there-- a web of impossibly fine silk, woven by a true master, who sat immobile at the center of her shimmering spiral of blues, reds, golds and greens in barely visible strands that rippled softly in the slight morning breeze, like the afterimage of a sleeve of a no longer visible goddess...

How could I barge through that to get the bamboo who cares about bamboo, I'd as soon spray paint the Mona Lisa, so I just stood a long while looking, there in the Louvre of the moment. An indefinite time later, back in the outer world recalling the minor matter at hand, I went the long way around, reached over the neighboring stack of firewood to the bamboo stalks and lifted them out. As I walked away I noticed that the Mona Lisa was sagging. It had been braced not by three invisible strands, as I'd thought, but by four, one of which had been attached to the bamboo.

Now if that creation had been mine, I would have been majorly peeved. But the spider, in her now half-perfect web - the other half of her world wavering and useless - wasn't wasting time and energy cursing whatever clumsy beast had done this to her life's work. She just stood there sensing the setup, then headed immediately out along the nearest intact support strand and doubled it, buttressed its end, then sped along the opposite one and so on, back and forth as I watched, back and forth across the new wasteland that would in time be restored; the past was gone, the future was yet, only she was now...

Gazing at masterworks is never a waste of time.

JUST FIVE MINUTES

A brief but deep delight it is, to 'steal a moment' (as though one's time is another's property), sit quietly and watch - enter insect time - as a male dragonfly, after a ziggy cruise back and forth on glassine wings, perches at last atop the tip of the tallest limb on the plum tree, a prominence carefully chosen as affording the best location for displaying to all the flitting dragonladies - for the few days allotted - bright red masculinity in all its charm, while a few branches below, a large garden spider has been busy all her life weaving a broad web of such geometric complexity as to astound mathematicians and evolutionaries, and of chemical complexity so simple as to be far beyond our most advanced chemical reach, and all without an advanced degree, a cutting-edge lab or a vast production plant.

Meanwhile a tamamushi, peacock of the insect world, buzzes lazily by, so splendidly winged as to be in no hurry to light anywhere, a beetle of refractive iridescence way beyond Warhol's wildest dreams, and not at all commercial, simply having emerged that way from a cocoon somewhere in the wood into living beauty surpassing any jewel, winging slowly past on the quiet evening air...

Just 5 minutes of your time...

Photo via What's That Bug

THE SPIDER AND THE FLY

This morning as I was leaning on the deck railing in the sun for an early look at the lake, I spotted right beside my elbow a little gray jumping spider that had just captured a big blue-bottle fly in a paleosavvy grip about the bulging red eyes, the fly now upside down and buzzing helpfully right into the spider's jaws, legs flailing in the long-legged grip.

The spider, no doubt worried at my looming and nearing presence, nevertheless stayed in place, lengthening and strengthening its hold at every pause in the fly's movement, injecting its relaxing venom until the struggle waned to stillness... When at last it could afford to move, the spider carried the inert fly down into a crevice in the wood joint...

When I later looked into the crevice, there was nothing to be seen. The whole drama somehow put me in mind of over-the-counter derivatives, though without the greed...

As if it's not happening all over the world...