January beach walk

The air warmed up, the beach did not--ice and snow lay just beneath the sand. I went barefoot anyway.

Not much to say, except to say words cannot say what I would want to say. Four scoters waddling by, occasionally dipping under for food. A gull slamming a dying crab on the sandbar. A tiny flock of five sand pipers sharing nine legs.

Oysters scattered on the beach, torn off the rocks by last week's ice, still alive. The sand will swallow them up if the birds don't get them first.

Death all around, but death is always all around--it's easier to see when the living retreat for the season.

The deep January colors and long shadows reminded me not who I am as much as what we are part of--but that's a conceit. There was no me for long moments. Or maybe everything was me, which is impossible, of course. Words fail.

When I came back, my tracks had filled with water, which then sought the bay, as water will.

This one is for me.

A jelly story

When looking at a jelly lying at the sea's edge, a critter that uses the same genetic code as pretty much anything that has suffered the indignity of DNA analysis, it's hard to get worked up over nonsense.

• A physicist says that we, like the jellyfish, are mostly empty space.
• A priest says we have dominion this dying jelly, over all that lives.
• A chemist says that the orderly appearance of this critter, and us, does not deny entropy--the sun's slow collapse into chaos feeds our lives.
• A business man says the jelly is hard to sell, and loses interest.
• A poet say the jelly has a soul, and notices the cyan halo of sky around it.
• The astronomer ponders the angle of the jelly's shadow, a telling sign of winter to come.
• A geologist studies the angle of repose of the grains of sand, failing to see the critter at all.

The jelly faded back into the sea, now dead, its story as interesting as mine, as yours, our stories share a common end.

I almost missed this jelly, anxious as I was to catch up on something for somebody due somewhere before Monday's sunset. Now it has become part of my story.

We found the jelly a week ago, and a moment later, dolphins distracted us.
I meant to put the jelly back. I did not.
I had a chance to change the story.

Last day of 2010

Our last beach walk of the year. Much of the ice has melted, the animals can scavenge again, feasting on horseshoe crabs and blue claws dredged up by the grim grinding ice. Dying comb jellies glistened on the beach, ignored by the gulls.

I found a small whitish clam panning the beach with its foot, perhaps a young surf clam. I tossed it back into the bay, my last clam of the year.

The last day of the year is a human construct.,

Today will be a little different than yesterday, true. The sun will hang in the sky a minute longer today, angling a hair higher in the sky. High tide will be almost an hour later, and a few inches higher.

I teach indoors, obviously, in 48 minute chunks. Biology happens outside, in millennial chunks. Transferring knowledge of life is a Sisyphean task.

I condemn others' acts of hubris while ignoring my own, trying to stuff minds with abstract shadows of what can be found just outside the classroom window, if we took time to look.

The word "education" comes from educere, "to bring out, lead forth." My best days are those when I lead the students out the door to the real world outside, the one that created us, the one we cannot hope to fully grasp.

Photo by Leslie, December 31, 2010