A speculative mind

  As I have mentioned, I worked for two seasons on the Spotted Owl Survey for the US Forest Service back in the day. This involved setting up stations around areas that were scheduled for timber harvesting to see if there were owls nesting there. We would look at a topographic map and see where we needed to put stations (usually along logging roads) so that we could get complete coverage of the area to be harvested. We would go out during the day and mark these stations with ribbons, then at night we would go to each station and “hoot” for ten minutes. If we did not get a response, we would move on to the next station and so on until we could be sure there were no spotted owls in the vicinity. This meant we were working at night in the woods. There is a lot of wildlife activity at night in the woods. It is not just owls, a fair number of wildlife are nocturnal. We saw coyotes, bobcats, cougars, bats, frogs, deer, elk, among other things. But it was not just seeing the wildlife, ...

  I have been much disappointed by Aurora Borealis performances over my life. Each time they predict one might be visible in our latitudes, I waited up and saw nothing. To be fair, auroras (aurorae?) are kind of fickle. They are created by solar storms that send charged particle into Earth’s upper atmosphere where they interact the atoms there. The timing has to be right. The direction of the charged particles has to be right. That can all be a bit hard to predict. Also, I live close to the 45 th parallel. Not a great spot to watch auroras from. We rarely get any this far south. Still, sometimes they predict when it is possible, and I go out and look to no avail. Last year there was a great aurora that lots of people who live where I do, saw. I didn’t, not for want of trying. My wife and I drove around to places where there was not a lot of light pollution, but no dice. The next morning we saw lots of posts from people who had seen it, even from places I would not think would be...

  My wife is the poet, not me. I do wish sometimes that I was a bit more poetical. It would make my writing better, more artistic. Art is about evoking emotion, and nothing evokes emotion like poetry (except music, which is itself a kind of poetry). Through metaphor and symbology, poetry reaches not just the brain, but the heart, the soul. That being said, I must confess that poetry sometimes loses me. I get lost in the words and the imagery befuddles me. If I am really going to get it, I have to read it multiple times. I don’t think I am alone in this. “Getting” poetry requires an effort. But so does “getting” a painting or a sculpture. You have to let the work, work on you. The reason some people have trouble with Shakespeare is not just that he uses archaic language or refers to events that were only known in his day. The main reason people have problems with it is that his language is poetical, symbolic. It is meant to take the listener on an artistic journey, not just convey...