I look out and see the day spread, your hands in mine, the world become us

What I really want is to feel a part of the happenings around me; I want a bond to the goings-on. Sometimes, of course, I'd like to have no part of things done. Bad decisions, made by people that see no further than their own good, or worse, those that do see, but willfully harm others anyway. If I close my eyes at certain moments I can feel the grass dying beneath the snow falling outside my window. Digging deeper, I can feel the lushness of the Argentine Pampas grass flourishing beneath a summer moon. I have never seen the Pampas, I cannot imagine it with my eyes open, but there in my mind it grows, jumbled with an owl perched on a ponderosa pine's twisted limb in the Rocky Mountains. Somewhere mushrooms are springing to light, or drying secretly, or dying unnoticed in a field or forest.

News... is one way to see humanity stumbling through life. Philosophy, religion, poetry, maps, tour guides, books on fishes, on birds and plants, these all connect me to the world, but I can only lap a small portion of these things.

In the hub-bub of what is, I am a small player. Compared to this, my worries become tiny flags that cannot drown out the enormous beauty of things. The world's near infinite complexities, the vixen in heat, mamma bear protecting her cubs...


Tigers, tigers everywhere

And what shoulder and what art
Could twist the sinews of thy heart?
And when thy heart began to beat,
What dread hand and what dread feet?

Lately tigers have filled my imagination. I see their sleek bodies move silently through wonderful jungles, their long flanks never entirely visible. Perhaps this is Jorge Luis Borges' gift to me. To see beyond a doubt the terrible grace and strength surging through the tiger's limbs and knowing that this, too, can be mine and me... I have but to let it in.