Our Hold on The Planet

A little Robert Frost for Evan's Birthday

We asked for rain. It didn't flash and roar.

It didn't lose its temper at our demand

And blow a gale. It didn't misunderstand 

And give us more than our spokesman bargained for;

And just because we owned to a wish for rain,

Send us a flood and bid us be damned and drown.

It gently threw us a glittering shower down.

And when we had taken that into the roots of grain,

It threw us another and then another still

Till the spongy soil again was natal wet.

We may doubt the just proportion of good to ill.
There is much in nature against us. But we forget:

Take nature altogether since time began,

Including human nature, in peace and war,

And it must be a little more in favor of man,

Say a fraction of one per cent at the very least,

Or our number living wouldn't be steadily more,

Our hold on the planet wouldn't have so increased.

Stripes Had Better Be In

On Friday Dave took me to the beach. The water was a bit chilly. I know this because I took off my shoes and played tag with the ocean. I also picked up a rock. It has stripes.

You know what else has stripes? The sky. 

Last week the sun blasted us with charged particles. It disrupted high frequency radio waves for two days. The sun is beginning a cycle of regular solar storms, which should occur about once a month through 2013. They won't all hit us, of course--the sun is a sphere and could hiccup in any given direction, towards the Earth or not. These light shows--called aurora borealis in the North and aurora australis in the South--create some of the most beautiful skies ever visible on Earth.


Awesome thing number one: one charged particle is just a charged particle. But a collection of charged particles is actually plasma. A lot of science fiction stories include plasma guns--weapons that spout ionized gases that disrupt robotic systems, destroy living matter, and generally cause all sorts of excited chaos. Well guess what. The sun does this to us all the time.

Awesome thing number two: the sun does not hate us (or love us, take your pick)--other planets have auroras too. Jupiter continues to be my favourite planet. Check out this sweet picture of Jupiter's aurora:

 

 That made me think, "I wonder what our aurora looks like from space?" Someone else thought of that too. Someone who actually gets to go to space.

 

Awesome thing number three: sometimes the Sun practices exploding. On these nights the Earth dresses up, like for a fancy dress party, sparkling with gems and plasma jewelry, the princess of the solar system. And we are just little germs, scurrying around on the surface building castles and highways, afraid that our communications systems will be disrupted by the sun.


One day I want to go to Alaska. I will plan my trip around projected solar flares. If I do it right, maybe I can see the aurora over the ocean. I'll take my striped rock and wear pinstriped pants and a striped scarf. If I'm lucky, stripes will even be in that season. Otherwise I will have to be uncool. Uncool, perhaps, but happy.

Canning Peaches in the World Inside My Head

In my head is another world. This world is a magnet for thoughts. It's a world that draws people who think so much that they forget to shower, who think so much that they look like they're floating somewhere else, who think so much they don't notice they've been standing in the middle of the sidewalk for fifteen minutes. Here people keep swarms of stinging insects in boxes and use shopping carts like summertime sleds and find ways to rappel from the clouds. Instead of metal and paper, currency is made of ideas.


In my world you can see the stars and no one is afraid of the dark. When the sun comes up, the sky changes into a thousand colours before it balances out into just one, and when it goes down in shatters into a different million coloured pieces that fly out into the vast expanse of everywhere and light up the dark with shining pricks of white light, a hundred billion miles away.


The trees are triangular. There is grass too, almost the same wavering green and winking lavender as the trees, and it spreads out from your feet in every direction, as if you are its source. It pours down the hill, spiky and filled with life and pizzazz. There are little flowers, blue ones. They look like your eyes, sparks of colour, sparks of life in the endless green. I can hear a river. It swishes an hiccups and bellows. It spins and tangles with the earth; it ducks under bushes and careens around trees. And then it takes a mad leap into a different large bit of water that's just biding its time until the dam breaks.

The sun is a square, if you look at it for too long. The clouds float around masquerading as rabbits and flying horses and Jesus' face. The people that live here have black skin, as black as the night sky and more beautiful than the earth itself, and white skin too, and all different shades of brown.


My mother and father live here, and sometimes I help Mom can peaches. It is very satisfying to have the peach juice running down your arms and the slices of peach splop-ing into the bowl of lemon juice. I like the way the boiling hot peaches almost scald your hands when you hold them tightly, and how the skins just slide off into a sticky, sweet blog of peach. The smell is there too, potent and alluring and delicious; and every so often some of the peach doesn't come off the pit and I can BITE it and the sweet juice runs down my throat and chin. Then, when all the peaches are peeled and sliced, Mom comes along and puts them in jars and heats the jars until the're really, really hot and the lids seal themselves. Then we put them in the basement and can eat them all winter long. The bits of peach stick to my skin and dry, and the smell lingers on my hands and arms for hours an hours, no matter how hard I scrub them--except I don't scrub them because no smelly lotion in the world is better than the scent of fresh peaches.

And in my world, while I'm helping my mother, sometimes the wind howls and roars, and the rain attacks with the fury of the gods. Pools form and water tries to race uphill, and the street lights sparkele and dim in the wild torrent of air that billows and gusts and bellows. Occasionally it simmers down to a whisper, but only to gather strength before launching another massive attack on the trees and the houses and the people who were standing on the sidewalk and thinking so hard they forgot to go inside.


Then I realize that the world inside my head looks and awfully lot like the world outside me head, so I move from my spot on the sidewalk to go explore this world instead.