birds call, snakes swim

We work early this morning and drove to Hagerman National Wildlife Reserve up on the Oklahoma border. We passed tall green corn stalks with yellowish tops, a real challenge to my notion that wheat and alfalfa were the only "money" crops in this part of Texas, and that everything else was just garden plot farmers' market stuff.

I overshot the exit and misplaced us (which, really, is just to say that I was driving, because the rest of the idea flows from that thought). We stopped in a tourist information center where a nice retiree-volunteer type man pointed out the way to the preserve some five miles back. We browsed the air conditioned brochure stands, filled with hundreds of Texas places familiar and arcane. I took the brochure for Henderson and Kaufman counties, rural northeastern Texas counties a short drive from us. My wife took the brochure for Mustang Island, the beach locale well to the south. The nice man, who had come outside to check whether the US and Texas and Grayson County and Mexican flags were all in good flying condition, saw us admiring the neat native garden in front of the building, and toured us past sights such as "this is how the red honeysuckle looked before we trimmed it away". We headed off to the preserve.

( Nature, Reading Poetry, and Mulch )

tonight we walked in the dark to the pond

A killdeer, the suburban plover, began its "broken wing" dance as we walked in the park. I'd read about this, but never seen it. The killdeer runs along the ground, lifting a wing as if it were broken. Killdeer nest on the ground, and the performance is intended to lure the predator away from the nest and after the adult killdeer. We played along and followed it--when we had come near it and far away from the little grove of trees, the killdeer triumphantly took wing, and flew into a tree. It was so cool!

I mailed three corrugated plastic cards with photos and slogans on them to postcardx people. I read the rule for the LJ community with a modestly strict rule for mail exchanges, and decided that I am bored with rules about trivial things. The rule seemed fair, not too strict and it made sense, and I was simply bored with the idea of policing fun, so I did not join. I joined another LJ community that sounded progressive and indepedent that was on someone on my friends' list's community list, but then I read more deeply into the posts, and the thinking seemed needlessly negative, so I promptly unjoined. Never a borrower nor a joiner be. At least until tomorrow, when I reserve the right to change my mind and join again.

When I first came to LJ, I imagined it would be the place that
I discussed law careers, as my participation in vault.com's message boards on law and law careers had resulted in a few folks over the years seeking out my advice on how to do law without having to practice law in faceless megalithic "BIGLAW" firms. I had seen honoriartist's site noted on crosses.net, checked it out and thought LJ was an ideal low-maintenance way to present an "advice journal" for kids thinking of going to law school. Looking back over the first few months, I see only a solid handful of posts on my original intended "topic". Now I use this LJ for something altogether different, and would have to start a 'law study' community to really put into place my original plan. Of course, I still post to vault.com, so perhaps the whole idea was a needless extravagance anyway. I still need to take up the offer of the guy who wanted to digitize an ebook on law careers for me, but
I'd have to first write in twelve ideas the things I've said in
hundreds of message board posts and e mails. It's always easier to be wordy than to be precise.

I'll bet I'm not the only one who started down one path in life but wound up on another, though. I ended up in law school to begin with in an instance of quirky thinking rather than pure logic. At the time, I considered it an enormously politically incorrect thing to do. Of all things, it turned out that this particular foundry of the dark satanic mill company worked out well for me. I'll have to remember to write a post on that, as I've told it to only a friend or three, and only some of those folks are on LJ. I'm not the only one who started out on the road to Damascus, though, and ended up taking the long road to Tipperary. I like to think that if I have any virtue, it is the virtue of being a fairly pure dreamer who can live very much in a very (and sometimes discouragingly) real world. I feel as though I have been given a gift for practical goal-oriented things, which is God's compensation to me for giving me relatively no talent. It's not a bad life, helping folks with their legal tangles. I sometimes wish I could be more help to others in other contexts, as folks try to achieve their inmost desires. Simple Cleverness always wants to see True Talent succeed, and all that (after all, True Talent never writes in capital letters after 9th grade or so). Yet, individual paths are so *individual*. "Work out your own salvation", the Buddha said. He didn't mean to withhold help from others; I think he meant each person must find a path. We are all dreamers who pretend we live in a reality nobody else could possibly understand (except perhaps over mint tea, a 3 in the morning, on a really great night). For that matter, maybe my "true reality" is just another dream. As this Sunday dissolves before my eyes, I'm grateful that my real world sometimes seems like a very pleasant dream.