nearby journeys

So many things withstand close inspection.




We live in a particular scale and frame of reference. Millions of things live around us,with us, within us. One almost comes to understand the Jain idea that our goals in life must cause us to avoid damaging the life around us. But I think our impact is inevitable, on everything we see and touch.




I like magnifying glasses and microscopes and telescopes because the alteration of visual perspective just seems to cool to me. There's so much to see, all around one.

I think lately how the solution to sustainable energy will inevitably involve less travel and smarter travel. Then I think about the little town where I grew up. Few people got the chance to travel outside the country. A few people, in fact, had barely left the county. Yet we had visual postcards from other places--Viewmaster reels, National Geographic, and public television nature specials. I think, sometimes, that so many folks are all in such a hurry to do and see in one particular way that folks no longer see and do what is all around them.

I think that I admire garden folks and local birders because they try to see what is around them. I certainly love to travel, and don't have any negative things to say about travel. But so many journeys lie all around, waiting to be taken.

1881--present

Today I had a quiet day. My Weight Watchers weigh-in contained a rather surprising setback. I suppose that setbacks serve a valuable function as reminders, remonstrance and realignment. Actually, I don't know what purposes setbacks serve, but I wanted them to serve some alliterative function.

Tonight the Methodist church we joined last Sunday held its 125th anniversary service. We gathered with the people we know from Sunday school at a table to eat chicken, which I hate to alter a good bit, skin-wise, to make it conform to my eating plan. A quartet sang "Daisy Bell", which was the kind of song we sang while car-riding when I was a boy.

One of the visiting ministers from elsewhere who attended the service appears on a videocassette lesson my class views each Sunday. It's always interesting when people morph from celluloid heroes to real-live people. The minister in question looks good on video, but rather nicer in person, which is, I suppose, the sort of thing that she'd perhaps enjoy knowing but which instead is merely one more weblog fact cast out into the void of cyberspace. My wife and I sat beside the mayor and his wife, whom we do not know, and yet, for me, despite the potential opportunity of proximity, he is rather more someone that I see on the local public access television than someone I know at all.

The lightning flashed as we drove home, too late to see Jane Tennison properly grill any prime suspects on television.