Upon Surveying February

The structure of the year is a beautiful thing if you choose to look at it in that way. The fact that gym memberships skyrocket each year the day after new years, the yearly sass-fest of extroverted singles around February 14th, the targeted advertising of corporations toward their subjects is remarkably repetitive. The thing about repetitive trends in the year suggests one of two possibilities (or maybe both): Either the world is crazy and is trying the same thing over and over again hoping for a different result, or all of their repetitive actions are working!

The essential subject of this post is that of continuity. The years have continuity because of their consistency. Major changes happen each year, but we take comfort in what doesn't. As I'm applying to post-graduate schooling, finding little events that I know will still occur one year from now, at a time which I cannot predict with even a tad of accuracy, is a deep source of security.

Whether it is 75 degrees outside, or a wet and steamy Seattle morning, a baseball will fly in the same way. If thrown overhand with seams perpendicular to fingers, and released at approximately 80 miles per hour, the seams will whistle in the air and fight the motion of the ball. It will zip straight. The angles that the sun creates from bats and batters, and the inconsistent bounces of ball on dirt, act as physics mocking in irony the consistency of the game. Each year, the same field is occupied by those who love the beauty of consistency, and the same comfort will come to those who love beautiful motion as came to me when I went out to watch the world of motion dance as a child.

I can't possibly predict what I will be doing with my days in a few months, but baseball will be played and it will be beautiful.

Happy Spring Training!

    Upon Surveying trees in winter, intellectual escape methods come to mind. A purple-tinged haze lies resting atop the canopy of a Seattle grove; the grove lives two miles distant aloft in the geology. Simplicity is a cliche, and is a tempting one at that. This coniferous gathering would be easily explained away by the words, "simple beauty". After genuine observation, there is a foreboding and an ominum in that haze and mesh of branches, neither of which can be accurately dismissed as "simply", (insert adjective). The glorious saturated chromaticism in the sky is hid from that glen under said canopy. The little trolls and children seeking shelter who find their way into it and do not feel like leaving must sacrifice being shone upon by the setting sun, and even most of the risen sun.

   Nature is never spent

  Now as the sun is losing its hold on the attention of earth's eyes, the lights of activity cleave through the once-dimming haze still in happy recline atop the trees. This foggy mass now takes on the role of refraction and reflection and magnification. As I approach the natural atrium, light from the resolute streetlamp, guarding gallantly the forest entrance, appears as a solid mass which proceeds from said lamp and assumes form in the air, revealing the haze to be a beautifully complicated and messy coalescence of formerly thin white clouds.

Watching a forest at sunset isn't "simple". Just because it all works together does not mean it is a beautiful "simplicity".