Jack Burns Lives!

Just Another Day

Another glorious morning in the Mississippi Delta. My human neighbors are busy with their leaf blowers, stirring up dry as a bone biomass into a cloud of dust that swirls and settles only feet from where it originated.

Soccer moms head to Jazzersize. Carport sales are open so folks can sell all the cheap, plastic crap they’ve accumulated over the years. What’s not sold goes to the landfill.

Headline in the local paper: Farmer Massacres Forty Deer And Leaves Carcases to Rot In Woods

The killing was carried out with government approval, I might add.

And tomorrow morning, the suburban churches will be humming with activity as thousands upon thousands of believers leave 5000 square foot homes in expensive cars and drive to multi-million dollar buildings to worship a dead hippy that talked about peace and the rejection of material possessions. A high percentage of these believers are Bush supporting Republicans.

How they fail to see the disconnect between their everyday lives and their “belief” is a mystery to me.

But somewhere there is sanity. Order. Something that makes sense.

Northern Cardinals rise early, usually the first amongst our avian species in this bioregion, to gather food. Like the cardinal, chipmunks rise early and get their work done before the heat sets in, typically in the 90′s during late July, rising to the high 90′s in August. The cicadas warm up a song that will last until dusk. The Cardinals gather the last of the day’s bounty before yielding the sky to Evening bats that fly under the mysterious Southern moon.

Perhaps most fascinating of all are the female Araneus cavaticus spiders that arise each night and spin their large, masterful webs between the house and the garden, catching dozens of bedazzled insects. In the spring, they’re fairly small, but by September, they’ve grown and are often as big as a quarter, fat off a healthy diet of flies, beetles and other arachnids.

About the only thing that thrives during the day are the tomato plants. In this heat, a half ripened tomato spotted in the morning could easily be ready to pick by nightfall. At most, it needs just one more day. Even the pepper plants bow in subservience to the Southern sun.

Order, balance and continuity are found in nature, not in technology and religion. Not that the human world can’t produce order, balance and continuity. We can. But we should look to nature for how to do it, because all of the answers lie there, not in nanoscience, spreadsheets, Bibles and mysticism.

Just by observing life in your yard you learn a lot. You learn to conserve energy. Build efficient homes made of local materials. Rise and retire with the sun the moon. Live in balance with other life forms. Live in balance with the seasons. Take what is sufficient to live a healthy life.

Play. Sing.

Postscript: I couldn’t remember the correct details when I first posted, but I wanted to mention the renowned ecologist Eugene Odum. Odum correctly believed “there is more information of a higher order of sophistication and complexity stored in a few square miles of forest than there is in all the libraries of mankind.”

I agree.