every day is a good day
I’ve bicycled past this sign near the post office all summer. Now it’s fall. What I’ve heard is that it will be a beer and pizza joint. The building has a long history, having been a diner, a grocery store, a pizza place, and a restaurant. What will it be next?
While we wait, it’s fall, a season of brilliant colors. What if we would all die like autumn leaves, going to our graves in brilliant color, getting more flamboyant the older we get?
I picked the last Dahlia out of the garden today. The last of the summer flowers. And this afternoon, I found the first egg of a young hen. Every day is the last of something and the first of something else.
In The Edge of the Sky, astrophysicist Roberto Trotta, explains the origin of the universe using only the most 1,000 common words in English. His idea is to explain difficult concepts as simply as possible.
It’s an interesting book, and the simple explanations of the universe’s origin are fairly easy to follow, but since Mr. Trotta is using only the most 1,000 common words, he can’t use words like universe, planet, and galaxy because those words aren’t among the most 1,000 common English words. Even “thousand” isn’t among them. So how do you describe the origin of the universe when you can’t even use the word “universe”?
Mr. Trotta uses the phrase “All there is” in place of “universe”, “crazy star” for “planet”, “star-crowd” for “galaxy”, and “big-seer” for “telescope”.
You can get a feel for what writing, reduced to using only the simplest of words, reads like by reading a few excerpts from his book:
My college is in one of the most busy and beautiful cities in the world, which has a water road running through it and guards in red jackets and black head-covers. The head of state is a dear old lady who comes from a line that once had great power, and people in the street wave when they see her at her window.
We haven’t found Crazy Stars like our Home-World yet, but it’s only a question of time. Every day, student-people come up with new, better ways of looking for even smaller Crazy Stars, and soon they will find one that could have water and trees and animals and perhaps even people living on it.
At the time when many young people were growing long hair and asking for a better world without fights, a student-person called Doctor Rubin was the first woman to be allowed to use a Big-Seer.
So does Mr. Trotta succeed in explaining difficult concepts with simple language? At times, his writing becomes so stilted because he can’t use words like hydrogen and electrons, that I found myself trying to figure out what he was describing. Nevertheless, I enjoyed reading Roberto Trotta’s The Edge of the Sky.
It’s gradually becoming the cool, wet time of the year. For Lucky and her chicks, it means having a big breakfast before spending the day outdoors in the cool, drizzly weather.
In the village, the last flowers of summer are as beautiful as ever. The butterflies are enjoying the last sips of nectar. The beauty of the Pacific Northwest is that the seasons change gently and slowly, giving plenty of time to enjoy the transformations. Each day is just slightly different than the day before it.
The first fall leaves are dropping. Ahead of me are weeks and months of gathering leaves to compost and use in vegetable beds in the spring, summer, and next fall. They are much more satisfying to use than artificial fertilizer sold in plastic containers. Raking the leaves provides plenty of exercise. The earthy smell as they break down is enjoyable. The crumbly texture of composted leaves soothes my fingers. And as the leaves break down, they attract an infinite variety of bugs the chickens love to eat. The bugs eat the decaying leaves. The chickens eat the bugs. I eat the eggs of the chickens. In a way, when I crack open an egg and eat it, I am eating the autumn leaves. If I close my eyes, can I taste the autumn leaves in the eggs?
On the way home from delivering eggs, there’s time to enjoy my favorite cows.
I went to get the trailer to haul some fence posts and found on the end of the trailer, the intricate, winding footprint of what I’m guessing was a slug. It looks like a satellite view of a rocky desert landscape with rivers and streams meandering over it.
How long did it take that slug to draw the intricate pattern? What was it looking for and did it find it? There are so many fascinating, marvelous, mysterious things all around us. You don’t even need to go looking for them. Just step outside and keep your eyes and ears open.
