The last few weeks have shown how dangerous believing in fairy tales can be. Not seeing what is real, not accepting it, will lead you far astray. There are many fairy tales about how this wonderful universe came to be. They have their charms, and can soothe. But the truth is still unknown, which makes it more mysterious.

I wonder who appreciates nature more. Those who believe in these creation myths, or those who accept that it has been a long, laborious, excruciatingly difficult trial and error experiment, and that for something as lovely as a swan to exist, took millions upon millions upon millions of years. I am inclined to think that those who realize how much time it took, and how conditions had to be perfectly right, for something as lovely as a swan to exist, appreciate nature more than those who believe in fairy tales of mythical beings waving a magic wand and bringing everything into existence. If it happened that way once, it really doesn’t matter if we destroy it. Some being will just wave a wand and recreate it all.

But when you realize all the steps it took for something as lovely as a swan to fly overhead, and how there are no other places within billions and billions of miles from us where you can watch such magnificent birds glide over you, then you realize how precious they are. What a gift they are, and how horrific it would be to cause them all the vanish.

On Saturday the sun looked like the moon through the clouds. It’s been a very mild winter so far. Some years, the pond is frozen fast this time of year. Not this year. There is still the rest of January and February to go through, so who knows, a cold snap could still bring about a blanket of soft, powdery snow, and hard ice sealing the pond.

How all of us living beings are made is remarkable. And all the instructions for making something as complex as us, exists in every cell in our body, some 30 trillion cells, 30 trillion copies of our blueprint, in our body. It boggles the mind. And it’s not a fairy tale. It takes over 3 billion base pairs to describe our entire genome. If you would write it down and try to read it all, well good luck reading all that. And yet we have trillions of copies of those instructions in us. When you investigate how things are, you come up with explanations that are far more interesting and marvelous than fairy tales.