The Turn of the Wheel, the Floating of the Magic 8 Ball

Should I write in this blog tonight?

"It is certain."

What should I write about?

"Yes. Definitely."

The answers from the Magic 8 Ball are inevitable. The end of the song is inevitable. The fall of the thrown object is inevitable. The erosion of soil by water and wind is inevitable. Dusk is inevitable, so is dawn. Love seems to be inevitable, hate as well. Unfortunately, despite the best of our hopes and intentions, war seems to be inevitable. But time is inevitable. Healing is inevitable. Peace is inevitable. The balance of all things seems to be inevitable.

Maybe all that happens to me in my life is inevitable. Maybe everything that happens to us is just fate, destiny, and we have no control. Certainly, it is inevitable that we end up wondering what the hell it is all about.

Will any of this get easier?

"It is certain."

Is there an absolute to our future, already predetermined? With the talk on climate change these days, it seems that everyone has a way of modeling our future. Apparently all of the Artic Ice Shelf will be gone, melted, by either 2050 or 2020. 2020 is not that far away. What if I was thinking of buying a piece of land next to the ocean, or a bay for that matter? What if I live there? Is it going to be under water in 13 years? Or 43 years? Is this going to effect property values? Is there a way that someone can predict this for me? Can we create an entire digital model of the world to show us the inevitable future?

I have been hearing a lot lately about modeling the environment, predicting the future using digital technology. It's amazing, just using a program like Google Earth, to think of just how much information has now been digitized, and what we can foresee, it seems accurately, using this technology. We can see the oceans rising, the storms getting worse, the weather gettting warmer everywhere. The bays flooding, the mosquitoes multiplying. We can model the continued population growth. We can show what will happen, too, if we change our ways, keep striving for a better world, a healthier world, a more aware and balanced way of living on this planet.

Should I go to sleep?

"My reply is no."

Tonight is the open mic at Caspar Inn. I need to practice, to play music that I have written, to take it there to that open mic one of these Sunday nights. Tonight my guitar is off with the naturalists and my banjo is short a string. I should probably be restringing it. But I'm here, on this keyboard, looking for something.

I sometimes can't believe the emptiness of nighttime. I think I am finally beginning to realize why so many folks go to sleep before 10 pm. It's 9:50 right now. I can only imagine an hour ago, the fading twilight sky and the trees through the skylight above my head. Now I look up and see myself reflected in a mirror of black. Out the window in front of me, and to my left, is another night of the darkest night that I have ever known. I remember streetlights now as a strange, unnatural brightness. I remember being in New York City around Christmas this year, going back, late, to a friends' place to crash. I couldn't find an unlit shadow on the entire street to step into for a moment. I walked by the Fox News building and really had to take a piss. Th place was lit up so well, there was not even a dark crack in the sidewalk.

There's a twisted corkscrew of a tree in my yard, like I said. What does that tree do at night, I wonder? What ghosts, if any, haunt this forest where I live. Is ghosts even the right word? Perhaps the spirit that inhabits the nighttime of the forest is not a ghost of any sort. What does a corkscrew tree think about? How did it become so twisted, anyway? We talk about the growth of trees reacting to climactic conditions, like krumholz, gravitropism, phototropism = plants growing in a certain way in response to the environment. Bending at the will of the wind, growing directly up in response to the force of gravity, or leaning precariously out from a hillside or ledge to better feel the sun. Maybe there is a force, a spirit, a ghost in the night that moves to different degrees each night, and some of the plants respond to this. It feels like this, sometimes, to me. I can see reflections of something like this in the way trees grow here. Sometimes, it seems, influenced by some hidden force while all the other trees nearby remain untouched. Maybe there are nights that the energy here in this forest is more amplified, or bent in a different direction. Maybe there are only certain organisms that respond to this energy at all.

Ghosts in the night or not, it does get damn dark in the redwoods. As a naturalist I was responsible for walking a group of kids around without flashlights in the dark for an hour once a week. The "Night Hike". A great time to teach about owls, raccoons, predator prey relationships, coyotes. bats. Many many times during my nighthikes I would be guiding the kids on a trail by the feel of the trail under my feet alone. And more than a couple of those times I had to use a flashlight to guide my group around a bush that I had blindly led us into. There's a good Wendell Berry quote I can never get quite right:

"To go in the dark with a light is to know the light.To know the dark, go dark. Go without sight,and find that the dark, too, blooms and sings,and is traveled by dark feet and dark wings."

Dark here, like anywhere, is deep, mysterious, unknown. A blanket cast over the earth to block us from the sun for half of every day to remind us to be kind to each other. A blanket filled with pinholes created by the hummingbird's beak and claw marks from the mountain lion. On some nights, a gaping hole left by the head of the turkey vulture. The dark is deep, enveloping. We found fire and crowded around it, we have to know what is there, we have to be able to see. We see, we create heat to stay warm. We barbeque.

We are humans. It is inevitable that we act like humans.

Sleep is inevitable.

Is anyone even reading this still?

"Ask again."