Recently, when my brother and his wife and me traveled to Seattle, we took some time to tour America's Alps up near the Canadian border. I'd never heard of them and for sure I'd never passed through them in my travels. Not that I recall. I was on steroids for my RA during that trip, and to say I felt thrilled about seeing the countryside would be low-balling it. Wow!
The three of us were riding through this Tyrollean-like wonderland completely agog by the spectacular views we were surrounded by. This place was definitely not the coastal plains of the Carolinas where we hailed from. It was about as opposite of where we lived regularly as it could get. The coastal plains of the Atlantic are as flat as a fly flitter, sometimes for a hundred miles (161 Km) inland.
My Aquarian youngest brother, always handy with the facts, informed me for some reason that there were only two deciduous trees in the species cypress belongs to. The bald cypress in the coastal plains back home, and the Western Larch.
We stopped at a rest stop that was apparently inside a federal park. It was also a Ranger station. They had labeled plants with neat little government tags along walkways that ended up on platforms with spectacular views (I can't help it. Spectacular is all I got for this place). My brother and his wife took off on their own so nobody would know I was WITH them, and so I looked for a Western Larch.
Not there. I was very thorough in my search. We had been in the car together too long. I went inside and asked a Ranger who said he was a forestry specialist if they had Western Larches in the Park. He told me there were some there, but they were about forty miles away up a hiking trail.
He asked me why did I wanna know about Western Larches. I told him about the deciduous thing and that we had lots of bald cypress down by the river where I lived. He immediately perked up and asked me where I was from. I told him the coastal plains of North Carolina, and he started naming towns and counties. I realized then that he was a real tree enthusiast.
The paragraphs above are leftovers from a post I wrote that got too long. What's below is another one. They don't have anything to do with one another.
I sorta hate to admit it because it appears to piss a few too many people off, but I'm not convinced Mother Nature is my intimate friend. On the contrary, tha' bitch has been trying to murder me my entire life... and she will ultimately succeed... whether I bow down and worship or not. Your milage may vary.
The personality is a strange, humanly constructed aberration of nature that no other species than homo sapiens understand it's hopes and aspirations. When I write of a docetic spirit moving through my body unaware of my personality's petty desires, I mean to include Mother Nature too.
I will be the idiot and take this further. I don't think any other aspect of nature is aware of any homo sapiens personality. This is a species specific phenomenon. But, I would say that wouldn't I. I'm thinking the expression "islands in a stream" might be apropos for the human condition. I suspect we're the only form of life on Earth that kens the persona ex-is-ts.
I do not attempt to tell the God's own truth here because I don't know what the truth is or hardly ever. I try to capture the drifting thoughts that randomly appear in my imagination for reasons I may not understand. I don't know if the content I capture with these words is true or false. The Comments settings are turned off to prevent me from having to defend what amounts to little more than fanciful, sometime crude speculation. Great moments in our lives never return.
