View From The Shore

"We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far."

-H. P. Lovecraft

"Sun's up, uh huh, looks okay

The world survives into another day

And I'm thinking about eternity

Some kind of ecstasy got a hold on me"

-Bruce Cockburn, Wondering Where the Lions Are

My pre-work moment of meditation on the patio here at Cliffside was punctuated by bubbles floating down and past to the north.

Among the guests upstairs this holiday week must be a child, because the soapy bubbles appear a couple times a day.

As the sun effaces in the evening, those trees fill with lightning bugs that give the woods a holiday air. I remember the forest behind our house in Marietta lighting up at night, in the age before pesticides became so very effective, but haven't seen the likes of this in years.

A pair of mourning doves has taken up nest in one of our hanging strawberry pots. There's at least one egg in there, and maybe two by now because Peg's read up on them and says this is the pattern. The pairs mate for life, and sit the eggs in shifts. P says their arrival is considered good luck, and as the name suggests tends to coincide with the death of a loved one, as if he or she has taken the opportunity for one last chance to look in on the living before heading to the next adventure. Good morning Dad. I always wanted to show you this place, but you and Mom were always too sick and frail.

Thinking of eternity this morning, imagination captured by a documentary series we started watching on Netflix last night. Ancient Apocalypse posits that there was once a global, pre-Ice Age civilization some 13,000 years ago, with many of the trappings of modern human life, that was swept away in a global deluge that appears in contemporaneous myths across the planet nearly 10,000 years before the construction of the pyramids. Archeologists seem collectively to dislike the series, and brand it as pseudoarcheology, but if one sets aside the more dramatic assertions about the flood story in Genesis and others describing an actual historical event, the proof of very, very old roads and structures hidden for millennia under the canopy of the Amazon rainforest seems at least somewhat empirical, and sort of calls one up short. When Jesus walked the earth, when Jeremiah delivered his first jeremiad, when Hammurabi's code was first chiseled into a clay tablet, human civilization was already very, very old. Political, social, and climate crises stretch back over the horizon so far as to seem infinite from our incredibly limited perspective.

As it happens Canandaigua Lake, which rests right outside my window right now, was formed at the same time, as the ice sheets from two million years before receded and left deep gorges and debris dams behind. The little bald man's time standing on the balcony admiring it all is barely the blink of an eye in the life of this place.

So there's that.

This is July 1st, the 162nd anniversary of the day Heth's division bumbled into Buford's cavalry while looking for shoes to steal in the little village of Gettysburg. It seems the only one to truly realize the import of the moment was General John Reynolds, who arrived that day from the south with two corps and decided to gather the forces he had available to seize and entrench Cemetery Ridge. It was probably the most fateful military decision in United States history, leading to the debacle of Pickett's Charge up that same ridge two days later, and the death of Confederate hopes for a military victory (as well as the death of a chunk of Pickett's division).

Time to lean into work, some tax lessons, and the need to deal with another ridiculous administrative glitch as bills went out last night without my authorization, apparently on some autopilot set up by my well-meaning paralegal. The billing is rife with errors, and the first angry client emails have already begun to arrive.

I love my job. Thankful this all isn't forever, although I could spend eternity in this spot, watching the light and the seasons change around this body of water the natives called "The Chosen Spot".