27 Questions Intended to Evoke a State of Wonder

1. Can any creature hear the fall of a snowflake? What could that sound like?
2. Concerning King Tut: was there, on the occasion of his funeral and interment, any music? Did anyone play a wrong note?
3. If, long long ago, there were dinosaurs at the south pole, and if, when the darker solstice came, they migrated northward to a place where the vegetation didn't die off (for lack of light), what was that like, a dinosaur migration? Could you feel it from a distance, in your feet? Those enormous creatures on the move? 
4. Considering the poet Sappho: when was the last copy of her poems lost? Or maybe does a copy of them still survive, somewhere in a remote desert cave--an ancient scroll waiting to be found and deciphered? Who will find it? When?
5. Was there really a Helen of Troy? To get a glimpse of her face, how many days would I walk?
6. Consider all the fine painters who died young: can we imagine a museum containing all the works they WOULD have produced, if they had been given another five years to create? A Louvre of what might have been! 
7. If I could come into possession of any lost  relic of the past--Marlowe's last quill, a butterfly specimen from the Jurassic, a bottle of Nefertiti's perfume, capped with an ivory plug...what would I want to have?
8. If the sum of human pain, over the full course of history, could be expressed as an alien planetary landscape, what would that planet look like?
9. Now what about a planet expressive of the sum of human joy?  
10. Now can we imagine a trumpeter who dreamed nightly that he was an astronaut on both these planets, and every morning picked up his horn to express them both?
11. Is wonder an emotion necessarily tied to melancholy? To what is no longer here? To what was never born? To what we know for certain cannot last?
12. Do spiders ever take joyrides on clock-pendulums?
13. If all mammals dream, what about prairie dogs? What do prairie dogs dream of?  Hawks, kestrels? Prairie dog love? Building new tunnels? Reinforcing old tunnels? Taking wrong turns in tunnels? Tasty roots?
14. What is the composite musical pitch of the buzz of a honey bee hive? Does that pitch differ from species to species and from hive to hive? Who sets the pitch? The queen? Or is this something the drones have a say in?
15. If robins can hear earthworms crawling beneath the ground, can earthworms hear robins walking above the ground?
16. What makes a soap bubble beautiful? Its perfect roundness, never obese? The floating nature of its existence? It's multi-colored swirlish nature? The shortness of its life? The eye of the beholder, itself a mortal sphere?
17. How did these questions get from me to you, really? Where did they come from originally? Where will they eventually go? Are they common property, or do they already belong to their ultimate destination? 
18. What is the ultimate destination of all our questions?
19. Consider: there are bonsai plants in Japan that have been handed down in families for generations. Presumably, some of these plants, if left un-watered even for a week or two, would die. Now, what is the most delicate plant handed down for the longest time?
20. Can the bonsai in constant need of care, be compared to human love, which must consistently be expressed, or else will die?
21. If yesterday I learned that an apple is really a kind of rose (in the same way that French is a kind of Latin) how can I live today not hungering for some other beautiful fact I do not know?
22. If emotions possessed texture, so that you could identify them by feel (like a pot of lemongrass or a swatch of corduroy) how, I wonder, would wonder feel? Smooth as polished gold? Somehow electric?
23. If beauty is in the eye of the beholder, why only one eye? What's in the other eye?
24. Consider an old LP recording, featuring a string quartet, all four members of which are long since dead. This is recording of a late quartet of Beethoven. Now play it on an old turn table, and listen, and what exactly is happening here? Isn't this a kind of five-fold resurrection? A springing back to life of four people's passion and intelligence for the music of one who came even before them? 
25. Doesn't the needle, as it digs and scrapes the groove, amount to a sort of miraculous grave digger, undoing and transforming the effects of death, one of which is certainly silence?
26. How long can we keep listening like this?
27. Or is this deep attention to the music of the moment, the very meaning of forever?

      ?HB?

Your Farm is Beautiful

After all those months of snow and cold here in Valparaiso, and after a late short spring (you almost blinked and it was gone) it's good to have the family garden back. I'm especially enjoying the fresh vegetables. It's such a gift: to eat crisp lettuce again, cut just minutes ago from the garden bed, or to pop strawberry after ripe strawberry (that original earth-candy) into the expectant mouth and chew. Gardeners have a reputation for complaint and for seditious murmurings against misfortune, but the truth is that their investments of time and labor are in the end generally well-rewarded. Because even after the winter cold, the cabbage-worms, the wind and the hail, the digging mole and the nibbling rabbits--even after these have all had their say, usually the earth still finds a way to get its gifts through to us. Like a hand pushing sweet pulp through a sieve. 

Sometimes our rewards as gardeners arrive from unexpected sources and in currencies other than food. Such a thing happened to me just the other day. Our vegetable garden is bordered on the west by an alleyway, and about a week ago, as I was weeding one of our potato beds, a woman came along the alley, walking a small dog. She paused and looked over the picket fence: at the sweet peas climbing their graph-like trellises of twine and the young squash-vines just starting to crawl. At the tall wispy asparagus leaning in chorus in the breeze and the tomato plants vigorously climbing their cages. At the white-flowering buckwheat all abuzz with bees and little golden flies.

"Your farm is beautiful," she said.

Now to my ears, this was two compliments rolled into one. First, I was happy enough that she had called the scene "beautiful," and I told her so. Way too many people, I said, think that vegetable gardens have to be dowdy. We at Sunnyside think otherwise. And we strive to prove our point. 

Second, I was really touched that she had called our garden a "farm." "Your garden's beautiful," would have been a nice enough compliment. But to call it a farm! That was really extravagant praise. It was like tossing a bouquet of carnations for me to catch, even as she applauded.

Her point of course was not that our six hundred square feet of vegetable beds actually amounted to a farm. Or that we were actually making a living cultivating our garden. Her point was that to her it was obvious that our garden wasn't just a hobby or a pastime--a fun little extra--but a place and a pursuit approached with sustained commitment and affection. Something integral to our lives. Something like the real professional thing. 

I think that when it comes to encouragement, almost nothing beats a compliment from a stranger. Such compliments fire up the mind. They charge up the will. They confirm us in our principles. They remind us that what may feel like a solitary pursuit--in this case a low-carbon lifestyle--is often enough actually a public performance. The neighbors really do take note. They come and see. They pass by and admire. And sometimes, in certain happy moments, their appreciation comes full circle back to you.

I of course thanked the alley-walker for her compliments. I told her that it made me happy that other people could enjoy looking at our garden, even as we enjoyed eating what it provided for us. She told me to have a good day and then moved on, her terrier in the vanguard sniffing the gravel and jingling its tags.

Well. Time to get back to those weeds.

HB