online: 11 july 2011 modified: 10, 11, 18, 19 july 2011 10 july 2011 unstable weather
in a city forest
...a small bird singing in a nearby tree... it continues... grey and white clouds of indefinite shape moving southeast... aware everything is composed of continuous changes... some too slow to be noticed... the ferns that fell or were chopped down a few months ago are replaced by new growth so dense that one cannot distinguish one fern from another... and everything else here is approachimg its maximum growth...
...the sounds of road traffic and aircraft are from long distances... things nearby are silent except for the bird that still sings... though it too may have moved further away...
...the sky looks thunderous and the long leaves of a nearby tree quiver slightly perhaps shaken by tiny gusts of air movement... after which there are greater gusts that shake branches as well as leaves... (i'm astonished to see how a topic or theme arises as i sit recording small events that i don't usually notice and didn't intend to write about...)
...yes i see now that this may be the transition from stillness to windy weather... or perhaps into storm... and i wonder if wind rain or even thunder and lightning will drive me away...
...very slowly the wind is continuing to appear... not from a distance but in separated growths of moving air out of stillness... probably with very local changes in air pressure... or some more subtle and invisible process of what we call aerodynamics... the surprising movements of air when in moving contact with objects (or with other portions of air that are moving at different velocities)... and as i imagine these physical processes i hear and see images of my father teaching physics to classrooms of boys... including me...
...as i wrote that, another bird (more chirruppy than the first) has taken over as soloist... and i then hear the rapid speaking of a human language that i do not understand... (this is going to be a more frequent experience in all countries from now on so we had better get used to it... or even to enjoy the shock and surprises of ways of speaking and thinking not our own)...
... the whole sky is now darkening and rain begins to fall on the touch screen... so i get up and stand under a tree... remembering that i was trained not to mix water and electricity (but they are well mixed in the body)... and that the weather forecast did not mention rain... and i deliberately left my umbrella behind...
...now i am continuing to write in the rain (but on paper)... the rain is not yet penetrating the leaves... i'm glad to be obliged to look at a cluster of fir trees that were not visible from the place where i was sitting... trees with leaves like needles always seem more attractive to me than are those with flat leaves... yet you could say that needle-leafed trees are over-simplified... or frozen by cold climates into rigidity...
...i stay under the trees until heavy rain penetrats the leaves... and then i remember an alleyway where i can shelter nearby... and run there without getting completely soaked... and then i run to a bus stop and watch people completely dry inside cars and i see a woman inside a house and a man walking under an umbrella and a woman at the bus stop who is completely enclosed (but for her face) in a transparent plastic rain garment... and i canot help thinking how well protected we are from predictable rains etc yet how vulnerable we are to slightly greater instabilities in conditions of the gases or liquids and solids of which on our planet consists...
for comfortable line length please set the window to about half of the screen width
You may transmit this text to anyone for any non-commercial
purpose if you include the copyright line and this notice and if you
respect the copyright of quotations.
If you wish to reproduce any of this text commercially please
send a copyright permission request to jcj 'at' publicwriting.net
(replace 'at' and spaces by the @ sign)
