"If Mozart Hadn't Died, Stravinsky Never Would Have Arisen"

The world, and specifically, our area, lost a beautiful soul today. Her name was Anne Rudloe. She was a Zen Buddhist, a writer, a naturalist. She and her husband, Jack Rudloe have done more for the local preservation of our ecology here than anyone and they were co-directors of an amazing place called The Gulf Specimen Marine Lab.

Here is a video made before she died. It is well worth watching for many reasons.
I feel quite sure that Anne is just fine, whatever death has brought her. And we are the better off for having had her.  

Light Equals...What AM I Trying To Say Here?

ARRRGGGHHHH!
I have a spot of poison ivy on my calf and it itches to the point of I-cannot-stop-myself, I-must-scratch.

I read a piece in the paper just now, not about politics or murder or "So-and-so was born in 1934 to Mr. and Mrs. So-and-so-Smith" but about horseshoe crabs and time.

Anne Rudloe wrote it. She is a local Buddhist and Scientist and she said this:

"There is no new day, only the endless cyclic alternation of light and dark, cold and hot, wet and dry weather, activity and rest. In the morning daylight simply resumes. It is not a new day. This timeless space has existed for millions of years."

I don't know whether this makes me want to weep for the beauty and truth of it or to weep that I am not a particle of light.
I hope when I die I become a particle of light. Or perhaps I already have and am and I don't know. I can't understand these things.

She writes of the horseshoe crab and how for 400 million years this creature, unchanged in all of that time, responds not to day or night but to the "cyclic waxing and waning of the moon."
She says, "They've been doing it for hundreds of millions of years as humans count time, but to the crab perhaps there is only right now."

Right now. Right now my leg itches. Right now I am washing the rug that Pearl's lake of pee contaminated last night. Right now I am writing this, click, click, click and the light is right now and right now it has changed again, imperceptible to me, and now again.

I think about the time, so very many years ago, as humans count it, when a friend and I walked a beach and saw the horseshoe crabs mating and we were young and it embarrassed us, those obviously ancient (we had no idea what they were) creatures, buried down in the sand, huge females with smaller males atop, their spiny tails raising and lowering, doing the same things humans do, we knew that, somehow, and that was so long ago but to the crabs, no, it was right now and on beaches right now, they are right now, doing that again so that there will be a right now a million years from now. Maybe.

Perhaps this gives me some inkling of why I hate to call and make appointments, write down "times" on a calender, my inner particle of light knows that getting teeth cleaned is just such a lost cause, even teeth crumble and become dust which will blow in the wind of light at some point, long after I am dead but this way of thinking, although possibly universally speaking, may be true, it is not practical for this incarnation of my being.
If there is such a thing.

Well. Monday morning. Owen is coming soon. A thing in town tonight where Freddy is showing his films. I am thinking of all of that, my mind (right now) distracted by this itching, and I am thinking of light on water, specifically the violet/green/blue water of the Mexican Caribbean, how it makes diamonds on the amethyst/emerald/sapphire jewels below it, how they dance!

I guess that's it. I guess that's all I have to say right now and mostly because I am a human being and my mind is too dense with blood and brain and bone for all the light it would need to truly understand any of how this life works but I am in awe. I am aware of a tiny sliver of all that I do not know, right now, or in fact, ever will.