At Carson Beach, standing in warm shallow low-tide water, three of us and the kid looked for shadows on the silty bottom, expanding and shrinking and definitely move along the shore. Tracing back toward our eyes, we saw white, semi-transparent jellyfish, first one, then many, making their way somewhere.
Jellyfish we'd seen in the aquarium a few days before, creatures like frosted glass or clear with lacy hems to their pulsing bell skirts from within which trailed long, long tendrils (sometimes referred to as oral arms), draping and twining (but not tangling, rather sliding) the others in the tank. Beautiful, exquisitely so, but perplexing.
There's seems so little to them, my daughter observed, no complicated innards, everything open to view, no secrets, and yet alive; so alive, in fact, that some suggest the end of the oceans will be the reign of the coelenterata. They are almost nothing, virtually indestructible, but endowed with appetite.
(Yet, think, the cornea, transparent as it is, is endowed with pain nerves.)
So too the roots I unearth these days preparing my gardens for planting. A white stem shaft here, a clump of white roots there, and yet each is ready to put forth shoots, the shoots leaves, the leaves food for more expansion of roots up and out, plus flowers and seeds. Not one of these fragments can be left buried; not zombies but as relentless, they will inevitably sprout and seek to dominate wherever they are.
Maybe some notions are like this--seemingly simple, readily graspable, perhaps mesmerizingly attractive, but voracious, relentless, ready to dominate if allowed. Social Darwinism comes to mind, and, oh, the damage it has wrought.
These weren't your reflections, grandson. You were taken by the brown opaque mud squidging between your toes, as was I.
Jellyfish we'd seen in the aquarium a few days before, creatures like frosted glass or clear with lacy hems to their pulsing bell skirts from within which trailed long, long tendrils (sometimes referred to as oral arms), draping and twining (but not tangling, rather sliding) the others in the tank. Beautiful, exquisitely so, but perplexing.
There's seems so little to them, my daughter observed, no complicated innards, everything open to view, no secrets, and yet alive; so alive, in fact, that some suggest the end of the oceans will be the reign of the coelenterata. They are almost nothing, virtually indestructible, but endowed with appetite.
(Yet, think, the cornea, transparent as it is, is endowed with pain nerves.)
So too the roots I unearth these days preparing my gardens for planting. A white stem shaft here, a clump of white roots there, and yet each is ready to put forth shoots, the shoots leaves, the leaves food for more expansion of roots up and out, plus flowers and seeds. Not one of these fragments can be left buried; not zombies but as relentless, they will inevitably sprout and seek to dominate wherever they are.
Maybe some notions are like this--seemingly simple, readily graspable, perhaps mesmerizingly attractive, but voracious, relentless, ready to dominate if allowed. Social Darwinism comes to mind, and, oh, the damage it has wrought.
These weren't your reflections, grandson. You were taken by the brown opaque mud squidging between your toes, as was I.
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