Letters from Josh
Timeless Sundays Letter 79 4/25/22
Howdy, folks! I hope your week is rockin’ right along. How ‘bout this weather, eh? It was so delicious, it kept luring me up to “Bear Hill”, so named for a recent sighting of a furry friend. (Although I’ve only seen coyotes there.) The view was splendid, the sunshine like a warm hug, and it seemed right to make a postcard out of it, letter-style, so you could be there, too. I sat under the hickory tree with a fledgling crop of lime green leaves, casting a deeper shade every day. The land rolled away, verdant fields dotted with constellations of fresh buttercups, meeting the forest in the valley, and stretched onward. Thoughts from the day flitted around in my head like the dragonflies that had finally made their appearance, and gradually I became still. Isn’t it weird how real our thoughts seem, all-consuming and urgent? There’s a supermassive black hole at the center of our Milky Way galaxy. It has a right to take itself so seriously, but no matter how densely I scrunched my brain, the view reminded me that this didn’t apply to me. Here on the bench under the hickories and oaks, I marveled at how the land just was, sleepy under a Sunday afternoon. In the far distance, the mountains were a pale blue, obscured by a haze, while a bumblebee droned lazily through the waving grass. The Wood Thrush fussed a bit, and then began to sing, achingly wistful fluting notes somewhere up the mountainside. There’s an ancient wisdom in the fresh growth of Spring, reminding me that the seasons have been whispering across this landscape for a long, long time. Rocks from the Cambrian Period lay strewn on the slope behind me, half a billion years old, remnants of when life started in earnest on our planet. My phone beeped, and a buddy called to video chat, uttering a justified expletive when he saw my windblown hair. After a while, our talk, like the week, ended with a laugh, and the World slowly turned towards night and Monday. The amber light faded, the air grew cooler. The distant mountains took on a purple hue, and the turkeys wandering at the bottom of the hill were gone to roost. The evening frog symphony was tuning up. Twilight appeared, fluffing pillows for the trees and gathering the comforters of a velvet spring night. I stood up, ready to head back home, and set up the telescope. Spring is an excellent time to spy distant galaxies and listen to the crickets. They’re back!
Till next week - Josh