The Dark Between Stars

Unread essays - Alweiss and Marder in particular - float across the desk revealing stained pie recipes from my mother and notes from my father's last doctor visit. One school argues there is only matter while another argues there is only consciousness and while I've spent considerable time in both camps, learning the terms and conditions from smart and admirable residents, I am more and more inclined to the former, mainly because it's easier to garden, raise bees and chickens, and bake bread and so forth. Keep it simple, or keep simplifying and see what you end up with, is one way to do it. Jack (an Appaloosa cross) declined the grape until we peeled it but later handled a series of small fences with grace. Nineteen fifties east coast jazz certainly tests the theory. Asimov points out with respect to the evolution of self-replicating molecules that "[t]o have this happen on the basis of random chance seems to be asking a lot, but then a billion years is a long time." God does love a good mystery, or so one says having spent most of Sunday school mentally composing love letters to girls, only some of whom were Catholic. At last it rains, leaving me in the back room with piles of reading and insufficient clarity for a sustained writing project, leading to this. Or is one always writing love letters? This this, right? Shadows attend, which is another way of saying there's a light around here somewhere! Antaeus begs another interview (this is getting tiresome, no?) so we go to the garden where I am preparing a few hundred feet for potato starts and he is - he is always - silenced in the presence of labor. There is no such thing as mindless, no idea is ever lost, and sentences are like the dark between stars (which is a kind of light because we can see it). Do you know who you are? How grateful I am for the work of Loren Eisely, how hungry for the coarse and fulsome grain his wordiness embodied. The upper room remains crowded, in need of attention, but presently I am a gardener though tomorrow I slip back into teaching. Coarse hands gesticulating while exploring the problem of evil and the necessity of using the comma correctly. One can imagine them anywhere, slow but willing, given direction. Nothing is unrelated in this world of recalcitrant protoplasm studying itself and struggling to remember it's okay to have fun doing it.