sunday 21 august 2011

humidity remains quite high here. I have a very hard time with humidity. I find myself on tumblr looking at dazzling photos of ice and snow, wishing I could lie down on the cold ground in those pictures. and I have a song running through my mind. the germans call that an ohrworm, when a tune is going through your mind and you can't get rid of it: an earworm. I love that. last night I had a couple of other songs that wouldn't leave me alone, but right now it's this one:

cold as the northern wind in december mornings...... cold is the cry that rings from this far distant shore..... (roma ryan)

next subject: bryology..... the study of mosses (bryophytes) and liverworts. I've been fascinated with mosses for years, but never knew until a few weeks ago that in science they are called bryophytes, and a moss scientist is a bryologist. and I learned this, of all places, on the public radio show Car Talk.

I am both a frustrated naturalist and a frustrated animal scientist. everything I ever learn in these areas I do as a lay person with passionate interest, but I never have answers to all my questions because 1. I'm not officially in these fields, and 2. I hate looking up a lot of stuff and writing or copying the info. I hate THAT kind of research so much that in both college and graduate school I managed to get out of writing research papers, and my friends who ALWAYS had to write research papers were always furious with me. especially when I brought home the papers with grades as good as theirs. I got out of most research because I'm a good extrapolator, and because I majored in language and literature. I'd just go to the professor with a topic idea that involved reading the literature, but not much side-reading for research. every time they let me have my topic. even the astronomy professor. I'll do anything to get out of that kind of research.

so a few weeks ago I brought home some bryophytes from the canal, and found a different specimen at the river this morning. we actually have a terrarium supply store right here in town, but I can't afford to shop there, so I'm left to bare bones, as usual. I'm trying to keep my mosses alive in an uncovered plant pot, with not the right kind of soil or light or moisture level. failure is just about certain. today I looked at them with the magnifying glass I bought for snowflakes, and looking at them little moss stems, six different kinds, was almost as exciting as looking at the snowflakes this past winter was. I think it would do a lot of people a lot of good to look at things like snowflakes and mosses with a magnifying glass. to look at these small things that we take for granted with a tool that enlarges them, that reveals their intricate detail and sophistication. it's pleasurable, and inexpensive, and brings to the fore the fact that so many common, everyday things that we step on or in some other way take for granted are actually precious, and complex, and deserve our attention at least as much as, say, TV does. it brings us in closer communication with the planet that spawned us all, the mosses and the snowflakes and the ants and the humans, and all, all.

postscript: these are linking experiments. will they work?. http://www.sehnen.wordpress.com/2011/08/22/soulcast/ http://www.braonthree.wordpress.com/2010/01/21/hello-world/