jumpingfish

1. A Spider

There was a spider on the leaf. A tiny green one with huge green claw-like front legs. It sat motionless on a leaf as we watched. It sat motionless even as we approached. I pointed at it, but it did not move until I crossed some threshold just millimeters away from that tiny thing. With my finger descending out of the sky above its head with only a short air gap between us, the spider decided that it had had enough, and it dashed to the other side of the leaf.

2. A Bee 

There was a honey bee flying among the blossoms. They were long, orange-red, trumpet-shaped blossoms, and there were many of them around the spot where I stood watching. The bee would land on one flower and crawl to the open bell on the end, often causing the trumpet to flip one way or the other, yet the bee would hang on during that flip and peer into the blossom’s end. And after only a moment, it would fly directly to the next nearby blossom.

3. Another Bee

There was a bigger bee guarding that plant. It was a solitary bee that I know from the yard. It’s a territorial thing, sometimes chasing off Guinness when he barks at it, sometimes chasing off other bugs that come to close. But the honey bees didn’t bother it. It flew from blossom to blossom, hovering in the air beside each one much in the way of a Humming Bird. 

4. Wanting More

Although the heat had been brutal for several months, there has always been something blooming out here, and there are many places for spiders and bees and beetles and flee-flies to call home. Sometimes in the slanting light of late day, if we are sitting in just the right place at just the right time, we can see silken threads blowing in the breeze or gnatty things buzzing above the bushes. And there are sometimes spiderwebs in the branches. And the Solitary Bees do sometimes climb into and out of the solitary bee hotel. But there should be more of them about. More silken threads. More beetles in the leaves. More bees on the flowers. Even though this is a good home for those who come, there are just not enough of them about.

“Come look. You have to see this,” she said. 

There was a band of green on the map. And then yellow. And then orange. And red. The color splotch marched across her computer screen from east to west. It was coming right at us.

“Hey, you took my place,” she later complained when I sat where she had been sitting in the backyard on a bench facing west.

I moved over, and she sat down too, picking up the big one in her lap. I leaned over and picked up the little one. And there was sat watching the storm.

The sky darkened. The clouds seethed and roiled. Bolts of lightning flashed, followed some seconds later by rolling thunder that made the big one bark while the little one sniffed the breeze.

The sky darkened more. The clouds lost their definition as the leading edge passed over us. There was a drop of rain and then another drop. But the sky was still bright in the west, and the lightning flashes were moving to the south of us. And now the sky was not so dark. And the rain drops stopped falling.

We had such hopes, the four of us sitting out there waiting for the rain that was certain to fall. Waiting for those black clouds with bright flashing and rolling booming. Waiting for the cool front and the rain-smelling air. We had such hopes.

And it passed us, leaving us sitting there, leaving our parched yard still thirsty, leaving our rain barrels not full.

“There you are,” she said.

I opened my eyes and turned my head. Like a dream, I saw her in the distance, her hair tousled from her eight mile run, her arms swinging confidently by her side as she took long strides toward me. There was a look of exasperation on her face.

“For heaven’s sake,” she said, “I never know where you’re going to be. I’ve been looking all over for you.”

Little did she know (and I did not volunteer this to her) that I was sitting there because I had dropped to the ground in that spot, unwilling to walk further, drenched in sweat, only interested in cooling down and resting while I waited for her Rogue Running group to return.

“I’ve been looking and looking,” she said.

All I could do was look up and wait for her to join me in that shady, breezy spot against that cool limestone wall, which she did in a moment, groaning in relief as she stretched.

“I fell down,” she said.

I looked at her knee that was scraped and her shoulder that was scuffed. Her drink bottle was gravelly, carrying pieces of the running trail that it had picked up when she hit the ground.

“Oh, I’m going to be stiff tomorrow,” she said.

And then she added how she had told her coach about the hole in the sloped trail that had made her fall and about how she had blood running down her leg and how she too was now officially bad ass. She smiled as she said this and as she described how the coach had high-fived her on her new status.

Fair and industrious look out. A new moniker has taken the stage: Bad Ass Trudy.

Maybe it’s cause for hope that notable politicians and tech experts are starting to speak out about our government’s surveillance policies. Bruce Schneier is one. A top computer security expert with a knack for communicating, he writes books, he blogs online and recently he has been publicly … shall we say … skeptical of what the Internet has become and what we’re learning about our government.

Recently, he wrote this in a discussion of how government and corporate pronouncements have completely lost our trust:

NSA Director Gen. Keith Alexander has claimed that the NSA’s massive surveillance and data mining programs have helped stop more than 50 terrorist plots, 10 inside the U.S. Do you believe him? I think it depends on your definition of “helped.”

The whole thing is worth reading. But this one sentence pushed a hot button that I was trying to describe to the fair and industrious and infinitely patient Trudy.

Whether we believe the good director general or not does not only depend on the definition of helped. It depends on

• what surveillance means
• what qualifies as a data mining program
• what stop means
• what terrorist means
• what a plot is
• what it means to be inside the US

In short, not a single word can be taken at face value. Nothing is what it seems.

People joked for years about Clinton’s it depends on what the meaning of is is, but this kind of triangulation is now the norm.

Schneier is right. Something needs to be done to restore our trust.

From Free Range Living‘s Project 365, comes this dandelion, at which point the pen and the tablet beside me beckon.

It does the free range dandelion no justice. It was just a scribble but not bad as a Friday night meditation.

Happy weekend.