Wonders of Nature

Lunar Eclipse  by Glen Tepke Some of our most most profound moments arise when we are mindful of the ordinary, everyday happenings in the natural flow of our lives. A wondrous thing can occur when we look with fresh eyes...  we experience reality anew.  An honest and open look may throw us into confusion at first, but then there's always the potential for that "ah" moment when our understanding of nature deepens, and our conceptual world broadens... a moment of profound satisfaction. That's what happened to me last night as I walked my small pet beagle, and  I looked up at the moon. I tilted my head, and the shape of the craters and lunar seas took on the form of a rabbit, but that was not the surprise.  I've traveled the southern hemisphere where the rabbit on the moon resides.  I saw myself standing on the surface of the earth, nestled within the thin sliver of blue atmosphere that shelters all life as we know it.  The moon stood ...

Pomarine Jaeger by Patrick Coin B irds often get caught by the fierce winds of hurricanes, finding shelter in the eye and riding a tropical cyclone, sometimes for thousands of miles.  Some storms make landfall and travel far inland, and wayward sea birds settle on foreign coasts or in lakes and ponds. A fter the Superstorm Sandy, pomarine jaegers were found in many places as unlikely as Pennsylvania. Rescued pelicans  in Rhode Island were flown back to a place more like their natural home, Florida. B irds of all stripes follow the wind during their yearly migrations.  Sometimes the process is interrupted by violent events like Sandy, and they may end up far from their preferred habitats.  There were many such  sightings  after that massive northeastern hybrid storm: a Ross gull from the arctic turned up in Upstate New York, for instance, and in New Jersey a red-billed tropicbird was spotted. S andy is an example of how life itsel...

White-headed Capuchin , a photo by  JoeOcchipinti  on Flickr. A s New World monkeys of Central America, white-headed capuchins are perhaps one of the most recognizable of all primates, best known as partners of the street-performing organ grinders of early 20th century New York City. White-faced Capuchins are known to be very clever and can easily evade capture. In fact, they are so intelligent that they are sometimes used as animal helpers for  people who are paraplegic. In our travel to Costa Rica we were fortunate enough to observe two different troupes of Capuchin, one in a mangrove forest and another near our beach hotel.  In the mangroves, they were wary of us and posturing for us to leave (above), while by the beach resort they couldn't have cared less, and happily socialized with each other (left).  I will long remember the day when standing in the growing shadows of tall palms, we watched these wondr...

W hen facing illness we give consideration to our health and to our bodies, but before then we take our health for granted.  Sandy has engendered a moment of clarity for all of us.  Our relationship with the natural world is as intrinsic and as fundamental.  As with our own health, we often don’t give it much thought until crisis comes. Earth is our home.  We have no other.  Sandy's aftermath Sandy is only the latest example of a rapidly changing climate.  We can now see and measure the effects; changes like the radical disappearance of the polar ice cap, the increased frequency of droughts and forest fires, and the rise in sea level.  These things are no longer a matter of speculation. Let us see clearly… Taking care of our planet is the defining issue of our times. As a civilization, we are beginning to understand many of nature’s wondrous mechanisms, including those that have shaped the evolution of our atmosphere and climate...

nearby seawall Images and video of Dane Street Beach in the early part of the storm.   Northeast Massachusetts coast. When we arrived half an hour later

Hurricane Katrina just before it hit the Gulf Coast There is a dark majesty to big storms as they remind us that for all our human advances, the force of nature remains paramount to our existence. We exist and are beholden to the supreme countenance of nature and always will be. Perhaps that is why so many people, including myself, are fascinated by storms. Through modern technology we can watch them grow into behemoths of destruction, and anticipate their arrival. We know they will bring devastation, destroy people's lives and property, and yet cannot help feel a rush of excitement as they approach. Lord of the winds! I feel thee nigh, I know thy breath in the burning sky! And I wait, with a thrill in every vein, For the coming of the hurricane!                -- William Cullen Bryant (1854) Is it part of the human condition... this macabre and primal wonder of storms? Blizzard of 78' My relationship with massive ...

W ho could fail to be amazed by any creature who loves to live in the harshest and even the deadliest of places; in a pond of scalding water, in toxic acid, and even under a blast of radiation. Scientist have coined the term extremophile to describe organisms adapted to severely inhospitable places. Although most are bacteria or microbes, not all are single cell. Have you ever heard of moss piglets, also known as waterbears? T he short, plump, millimeter-long creatures with four pair of legs and little clawed feet are called tardigrades.  Some are vegetarians and some are hunters; there are 500 different species in all. These guys are found in the wildest of places, like hot springs in the Himalayas, and will blow your mind with what they can do. Hot Spring in Yellostone National Park A tardigrade can enter a cryptobiotic state (a very bizarre, death-like state of life) allowing them to survive in a dehydrated condition and highly toxic environment, even for many year...

The Grand Canyon Traveling the long highways along the high, plateau deserts of the American Southwest, one can stop and visit places like Zion or the Grand Canyon and many other amazing National Parks. The beauty of the Colorado Plateau is most often portrayed by images of the Grand Canyon.  Visually, it captures you, as it did my son in this picture. And yes, it is a magnificent place, but I want to tell you, there is so much more to discover... Hiking in the Colorado Plateau is an experience of natural awakening; the area is a geological marvel dotted with bits of intriguing history and culture.  The area’s old nickname, Red Rock Country, comes from the brightly colored sandstone, long ago deposited by an ancient sea that cleaved North America in two. Lava flow at Hidden Crater Meteor Crater in Arizona The scales of time resonate within you, if only one stops to listen.  At the bottom of the Grand Canyon you can pick up rocks more than two billion ...

NASA Image, Aurora over Midwestern US I magine mysterious curtains of crimson wavering in the night sky, while in a fit of madness, electrical equipment goes haywire.  That’s what happened in early September of 1859.  Literally out of the blue, telegraphs everywhere began to spark and crackle.  There was so much energy inexplicably flowing through telegraph systems that they continued to transmit even after being turned off.   Some operators reported being severely shocked. In 1859, a particularly powerful stream of particles from the sun hit the earth straight on.  For two days, unusually brilliant auroras could be seen across the planet, even in the tropics.  More than a century later, we still don’t fully understand solar storms and the auroras they generate.  The Inuit people tell us the Northern Lights sing; only recently has science discovered they actually do. Every eleven years, solar flares become more frequent and can prod...

H ave you ever wondered about a drop of water?  You should, as the whole of human existence, all human thought and creativity, rests on a slight bend in the nature of water.  R ound your lips and gently blow on the surface of a teaspoon.  See how the water in your breath has collected on the cool metal.  Place it on the tip of your nose and let the spoon hang there.  Dip the spoon back in a glass of water and glide it smoothly across your arm.  You see, water is glue and a lubricant at the same time.  Bizarre, isn’t it?     L ucky us, we live in a place in the universe that has water aplenty.  Our home is covered with a liquid ocean of the stuff and the air is infused with it.  Look outside on a wintry day, and you see water in all three states of matter.  The transition between ice, liquid, and gas releases or absorbs a huge amount of heat, and that energy allows water to cycle through the natural world....

Plum Island National Wildlife Refuge Is there a place, or a landscape that stirs your soul more than any other?  For me it’s probably the simple beauty and marvelous symmetry of sand dunes.  I’ve traveled to the Saharan sands, walked along the dunes that line the coast of Florida, and visited Great Sands National Park in Colorado.  But the truth is, I don’t have to go very far at all to stand in the hills of sand I love most. One of my favorite natural places is an eleven-mile long sandbar in northern Massachusetts called Plum Island.  It’s a wildlife sanctuary and as a child I saw my first bald eagle there; and also my first red fox, great blue heron, piping plovers; and the place I caught my first striped bass fishing at night along the surf.  Last year, I witnessed a young seal making its way along the surf, and a great cormorant wading in the offshore swells. The southern 2/3 of the island has been designated as Parker River National Wildlife Refuge...

Monet - Sunset in Venice There’s no other satisfaction like creating something.  That sense of accomplishment nourishes the soul in a way nothing else does. When the bible says we were created in the image of God, I wonder if it meant not so much that we look like, but rather that we create like God.   In my case, my fingers compose words and they appear on the screen in front of me… black, white and flat words, but wholly beautiful and powerful.  I am sharing my thoughts, literally part of who I am, with you.  It’s absolutely incredible.      My hands could be playing the piano instead, shaping mud and earth, holding a camera, or perhaps a paint brush dabbing flames of color on a canvas.  They could be arching through the air as I’m dancing or wielding a hammer.   When we think about what it means to be fully human I see no other thing more essential as the ability to create.  Making is as needful of a thing...

Rock field on Mt. Jefferson, NH When you pick up a lowly rock from the ground, you are touching something unimaginably incredible.   Yes, you have probably heard that a rock is a collection of minerals, and that minerals are made from elements, created by stars.  It’s all star stuff, the rocks, clouds and landscape you see in the image, and that’s pretty amazing, but there is even more to ponder. Thinking about a rock is pretty impressive.  For instance, if you compress the age of the oldest rock on earth to a year, the pyramids were built a few seconds ago.  The elements that make up that rock are older still, perhaps almost as old as the universe itself.  So, twirl that rock round your fingers and then forget all that… Imagine nothingness.  A white dot pops into existence… welcome the universe. This dot is so hot that the best minds among us are still wondering what it might have been like.  All that will ever e...

Vulcano Island My wife and I asked ourselves that question when we left the beach and began to climb the thousand foot mountain directly behind us.  Many years ago, on one of the Aeolian Islands in the Mediterranean, wearing nothing but sandals and bathing suits, we made our way up the volcanic cone.   It was a particularly tempting climb because this island named by the Romans now defines the very term for mountains of fire. We easily made it to the rim of the crater and began to walk around it.  Soon we were coughing and choking from the sulfurous gases.  We ran into a group of scientists in heavy gear and oxygen, looked at each other, and decided that perhaps we should head back down.  Despite several washings we had to throw away our bathing suits as they still smelled distinctly like rotten eggs. Sulphur Vent I was born in Messina, Sicily, and as a child remember the distant glow of the nighttime lava flows of Mount Etna, one of the gre...

Michelangelo's Creation of Adam, detail We humans tend to see ourselves as the center of all things.  It’s understandable, as we haven’t encountered anyone else in this vast universe, not even a lowly extraterrestrial bacteria as of yet. What happens when we do find life elsewhere?  We will lose our special status as the bearers of a unique haven of life in the cosmos, but what will we gain? It means something that we are trying hard to find out.  As I write this blog, Curiosity is digging in the Martian landscape hoping to discover signs of living matter.  We are searching the heavens for extra solar planets in that tantalizing Goldilocks zone, the place where the temperature is just right and liquid water may exist and so life. If we do find we are not alone, history suggests we will get used to it eventually, but it won’t be easy to adjust.  It may cause strife and unease.  In Western civilization, I can think of three great happenings that shoo...

As someone interested in human nature, I wonder if anyone is truly "normal." No matter how you look at it, being normal is a very strange thing, and I can't think of anyone that I know reasonably well to be a truly "normal" person. Everyone is quirky in one way or another. I mean this as a compliment and that's what curious about it. In our society, being called normal can be a downer, as it implies being boring. It's considered better to be unique, a trend-setter, an outside-the-box person. So why is our civilization so hung up on normality?  The concept of "normal" is expressed across our cultural institutions as an ideal state.  It helps define the standards of what is a healthy person, for example.  Being normal is a part of manners, positive behavior in general, and even found in principles of law.  Considering just how much emphasis and energy we put into being normal, it seems contradictory that we aspire to and even revere individu...

I run.   Well, technically I’m probably jogging but every other day, I travel about four miles or so faster than walking.  What’s the difference?  If you’re not touching the ground at any given point during your stride then you’re running.   According to anthropologists, we were all born to run.  In fact, according to  William Cromie  we humans are (or were) particularly good at it.  Our bodies have evolved that way, but after some quick research on the web I discovered that only about 1 or 2 percent of Americans run.  Only one out of a thousand Americans have run (or jogged) a marathon.   The rates for compulsive shoppers (clinically addicted, meaning it’s a serious problem for them) is much higher, somewhere between 2 and 8 percent.  True, we all need to buy things, but personally, I don’t know anyone who doesn’t shop frivolously at least sometimes.  I think shopping wins.  We are a culture of consu...

                  Lovell Island where we set our camp has a post-apocalyptic feel to it.  The islands, filled with ruined forts and bunkers, are a testament to American military history and nation-building.   As part of the Boston Harbor Islands National Parks Area they have guarded the port of Boston from pirates in the early days of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, to German U-boats in World War II.  Some of the more notable inhabitants were the prisoners, from early Indians to confederates and deserters in the Civil War.           On an eroded drumlin near our campsite rested an enormous block of concrete, the remnant of an underground bunker that housed the soldier who watched the harbor for enemy ships and submarines, ready to set off large, hulking mines stuffed with tons of TNT.           This urban archipelago is a geologic relic of the last ice age whe...

          “ I was really getting into my novel when I saw I had a message from Socrates on facebook. ”  Before  I clicked on the little icon on the bottom of my screen I got to thinking, why did I buy an e-reader that is also a web platform?   It’s pretty distracting.  Multitasking is supposed to be bad for us, at least according to a lot of new studies on human cognition.  Why did I buy an e-reader at all?  There is something to be said for losing oneself in bound, foliated wood pulp.  Some people argue e-books will ultimately relegate traditional books to being niche items, sort of like vinyl records are today.               I’m not convinced…           Future predictions are usually notoriously off kilter.  When television came along, movies and radio were supposed to go by the wayside, and both media are fine and well today.  When comput...

Gliese 581c  NASA Image The search for extra terrestrial intelligence has been going on for fifty years and still we have not found anything concrete. The recent discovery of "earth-like" planets like Gliese 581 c is re energizing this effort. Will we ever encounter intelligent life in the cosmos? If there are other beings in the universe where are they, and why haven’t they said hello? In thinking about this blog I came to realize I have many more questions than answers. What would it mean for our human civilization to discover that we are not alone? Some UFO enthusiasts claim that governments are already aware of intelligent visitation of our planet, but for whatever reason they are keeping it secret. One of those reasons might be the social repercussions of knowing that aliens exist. How would people of faith interpret first contact? Any interstellar civilization would have to be far more advanced than us. Would the fact that far ...

NASA Image, Rift Valley It's incredible to think about all of the natural forces that came together to create a sentient species on this little blue planet of ours.  There are so many interesting ways to approach the question of our origins. The Great Rift Valley in Africa is a place that elicits such conversations. What can  geology, the study of rocks and the physical earth, tell us about human origins, for example?  The crust is constantly on the move due to the internal heat of the earth’s interior. Along the Pacific rim, the sea floor is forced back into the depths of the earth forming a vast ring of volcanic fire;  In India, the Himalayas rise as the plates crush into each other.  How can any of this relate to human evolution? In East Africa the land is being literally ripped apart by the same great forces.  A new ocean will soon sever the continent apart and the horn of Africa will become its own separate land. The African Rift Vall...

NASA photo, Apollo 11 mission. Who cannot help being humbled by the vastness of the cosmos as compared to the smallness of our earthly home. We are indeed a tiny dot in the universe, but I do not believe significance is a matter of size. I've always been fascinated by the dynamics of pattern -- how pattern reproduces itself in vastly different scales, and how the blueprint of the universe is intimately bound through self-replicating forms. Sunwapta I revel in how the arrangements of nature are ensconced in space and time; the way patterns are displayed in our planet's landmasses, in the atmosphere and in the oceans. There is an artistry to the earth's physical landscapes that is more richly textured than any human work. AAAS Image Walking along a beach I watch the swells run up the sand, weave and merge, and return to the ocean as braided rivulets, and it reminds me of the great river systems of our world.  It brings back memories of...