Sylvan Reverie

Life is only transient.
Youth, once gone, doesn’t return.
Days are not the same as other days.
So why are people cruel?
- Hla Stavhana

I’m still stuck in my spell of not having much to say – but a random thought crossed my mind today and I wanted to get it posted before I forgot about it (as so often happens). I found myself contemplating the winter today, something I tend to do on really warm, allergy-triggering days, and my thoughts dwelled on snowflakes. What really impressed me was the minute symmetry, intricacy, uniqueness … and transiency of these crystals. I thought it was sort of bizarre, that Nature would go through the trouble of creating something like this, only to have it melt sometimes only minutes after its creation – and that’s when the connection took place, when I realized that we are essentially no different from a snowflake. As we drift in the wind, we add to our individuality and intricacy; but our fate is to end.

Why Nature would go through such efforts, to create something unique and precious, only to bring it to an end is perhaps, after all, best explained by the snowflake: Nature melts the snowflake so that it can be taken back up to the sky and reformed into something new, and equally unique … which means that drifting is only part of the snowflake’s journey.

How dull it is to pause, to make and end,
To rust unburnished, not to shine in use!
As though to breathe were life!
- Alfred, Lord Tennyson

I wanted to post something here just to say that I’ve been trying to come up with a post or two over the past few days, and have had no success. If it weren’t for the bursts of energy I’ve had recently, I’d say it is likely I’m sliding into a really dreary sort of depression. I’ve had very little urge to do anything productive, and the things I normally enjoy doing seem to have really lost their luster. The worst part is that my creativity seems to have abandoned me outright, not that I was particularly blessed with great stores of it to begin with; and this means I’m not much of a blogger at the moment. I’m just going to bide my time for right now, and with luck, this will change in the next few days.

And I regret that if my referencing that moment of trauma for our entire nation and in particular the Kennedy family was in any way offensive.
- Hillary Clinton

I’ve noticed several times that Hillary Clinton likes to use ‘reference’ as a verb, whether she’s ‘referencing’ moments of trauma, ‘referencing’ snipers on the tarmac, or just ‘referencing’ her childhood dog. It’s not incorrect to use ‘reference’ as a verb, Merriam-Webster’s online dictionary has ‘reference’ listed as a transitive verb; but it is incorrect to use it to replace the verb, ‘refer’. To ‘reference’ a moment of trauma means to cite that moment either in, or as a reference … or to supply that moment of trauma with references. If it were not for Hillary Clinton’s normal eloquence, I would be tempted to equate this to Bush’s ‘nukular’ issues, or my own father’s constant use of the phrase, “I seen”; but I find myself offended nonetheless at her, an attorney of all things, savagely butchering the English language in her apology. In apologizing for poor word choice, she exhibits further poor word choice … it’s just too much for me to bare bear.

Come, Boy, come and climb up my trunk and swing from my branches and eat apples and play in my shade and be happy.
- Shel Silverstein

While looking around for a few other things online, I stumbled across what has become an instant treasure for me, the text to a book by Shel Silverstein that I never knew existed, called The Giving Tree. I almost broke down in tears when I read it, and I wish I could say I grew up with the book.

The hunt is up, the morn is bright and grey,
The fields are fragrant and the woods are green.
- William Shakespeare

I’ve yet to find a definitive reference that explains the marking on my palm. The urge to discover its meaning doesn’t actually entail finding out all the possible meanings this marking might have (which I’ve already done, at length), but to discover an online source agreeing with what I’m pretty sure I read in a book several years ago … keeping in mind that I no longer have the book, or remember its title or publisher. And, while I have started to accept on some levels that I’ve either jumbled and confused information from that book, or outright created a memory to fill in a gap, I’m still hunting. (more…)