reply to Verlyn Klinkenborg essay in The New York Times

Dear Mr. Klinkenborg,

I agree with you about the sometimes frustrating but almost habitual way we all see the world around us. But I think such seeing is sometimes a comfort, cushioning us from seeing change too quickly like the time passing in my families face and my own face, reminding us of our constantly moving forward mortal lives.

My backyard though is different. I want to see time pass there, which sounds like part of what you want, not accept the scientific facts about the passage of time, like the years that cold white light takes to reach my night dark skies or the number of days today’s ashy green Maple leaf will take to tint, bloom red and then, fold and fall into a crackling carpet on the forest floor. Such facts reduce time to scientific construct.

I want a way to see time pass among the kind of nature I see in my ridiculously sloping backyard ravine strewn with old Oaks and Maples, ugly Buckthorn and a crooked patch of wetland brushed with one small, shallow green pond. I don’t want to just notice the changes daily. I want to see the colors change. But my eyes and brain can’t do it. I comfort myself from this form of frustration by knowing the brain is a lover of patterns and themes. So, the change I  do see has to be a form, a kind of pattern, like the sharpened sumac smearing red, the marsh grass browning in stripes.

Perhaps it would comfort you, Mr. Klinkenborg, to be reminded of one of the more disconcerting facts about seeing. The mechanics of our eyes create a blind spot. There is a place in our vision where we cannot actually see. The brain smoothes over such discordance, creating our perfect vision field. So, when I watch the heavy bodied Canadian geese swirling in the dark blue sky of Fall, I know my eyes are making up some part. Instead of thinking about that, my restless brain began to wonder why. Are they practicing? Anxious? Or is the mysterious signal to migrate sent from their brain still too weak?

Fall always makes me feel more philosophical about change. So some days, I watch my dog whose nose and eyes must be habituated from his frequent trips out to our backyard. Still when going outside, he tips his ears and nose up each time. I think he anticipates the pleasure of a little mystery, seeing and smelling something different, out there, every single time. When I weigh how much I like the mysteries in nature and even life, against my wish to see the passage of time in the natural world, the score is tied.

Mr. Klinkenborg, I hope your farm continues to have mysteries.
END

Note: Verlyn Klinkenborg is a columnist for the New York Times. He writes The Rural Life. I love his writing.