Monday, in midsummer!

The day manifests as magnificent, an idyllic copy of a memory from childhood. I recall a summer’s day, maybe I was five or six and not yet allowed to leave the yard. On that day the dew moistened grass felt so delicious to my bare feet. I remember delight on the swing, going as high as I could manage, and viewing the dark woods at the far edge of a neighbor’s yard. As an older kid, I would spend years exploring those woods, – the grove of bamboo growing at the head water the creek, that creek flowing for miles and miles… A lone squirrel leaping with precision from tall pine to pine was magical.

Even today the child-in-me cannot conceive of anything more sensual, more fraught with excitement, and danger, and shear beauty than nature. Other things are trinkets, a passing amusement by comparison to the dynamism of seasonal change, the infinite generative capacity of earth, water, and animals. 

Continuing the reflection could I ever doubt that I and everyone at hand here at Starbucks are “of nature”? Each individual embodies the entire range of nature-aptitude, that impressed me in my child growing-up years. Certainty all of that can be called forth, any of it activated by external circumstance, or by perception, or by memory. Human beings are domesticated, culture-wrapped, symbol-enabled mammals having learned to live in artificial habitats. Our original home is the woods.

Still – I am, and we are, the most clever of all animals. 

When I consider all of this, I feel empathy for the mythic figures in the tale of David and Bathsheba. Two (not unlike any of us), are captured in a maelstrom of passion. The upshot: a king is discredited, his beloved and his child die a premature death. – and life continues, albeit to limp on. 

Only by a luck-of-the-draw I’ve been spared such experience. 

Enough rumination. This song is covered by Tiffany, I Think We Are Alone Now, originally released by Tommy James and the Shondells in 1967. Do you not think the lyric expresses succinctly and with naiveté, how it feels?

But are we ever alone?

* The header is The Nightmare by Henry Fuseli 1781