One week ago was the first day of Spring.  That’s an arbitrary date of course.  The term “spring” is an arbitrary label, a sign that we have agreed means that days are longer, there is more light, vegetation shows signs of new life, birds and mammals move about, a sign that mating season is soon to begin, etc., etc.  The technical term for the study of signs is “semiotics.”  The word comes from the Greeks.  (from σημεῖον sēmeion, “a sign, a mark”)  Signs do not have to be such as they are.  If our brain processed data somewhat differently, the signs and the grammar of our language would mirror the difference.  Claude Levi-Strauss, a French anthropologist studied the structure of communication of “primitive” societies and concluded that their communication and cultural rituals though different, were structured along the same lines as advanced cultures.  What qualifies as “primitive” as opposed to “advanced?”

I guess all of that is a bit much for a Sunday morning, if you do not have a live interest in semiotics.  Forgive me.

Over the past few days I captured these photos.  Change is the hallmark of consciousness, that you, the subject, are processing the activity of your context .  In spring change accelerates, no doubt because of the tilt of the earth, the increasing incidence of light.  As the earth rotates around our sun the pitch of the axis inclines the northern hemisphere closer to the sun.  More light, more heat, more energy for photosynthesis, for driving the water cycle which brings the spring rains.  I like the way T. S. Eliot puts it, “there is only the dance.”  Life is a cosmic dance.

Who of us does not enjoy bringing a bit of Nature inside?  We have a diminutive bonsai that welcomes the morning light streaming into the bedroom window.  Upon rising this reminds me that I am kin to a vast matrix of life.  I am here to “get along,” to do what I can to cultivate, to support the thriving of other living things.

The backyard is still a brownish gray, the color of winter sleep, but there is more activity.  My attention was drawn to this wild rabbit searching for some early signs of green grass.  I too am always hungry upon rising in the morning.  Time to be up and about to search for some nourishment.  We are not fundamentally different from this rabbit.  Survival and food are prime motivators.

There are a pair of cardinals, a male and a female bird, that we’ve seen for several days in our trees.  Are cardinals monogamous, mating and raising their young year to year with faithfulness to one another for life?  I’ve read this is common with waterfowl species.  There is much about Nature that we do not yet know, and may never know.

I could not pass these daffodils up without getting my camera.  These were among the first to bloom in our yard.  They are splendid in radiant yellow, the bulbs sprouting with green shoots pushing through the warming earth.

And finally this reminder that life and death is inextricably connected, a polarity, each requiring the other.  Life and death are occurring all around us in different forms, constantly, in a rhythm that compels acknowledgement.  The acknowledgement is a ritual of habits and signs.  It varies culture to culture, but the meaning is the same.  At best it is the acknowledgment of the love that has obtained, by a piece of us that is passed from this world.

I do not know who Bob was.  Better put, I do not know who he is because he manifestly continues to live in the hearts of many who knew him.  Yesterday while walking along the sidewalk in Geneva I passed this memorial in front of the Graham’s Fine Chocolates and Ice Cream Shop.  I assume that Bob was a Graham’s employee who will be missed by many.  We easily forget that there is a time to arrive, and a time to depart.  No exceptions.

No man is an island,
Entire of itself,
Every man is a piece of the continent,
A part of the main.
If a clod be washed away by the sea,
Europe is the less.
As well as if a promontory were.
As well as if a manor of thy friend’s
Or of thine own were:
Any man’s death diminishes me,
Because I am involved in mankind,
And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls;
It tolls for thee.

MEDITATION XVII
Devotions upon Emergent Occasions
by John Donne