Plague Journal, Yard Sale Days
My day began at 6AM. These are community yard sale days here in Batavia. I did what I could to assist with staging items in our driveway, preparing for the early-comers. The early birds are intent upon surveying as many places possible, looking for the odd item to be treasured, or something they need. It is a brisk sunny day.
I was rewarded in extraordinary fashion for my presence outside, by four adolescent female deer that walked out of Braeburn Marsh. They passed close to our front yard, alert, surveying 
the unnatural environment of houses, manicured lawns, and asphalt roadway. I felt a moment of kinship. They were wild, equipped by instinct to live, to reproduce, to express fully their species form of being. The deer moved with grace, or so it appeared to me.
We Homo Sapiens express our fullness of being, only by dint of learning, a life-long 
expenditure of attention necessary for the hand-off of culture, from one generation to the next. For us, openness of mind, delight in learning is crucial to fulfillment. Instinct hardly figures in, as far as I can tell.
Spring is inexpressibly magnificent. I struggle to describe the effulgence of emerging life. Here are some photos taken within the last week. Tulips are common. Yet I 
am always transfixed by tulip’s intensity and purity of color. Eastern redbud trees grow in the woods of my home state of North Carolina as well as here in the Midwest. These redbud branches, covered with deep pink blossoms are highlighted by a background of an apple tree covered in white blossoms.
The last image is of the small Buddha statue in the back yard. In the foreground are scarlet leaves of a Japanese maple.
The song? I never tire of this one, Walking in Memphis. It is about all of us.
