Ghost Stories

Wilderness is not for sale.

Nick Rahall
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You probably aren't aware that you are surrounded by ghosts, are you? I don't mean the specter of some ancient personage who keeps appearing and disappearing or the creature in the white sheet that floats through the garden at night.

Wilderness is what it's name implies: wildness. Nature in it's intricacy and inexhaustible variety of design creates what to the human eye seems to be chaos. Scientists tell us that nature never repeats itself, no two butterfly wings are alike, no two snowflakes. I don't know how scientists can know that but I'll take their world for it.

Somewhere I have a quote which describes making a neighborhood as bull dozing down all the trees, building a street and then naming it after the trees: Oak Street, Maple Way, Elm Lane, for example. And yet if that neighborhood was completely abandoned and no one ever set up residence there again, nature would eventually reclaim it, the buildings would eventually collapse, the street would be broken and the oak trees would grow again. The seeds of the life that nature had designed for the place are still in the ground and those seeds are what determine what grows there. Those seeds and roots are the real life of the place. The oaks, maples and elms never left. You may say you have a nice two bedroom house with grassy front lawn, but Nature quietly and patiently says "No, that's where the pumpkin patch is."

An artist chooses colors from a vast spectrum of them and every color is there whether it appears on the canvas or not. If you mix all the colors you get a dark substance, indiscriminate and wild. A writer has a choice of words but his entire language is automatically implied in the words he didn't choose. There is a vast number of musical tones, many of them beyond the ability of the human ear. If they are all sounded together there is a kind of static sound called "white noise."

If you look and listen carefully you can see the implied colors and hear the accompanying tones. As you walk down your street stop at a tree, one that has been there since before your neighborhood was made, and know that it's brothers and sisters are but ghosts in the ground waiting to reappear.

DB = The Vagabond
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May today be a good day
A beautiful day in every way.
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SPRING QUESTION
(This is not a contest.)
Summer is around the corner.

In your opinion what is the most amazing thing that could happen during this decade? Make it as outrageous as you want but keep it within the realm of what you consider a possibility.

15 responses so far.

Answers will be published the first day of Summer.

Thank you.

dbdacoba@aol.com

DB - The Vagabond