Water Droplets

Now I am back inside, after changing out of the wet garments from the walk in the rain to observe and contemplate how it would be best to communicate what it is like observing out in the natural world. It is amazing what can be noticed, noting what then must be left unobserved, obscured by holding focus on the chosen subjects that pass by the minds eye while deliberately walking down a trail. Walking along I considered just how little I would be willing to describe, when considering the total that was before my eye out there. With so many subjects available, what is interesting, and what can be concisely worded to hold the attention of both myself and any potential audience. Here goes.

I prepared for stepping out the door into the steady almost heavily falling rain, by first retrieving a fresh change of clothing to await my return. I grabbed that old Gore-Tex coat that I now call soak-tex, it is old, put on a rim hat and out the door. First off I noticed just how heavy the rain was falling. Within moments I felt the chill of water on my skin, yet I knew it would be so. I went down the porch steps, crossed the lawn, turned right and stepped onto the muddy trail. I noted, vocalizing the words be careful, it might be slick. Immediately my pants contacted the sagging foliage heavy with water clinging to apparently every available space that could support droplets, absorbing every drop that contacted them. Again I noted the cool temperature, shockingly for a grief second. Soon the pant legs were saturated, I almost felt like a kid again out walking in the rain, just because I can.

As I walked along the narrow trail, with its water laden plants now leaning in toward the trail’s center, I noticed the droplets of water. They were both in motion and rock still. I saw little bitty ones that broke apart flying from the brim on my hat more than once, with a whack, they burst off, arching downward, passing out of sight. The drops clung to the plants keeping an equilibrium between its hydrogen bonding and gravity. The droplets suspended in what ever form shine like diamonds almost. Unlike diamonds though, their edges dome up, forming beads that can hang or stand alone. As I walked past the low branch of a pine, its needles hung down with differing sized drops at each needles tip. They hung there near motionless gleaming out with refracted backward images, reflections in a miniaturized scale, having bright crescent margins, sagging to gravity. A leaf blade of grass bent fully over with its upper surface segmented into a vee, had a solitary droplet standing on the uppermost apex of its arch. I thought it astounding, just how a drop of water perched itself forming a squat rounded dome like shape having a slightly flattened upper surface, with those crescent shaped reflections, dazzling at its edges. I also noted that some leaves seem to be hydrophobic, repelling the rain, causing the water to bead up, which is likely the same cause that formed the droplet on the blade of grass. Yet on the leaves of the snowberry bushes, this repulsion of water was more pronounced than the way water clung to the leaves of other plant species. I intuit that as the raindrops strike the leaves, the impact can disrupt its form, the collision busting the falling droplet into very small droplets. With all possible conditions available, some of these smaller fragments can again light upon the leaf and come to rest, apparently suspended on the leafs surface, in locations where the slope of the leaf was small enough to allow its rest. Water out in the natural world interacts in unique ways. It causes many of the shapes we as humans adore. All one must do is recollect the sight of a waterfall or a solitary droplet standing on the surface of a leaf while walking in the rain. Water is that precious resource seemingly here in great abundance, following gravities pull ever down via that path of least resistance.

World in Changes, a New Direction

Finally I figured out a good thing to do with this blog that fits with its original name somewhat appropriately.  Even so, this change brings with it a course correction.  No longer is the intension to communicate a political stance as it has in the past.  In spite of that, I can still depict changes in the world that can be observed on a daily basis if one chooses to look.  I always look and evaluate the things I see.  I began observing as a child.  Really what we as humans observe is based in what and where we observe that which crosses our ability to view. 

I live in rural North America, fully away from towns or cities.  It is but seldom that I find myself within the concrete jungle, paved or otherwise obscured by the creations of humanity.   I try to be outside more than I actually achieve being outside.  This thing we experience as, "getting old," combined with disability, seems to alter my will for being outside during periods of inclement weather, especially those associated with winter.   In this blog I now hope to share the experiences of observation while outside in the rather natural setting that I live around or otherwise stated as what lives around me. 

I have been living in this local for 23 years now, granting me the opportunity to get to know what also lives in this area both fixed to it, as in the plants, but also the transient animals living in and around this  place that I call home.  During my time here, I’ve studied the flowering plants that live here.  With this, I've photographed a majority of the plants that occur here, hoping to capture images of the numerous flowers that these species create.  For these photographs I made a website which, with its  bulk is actually an inventory of a sort.  The website is located here: http://birdbox.us/plants/index.html.  I imagine or otherwise hope that within the course of this blog I will refer to the photos contained there in, because I find the plants the photographs represent as an important part of my life experience.

For subsequent editions in the blog, I will write out the observations noted during living here in this location.