Labyrinths and Mazes

By: | May 28, 2021

This originally ran August 4, 2017.

There is a difference between the two. In one you can’t get lost; one way in, one way out. The other is full of dead ends and false passages.

I take my kids to labyrinths. When they were little, we walked in socks along the path of a smooth stone labyrinth on the floor of Grace Cathedral in San Francisco. Inside the soaring bay of the cathedral, walking is like gliding, like leaving your body. We wound in and out of each other, the path sometimes bringing us close together, other times sending us apart as we headed from the outside to the center, and from the center back out.

This is a 35-foot-wide replica of the Chartres Cathedral labyrinth, built into to the floor of the French throned church in 1201. According to Labyrinth Guilds caring for these convoluted works of interactive art around the world, these are spiritual artifacts, “divine imprints.” Traveling along one involves three canonical stages: purgation, illumination, and union. Purgation is the entry, leaving the prosaic details of life behind. Illumination is reaching the center. Union is leaving along the same path, joining with God.

This is how my kids learned to do it, and nobody ever told them. They figured out if you spend half an hour walking to the center, you must spend another half an hour walking out.

Mazes, on the other hand, are made of alleys. They have dumpsters and knocked over trash cans. You can get cornered, and at times can’t find the way. I like these, too. Continue reading →

Grace

By: | May 26, 2021

The anniversary week of George Floyd’s murder is a good time to revisit this post, which first appeared June 10, 2020. We still have so far to go, in the United States.

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Y’all Need this Word

By: | May 24, 2021
YallComeBack

Most people don’t adopt a new manner of speech in their 40’s, so when my husband recently started using the phrase “y’all” I wondered what was up. It wasn’t like his Swiss parents taught him to use this slang, and he’d grown up in Colorado, where y’all is uttered only by Texas transplants.

After hearing him say y’all for something like the tenth time in a week, I asked him why he’d suddenly adopted this word, which seemed out of place spoken by someone without a southern accent. He explained that he’d started using y’all with the college ski team that he coaches. Most of the skiers are women, and he thought it would be lame to refer to them as “you guys” — the phrase more widely used here in Colorado. “English really needs a plural you,” he says.

He has a point. All of the languages I’ve studied — German, Italian and Spanish — have a plural you, and while that extra pronoun was frustrating to me as a language student, I’ve encountered plenty of times when I’ve wished for a plural you in English that wasn’t gendered or regional.

According to Mental Floss, “y’all” is just one of eight ways to construct the plural “you” in English. Others include “you-uns,” “you guys,” “you lot,” and “yous.” None of the terms on this list roll off my tongue any easier than the others.

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The cicadas arrived

By: | May 21, 2021
red-eyed bug on bark
A nymph climbs up a tree

After my disappointment last week I am so glad to say: The 17-year cicadas have arrived. They’re here! We have bugs.

The good people of the Washington Post’s Capital Weather Gang explained that the cool weather has hurt the cicadas. A lot came out when it was too cold for them to molt properly. And, because they’ve been coming in more of a trickle than a flood, predators were more or less able to keep up.

I woke up one morning worrying that maybe climate change has done them in. That the global phenomenon has come to disrupt my favorite biological event.

But they’re picking up. Monday evening, I came across a slow-moving mob of determined nymphs, struggling through the grass to the oak tree, the tallest thing around. Thursday morning I finally saw a bunch of adults, around another tree. I hope to see and hear many, many more soon.

Photo: Helen Fields

Sci Fi lives on in the people it created

By: | May 19, 2021

What’s something you used to love but have lost your feeling for? For me, in a world that looks a lot like science fiction, I have trouble with the speculative novels I used to love. I’ve suspended my disbelief already, even in real life, and I shrug at the magic imagined in these stories. This post first appeared in 2013.

future

In this year’s SXSW closing speech, futurist Bruce Sterling enumerated disrupted technologies that have been supplanted, or are soon to be, by the latest wave of GoogleGlass-era living. He gave longform blogging five years to live, in the face of microblogging.

As future shock morphs into present shock, the cyberpunk fiction for which Sterling was first known is no longer the way to tackle envisioning the future, he says. Why write a story about future living – why not just participate in it and create it right now?

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Three Stooges vs. Revelation

By: | May 17, 2021

Consistent with my policy of running posts that take me, virtually anyway, out of the pandemic present to somewhere or sometime that’s interesting and wide-angle, I offer you the Chesapeake Bay: born in violence, growing up geologically and then sociologically, and now hitting the present with utter tomfoolery. And revelation. This first ran March 31, 2011.

The Chesapeake Bay was born as the Susquehanna River.  Around 35 million years ago, an asteroid apparently smacked into what is now eastern Virginia and left a 50-mile-wide crater, a sink into which all the rivers – mainly the Susquehanna but also the Potomac and lesser rivers — coming east out of the Appalachians naturally flowed.  Millennia came and went, ice ages came and went, and about 8,000 years ago melting glaciers raised the level of the Atlantic enough that, over the next couple of thousand years, it flooded into that old crater and on up the river valleys and created the Chesapeake Bay.  I’m telling you this story mostly because I like it but please, bear with me, I do have a point.

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Cmon, cicadas

By: | May 14, 2021
Holes in the ground, with shoes for scale

Tuesday evening, May 11

It’s the biological event of the decade, and it’s almost here. The cicadas that have spent the last 17 years underground as nymphs, feeding on tree roots, are beginning to emerge. For the last few days, I’ve been seeing friends’ posts on Facebook, of those red-eyed 17-year cicadas, in neighborhoods only a few miles from me. So I go out after work with a friend and walk around the neighborhood, looking at the ground and the trees. At our feet: The holes the nymphs dig before they come out of the ground. Here and there, on a tree trunk: a shed exoskeleton. We spot no adults.

Bug exoskeleton on tree trunk.

The parents of this batch of cicadas screamed from the trees of my parents’ suburban neighborhood in the summer of 2004. I was living in the basement, a new baby health writer at U.S.News & World Report, which was still a print magazine at the time. I wrote a story about the cicadas for Washington Post Express, a free newspaper that stopped publishing a couple of years ago.

I’ve been looking forward to the next coming of this next batch of cicadas ever since.

Wednesday evening, May 12

My plan to check my neighborhood trees every evening for the cicadas hits a snag: In other biological news, two friends are two weeks after their second dose of vaccine, so I drive up to their suburb to hug them and hold their four-month-old baby for the first time. No cicadas join us.

In 1987, I played with the grandparents of this year’s cicadas in my friend Malado’s backyard, about a mile from where I’m sitting right now. We gently squeezed the males so they’d squeal, and we built them little jungle gyms out of sticks. I don’t know if they liked jungle gyms. Probably not.

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Penspective: Looking up

By: | May 12, 2021

In appreciation and imitation of Craig’s ‘penspective’ series, but with less effective photography.

I saw these clouds in November and it has taken me six months to figure out how to upload the photo. But I’m glad, in a way, because I have a new perspective on clouds. (I am not sure that I have a new perspective on pens: the Pilot Precise V5 is still my favorite.)

Earlier this spring, I found out about The Cloud Collector’s Handbook, a guide to cloud types that also includes points for spotting various clouds and a scorecard. The book is delightful—it has approachable descriptions of the science behind how different cloud types form, and it also gives you 20 bonus points for a Brocken spectre and explains the rainbow-ringed mountaintop glory like this: “The perspective can make the legs of your shadow flare out so, what with the multicolored halo, it looks like a ghost from the 1970s.”

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