16 October 2001

It’s uncomfortably comfortable outside after a couple days of nice rain. I like rain when it’s coming down and when it’s about to come down — water in the air — but a day or two after is no fun at all. It’s too still and bored. Truly, rain is where it is at.

It’s the gravity that gets me right between the ears. Mist floating through a forest is good to see because floating isn’t the right word; it’s not lifted or suspended or hanging or anything: it’s three-dimensional and non-suspended. Air is dense stuff — we should think of it more as we think of water. Airplanes fly. Gravity is weak. There’s a good symmetry-progression in the last three sentences: air is thick, planes fly, gravity is weak. But water droplets falling through air: that’s something worth watching. Art, physics, perception: I’m telling you. And the surface of the ocean: an interface of fluids. And too many pretentious colons: chafing. As you watch the waves, thinks of them not as projections off a plane but as an abstract representation of the water’s pressure. That’s what it is, after all: it gets squished, it goes up. Oh, sure, after all that it gets complex, what with feedback to air pressure and wind, but hey.

I was supposed to haul wood this afternoon. Next one. Darn that woodpile, but this is supposed to be the first year we have enough wood to last the winter by the time we start needing the stove. There’s only so much six acres will support, really, and we’re taking that carbon and nitrogen and removing it pretty completely. Our stoves probably cause a couple millimeters of subsidence per decade. Not subsidence: soil loss.