looking through me

Tag: perception

August 11, 2016

through the valley

I love driving through California’s central valley. I love the vineyards and groves. I love the ranches and dairies and processing plants. I love the train tracks and irrigation canals. And I love the ascent from the valley floor into the heart of the Sierra Nevada mountains.

But this trip I gasped in despair more than in wonder. Roadside, family-run fruit stands sat shuttered. Dead and dying orchards dotted the horizon, and too many sun-crisped fields highlighted the drought’s devastation. In the mountains, the evergreen forest was strewn with rust-hued trees—still standing, though rendered lifeless by voracious bark beetles.

Climbing higher, whole valleys and mountainsides scorched and blackened by last summer’s 237-square-mile Rough Fire gave an eerie, apocalyptic stillness to the summer air. Work crews cut down dead trees . . . but they only remove the ones in danger of falling on the road. Tens of millions wait for gravity to bring them down.

Ongoing drought, invasive insects, bone-dry vegetation and record-setting fires conspired—and continue conspiring—to alter the landscape.

Yet even in the bleakness there is beauty. Tender undergrowth pokes through charred brush. Dry meadows rustle at the wind’s slightest provocation. New life sprouts on seared trunks. Hawks and ravens soar on warm updrafts. Wildflowers splash droplets of color across the muted terrain. Mountain streams tumble into lakes.

Different . . . and the same.

Beauty remains.

 

 

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June 22, 2016

rolling chair

As a person of short stature working at a desk of fixed height, I keep my chair raised high enough to type without getting carpal tunnel syndrome . . . which means my feet don’t touch the floor.

First world, short person problem. I know.

When my coworker asks me to look at something on his monitor, I give a healthy push against the desk to propel my chair back so I can see around the cubicle wall. It’s good exercise. This morning I pushed off and my chair started tipping instead of rolling. Wheeled office chairs don’t tip on industrial, low-pile carpeting, so I assumed I had leaned too far without pushing hard enough. Clearly the solution was to put more arm into it and really shove.

Turns out I did not need more power. A larger shove resulted in nearly launching myself out of my seat. The problem wasn’t one of force but one of hardware: a wheel had broken.

The chair was never going to roll. Even if I were the right height and heft to fit in the chair and even if I used the right technique and pushed with my feet instead of my hands, the chair would still be broken. It would still tilt when I need it to roll.

It only took one near unseating for me to change my strategy. Trying harder—using the same method—wouldn’t work. I didn’t have to prove the chair’s failure over and over.

The world—like my chair—is broken. The more force, the greater the tilt. Yet shove after shove after shove . . . it’ll roll again, right?

 

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