Natural History

The natural world is changed, in just a day—

Some little bright red baby finches sit outside my window on the ledge, trying to get in (or scrabbling at their reflections).

And at the other end of things, the planet Jupiter has lost a giant cloud stripe, the photographs tell us . . .

While I, drinking my French roast from my Cretan cup, seem to go on as always. Chaos Theory, though, would have it that my world is rocked, that consequences (if unknown) are inevitable. Now, or twenty years from now?

Or forty years past—the frozen nights when I went out into the January dark in Santa Fe to look at Jupiter, the rings of Saturn, in the simple telescope borrowed from school. Catching frosty stars and planets in a glass the way I saw crystals precipitate from clear liquid.

The reverberations of these small and yet enormous things do go, as they say, on and on.


image: View of Jupiter's clouds with the Great Red Spot at top right as brown oval to right of wavy white and brown clouds. Below the Great Red Spot are various bands of bluer wavy clouds at smaller scales with smaller light blue spots, NASA, Caltech/JPL