Sometimes I wonder
Wonder, where all my curiosity is rhetorical. Water boils, steam curls with my breath, finger hairs singe and crackle as they meet the blue flame and pull away. The odds are unimaginable that I sit here, conscious and embodied, human, with tea on my writing desk.
I have just had that moment of incredulity. And it passed. Fingers now typing the words in my head. Cat preening himself on the window popout. Beyond is the blue spruce, and my app tells me that blue leaves are exceedingly rare in the botanical world. Exceedingly is a lovely word. Rare!
The meniscus of translucent brown liquid rises up along the edge. A rooibos bag still bobbing. I can’t look away there is so much to take in. I stir and the bag ruptures. Little kites of flavor, fragments of leaves from the Cederberg mountains on the other side of the earth, gathered and dried summers past, by hands unsinged.
They swirl around. Swirl. Swirl. And could it be true that water swirls into the drain in different directions depending on whether you are flushing above or below the equator? When I rode through Kenya south to Arusha, the local boys feeding off my curiosity at the marked crossover did their magic. On northern side of the line an enterprising young lad poured water into a large plastic bowl with a hole in the center. The water funneled out spinning clockwise and he raised his hands triumphantly to me that he had nothing to do with it. Lo and behold he earned his lunch when he showed me the anti-clockwise spin a few steps away in the southern hemisphere. Clever blighter. Nothing to do with the Cariolis effect and everything to do with his smarts and my wishful thinking. We were complicit in confirming a cosmic truth.
Naturally, the next big question awaits investigation as you head south from the equator on your bicycle..Is it mostly downhill the way it looks on my spinning globe at home?
This one is a no-brainer. They never tell you this in geography class. But it is kinda implicit in any game of spin-the-atlas. No one wins if you point to places below the equator line. Heading south is all downhill. Look mom, no hands, all the way to Antarctica!
Yes, yes we know that gravity is going to keep you grounded as you race to the bottom of the earth. It is, after all, a very attractive force! (that exists between all objects that have mass). But if this really is downhill and I gather fantastic velocity (on my velo) how can I trust gravity to keep me from hurtling into space head first at the next mountain range?
All sorts of curiosities calling me as I write to you, my dear. Yes, that’s the way I feel about you. Both of us just perfectly human, having been hurled together with all manner of matter down the evolutionary trail to become these thinking marvels, me tapping slowly at this keyboard, with hair singed lightly on the third digit of my index finger, you reading with an almost imperceptible smile curling lightly into the corners of your mouth.
A cloud puff races through the blue, grasshopper snaps its wings loudly (crepitation for the curious) cutting through the view. And do you know that gravity exists to keep us on earth, together?!
Wonder! That which we do when there are no words.
That which baffles and stuns. Wonder.
