Whatever Moves or Makes Noise

With the equinox past, the nights are noticeably darker and the sun’s flat trajectory hardly rises twenty degrees above the horizon (no sextant, just a guess). Sunlight barely hits the valley floor anymore. Yesterday I woke up before sunrise and climbed part of the way up the slope behind camp. In addition to a smoky plume, blazing in predawn gold down the its side, Mount Erebus was spewing a stream of clouds high into the air over a hundred miles away. For a few minutes, one dense entity of vapor, resembling something like a Max Ernst painting, received the blurry, pyramid shadow of Erebus itself, cast up from below.

Last night we watched a movie after everyone finished working. I looked past the screen and out the window at a planet moving from left to right, transiting across the window’s eighteen-inch frame in about an hour. Without the bustle of urbanity, and the total absense of animal and plant life, air and car traffic, and any infrastructure or evidence of these things (jet contrails, for example), your focus basically turns to whatever moves or makes noise–each other, the wind, the sun, the moon, stars. Is this how ancient cultures saw their world?

This connection with the planet could be possible in a place like New York, if you had a clear night in the park, and the limitless patience and focus to sit and watch tiny points of light move at an impossibly slow rate relative to what happens around you. From there it seems better to look it up something like this on Google Earth. From here, with a minimum of input on your consciousness, it feels natural to include these things in your daily life.

Half-watching Johnny Depp strum a guitar through Chocolat in the French, I thought about how easy it is to consider and understand the Earth’s motions and processes and how we relate to them, when all I saw move that day were four people around camp, the sun casting shadows, and a sparkling planet floating across a window frame.