Autumn Anatta

Leaves fall gently down
Like rain into autumn pools
Who writes this bullshit?



(Photo courtesy of Robert Wnuk and Unsplash.com.)

Ego Kyôsaku

"The biggest ego-trip going is getting rid of your ego."

Alan Watts




(Photo courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Wikimedia Commons.)

WW: Starfish report, 2019

(Well, here we are again, on the same beach as last year. This summer I had difficulty finding many Evasterias; total count was only two. However, I did find an adolescent Pisaster ochraceus (photo above), which is heartening. Meanwhile, Dermasterias, which is resistant to the starfish plague, continues much in evidence. I didn't find many Henricia either, but they're not technically intertidal, and the tide wasn't as low as last year. And as in the past, not a single Pycnopodia, profuse in these quiet North Coast waters when I was a kid.

The lack of Evasterias compared to recent post-plague years, and the small size of those found, continue to sound a knell for this species. However, there remain two slim hopes.

First, the very low census still adds up to more than Pycnopodia , now apparently extinct here.

And second, though it appears that all our young Evasterias still succumb within a year or two to the plague, so far a handful are still turning up on the tidelands each summer.

So a healthy breeding population must survive in deeper, colder water. With any luck they'll outlive the virus, and eventually repopulate the bay.)

Shame

"People who don’t have a sense of shame have no future."

Thích Nhất Hạnh



(The Cloak of Conscience courtesy of Anna Chromy and Wikimedia Commons.)

WW: Baby barn swallow

(I was climbing down to the beach the other day and happened on this little guy [Hirundo rustica] in the tall grass, newly kicked/fallen out of a nest in the eaves of an old boathouse. His hovering parents became hysterical at my approach, but as you can see, the kid himself was game [or naïve] enough to meet me head-on.)

There We Go Again

In 1962, the number of playable guitars per million inhabitants on this planet was 200. By 2014, that figure was 11,000.

In case you thought guns were the only thing that was proliferating here.



(Statistic from Factfulness: Ten Reasons We're Wrong About the World, by Hans Rosling. Photo courtesy of Istvan Takacs and Wikimedia Commons.)

WW: Blue elderberries

(Sambucus nigra ssp. caerulea.)