The Geese Call Across the Creek

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Photo: rainbow just north of Tarrytown, early evening, May 2023

Out the window,

The leaves of the trees are green.

The geese call across the creek.

I’ve given myself the aim of writing a few pieces that, in the longstanding tradition of this space, give food for thought that demands a bit more of the reader.

Thought that penetrates more deeply into the many questions of why we exist.

In a recent podcast on The Morning Five (published, however, well before the publication date of this piece), I mentioned that if we look around us, everything we see—everything we are made of, everything we touch and come into contact with—is made by a sun. Without nuclear fusion none of the heavier elements that make up the cosmos would exist in the first place. As it happens that thought came to me simply while looking out the window of my office on a Saturday morning.

Out the window,

The leaves of the trees are green.

The geese call across the creek.

The cosmos is thus at its root and its heart a generative engine: a creative impulse that gives birth to a fixed set of elements, which then rearrange themselves in countless ways. The molecule DNA, for example, is actually a crystalline substance, an arrangement of elements  fixed in a regular, predictable, but highly flexible spiral lattice. This crystal conforms to the laws of organic chemistry, which are largely formulated around the carbon atom and its extraordinary ability to bond in countless different ways with other atoms around it. Yes, I have mentioned this before as well, but is it truly possible to mention something this remarkable too many times?

No one has ever explained why this molecule called DNA should be so; and to count it as an accident—actually, a series of trillions upon trillions upon trillions of cosmic accidents, all of which accidentally led to this thing called life and, yes, even these very thoughts about it, even the breath you are breathing—is begging the question.

Nothing is an accident.