I’m thinking of impermanence this morning as a continuation of my thoughts of yesterday. Between the raindrops there were swallows; as Yeats said- they came like swallows and like swallows went. (William Maxwell penned a beautiful novel with that title as a remembrance of his childhood.) After the swallows there were geese. I have been waiting for them.

A flock of 9 geese yesterday became 27 today. I haven’t seen any in over a month. They molted elsewhere on a quieter summer pond, unable to fly. I was hoping our injured goose of the spring, the one with the broken leg, was part of the flock but I have yet to see her. They are preparing for the turning season ahead. As I said in June, the solstice is the height of summer and like a full moon we are on its waning side.

Each of the 365 ponds on the Cape, one for every day of the year they like to say, formed from retreating glacial ice about 20,000 years ago. Imagine this fragile peninsula rising slowly up out of the sea as it were. That is not so long ago. In another 20,00 years, certainly much less, when the Arctic ice has all melted away it will disappear beneath the waves once more.

I think my path with this blog is more about the ephemeral nature of things, the poetry rather than the politics- though I may reflect on those issues, of overuse, over-development, over-population, etc., on occasion. Maybe there is a poetry of politics or politics of poetry.

Whenever I see these majestic creatures before me I want to protect them. I want this pond to be a safe haven for them for all time. We share an impermanence that is hard for us to really understand, let alone accept, as we must, and that is the greater part of its beauty.

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