Things that shouldn't float on air on a relatively calm day

It is so delightful to be faced with the physically impossible:

things that shouldn’t exist, things that CAN’T exist but do. 

The mind always eventually makes sense of these phenomena, but always too soon - but for that split second before it does,  the world is not how we rightfully expect it to be, and perhaps we, too, are too briefly freed from the strong inevitable: the gravitational pull of sense and logic and physics and experience* (see bottom of blog). And earth.

Here below is a collection of videos of one of the ways that these moments come into my life:

leaves and things dangling on spider threads. Walking through the woods or a park or a backyard or, as happened today: riding my bike to the farmer's market and there, right in front of my eyes is the nonsense: a leaf floating or spinning or swinging mid-air and not fluttering down to the earth, as it oughta. 

And even once the mind IS returned to its home, where everything respectfully obeys the laws of physics, we are able to see another, equally amazing, phenomena: the strength of the visible or barely visible or invisible, the tensile strength of this tiny thread that comes from a tiny animal that so many of us are afraid of. 

Now, maybe the whole thing is symbolically rich for you and evocative and metaphorical and stuff and makes you think of the ultimately tentative grip that we all have on existence, or maybe it makes you think of the strength that even the tiniest amongst us can create, or maybe it just makes you marvel at nature. For me, obvi, it's all of the above. 

Here, for your viewing pleasure is a small collection of these events from over the years, finally collected and posted today, August 9, 2020, a day filled with just as much wonder and beauty as any other day, but a day on which I was lucky enough to see it.

(On my computer, I have to click each video twice to get it to play.)

This freakin' thing, (above) I shot like 6 minutes of it it was so amazing. (3 different videos) I was biking by and it was falling through the air sideways, I pulled my bike over and got some video and then just watched. (Don't get me started on the topic of how a camera between us and our experiences gets in the way of a deeper experiencing of them.) So, I'm watching it and it's floating here and there and all around and then, all of a sudden, it floats quickly toward me and then kinda slows down . . . and then gently lands in the basket on the front of my bike. Right there in the big mesh wire basket.

Now when shit like that happens, even the proudest skeptic amongst us (that'd be me) will have another moment of being pulled away from the sure footedness of our logic-based existences and will think for a second, "holy crap, is this, like a message from my dearly departed mom. Or dad? Or a supreme being of some sort, a nature-god mother earth divinity kinda thing trying to connect with me on some magical level that I don't even believe exists?" Well, in my case, the answer to these wonderful questions always comes back in the negative, but for others, it spins a different way. (My friend, the author Anne McGrath wrote a most beautiful short story about this very thing and you can read HERE. Read it; it's so good.)

So I think these magical thoughts for a split second, and in thinking them think to myself that I should keep this leaf and ride off with it in my basket since IT HAS CHOSEN ME and I should clearly keep it forever in a frame on the wall and let my kids scratch their heads before they throw it out when I'm gone. (Sorry kids!!) But then I decide to let it go back to its dance. And I lift it up out of my bike basket and I'm pretty sure the thin filament will have broken by then with all the handling and dropping into the basket and stuff, but no, it just up and left my gentle grip and floated away to resume its mockery of the laws of physics. It was amazing. Every one of these events is, but this is the one that just happened a couple hours ago. So it gets the ink.

For more about spider silk, click HERE. 

 

This one happened right out the window of my kitchen in Rhinebeck:

One day, May 12, 2023, there were a dozen of these (above) in my back yard. Such a treat.

Click the button to make this screen larger; it's kinda incredible to see this amount of mass suspended in the air.

*I curated an art show years ago on this theme; it was called "Beautiful Nonsense" and was so much fun to be involved with. An accompanying blog can be seen HERE.