February 29, 2024
Happy Leap Year. Another example of humans trying to mold nature in a way that made our limited ideas more ideal. The fact was that it took the earth a little over 365 days to orbit the sun, so every four years, we played catch up to make our calendars more “accurate”. Of course, to maintain this scheme, we misrepresented an additional 44 minutes, and every so often, we skipped leap year to account for the buildup of this added time. The next time we’ll skip leap year will be in the year 2100.
Last night, it rained hard, making this morning’s walk through the woods a quiet endeavor. With soaked leaves and soft mud covering the ground, walking silently was easy. Of course, the noise I made was only one way wildlife detected my presence in the woods. As I walked along a seldom used trail, I discovered a leaf that some type of insect had eaten. The insect ate tiny holes in the leaves, leaving the outline of the leaves and leaflets, making the entire structure look like a fine piece of woven lace.
Several songbirds were singing, and I sat down in the middle of the forest to listen. The air was damp and the temperature cold, but yesterday’s strong winds had subsided, leaving for a pleasant morning. I saw several wrens, cardinals, chickadees, and warblers flying about, busy with their morning routines. Over the past few days, I had payed closer attention to nature’s morning pace. While birds darted about and tree branches moved with the breeze, the overall feeling of the forest was serene. I’ve been trying to calibrate my emotional sense of time to this pace, and carry it with me throughout my day.
Atop a large rock, I sat rooted, moving my head slowly from side to side to see if I could pick up any movements of wildlife. There were still a few dead leaves attached and dangling from tree limbs. When an air current came through, these leaves fluttered in the wind, catching my eyes with their movement. Sometimes, the leaf’s motion looked like a small bird in the branches. Other times, my eyes would superimpose the moving leaf onto the forest’s background, giving the illusion that some animal was moving at a distance.
After half an hour, my hands felt stiff and ached with the cold, so I worked to warm them up using a few trusty techniques. The first was to tuck my open hands in the bends of my knees while I sat. This protected them from the cold air, and the warmth created by my clamped legs transferred heat into my fingers. The second technique was to slide my open hands into my tall slip-on boots. They were thick, insulated, and waterproof, so this helped the blood circulate and warm my hands. I sat for another hour before trekking back to the house to get ready for work.
My wife and I recently had a conversation about our experiences in dealing with people. She told me it was common for patients to self-diagnose themselves by using information they gleaned from the internet. This led to absurd ideas about their conditions. Some were less harmful than others, but some people seemed to be so far off the mark that they were placing themselves in grave danger.
My work involved making determinations based on evidence gathered from documentation and interviews. I had the same experiences that people were in deep denial about their circumstances, or made absurd decisions based on misinformation they believed. As I thought more deeply, maybe their decision-making skills weren’t as terrible as they seemed. Perhaps they possessed an adequate ability to decide, but were just basing them off of poor information. I decided right then and there that the quality of the information we ingest and adhere to is more crucial than the logic being used. Good information offered a chance to make sound choices, but erroneous or incomplete information most often leads to failure.
This evening, a herd of deer were feeding in the pasture, grazing on the newly bloomed purple flowers that carpeted sections of the field. Not wanting to disturb them, I skipped my evening walk through the woods and watched them from my office window. Winter was ending and there were several hungry deer, including pregnant does frequenting the pasture. I wanted them to feed on the new spring grasses and plants so they could recover from the season and prepare for giving birth. To my surprise, the herd remained in the pasture, feeding for over two hours.
I rarely skip my evening walk, but tonight, it seemed like the right thing to do. Seeing the wildlife in the area had been an amazing experience, and I felt a strong sense of responsibility to upkeep an environment conducive to the animals’ wellbeing. After a hot shower to wash the day off, I read for a half hour before crawling into bed a few minutes after nine o’clock. As I drifted to sleep, I thought about this last day of February two years ago. We arrived at this new home in North Carolina from Texas in the middle of the night. I would be fast asleep when the official two-year mark passed, but tomorrow would be a special anniversary.