The hole

   During my morning walk, I spotted this hole, seemingly made by a gopher, and was drawn to it. There is evidence of hundreds and hundreds of these holes which have been covered up by these animals for their protection, but I don't see many of the uncovered ones, and if I do, there usually seems to be a gopher about to peek out or duck back into it.
   I didn't think why this particular one was so interesting to me when I first took the picture (apart from it's unusual angle and inverted conical shape), but the more I thought about it, I realized that it seems to me to be an almost perfect negative version of a hole which has been covered by its' maker.
   The 'door' of these holes is usually closed by a pyramidal shaped pile of dirt (the dirt which was used to create the hole in the first place), and this strikes me as a sort of inverted version of it, not literally an exact opposite, but a kind of allusion to it. It works abstractly in a way that I find uncommon in art made by human beings.
   Although it is difficult to tell this in the picture below, the hole is dug in a way that the gopher that made it appears to have had it's angles askew, perhaps searching for the top of the ground, but taking a couple of wrong turns along the way. While I am a person that usually thrives on rational ways of doing things because it provides a sense of order to my sometimes chaotic-feeling inner life, I find that unusual turns and obtuse choices makes the world more interesting and life worth living.
 

Good luck turtles

   Recently I wrote in another blog about wild animals, which gave me cause to think about my my life, and how limiting my own thoughts are. I wrote in that blog entry about how it had seemed to me that these animals and I seemed to belong to different universes, and thinking that there are living things that can strike me as being so removed from my own experience reminded me how closed my mind can be to the world that others exist in.
   When I take my daily walks, I see many of the same animals, and although I know that there are other animals there, living out of my sight under water, behind and up in the trees, I tend to forget that they are actually there, and turtles would be included in this group. I rarely see them outside of the summer months here in San Francisco, but about a month ago, I started to spot them again, bodies submerged as their heads come above water for a brief moment until they see me, when they disappear again.
   I now see the turtles almost daily, often times more than once a day, and today saw two in the same place, one swimming as another sunned itself on a small rock in the lake. Even though seeing turtles early in the morning has become a pretty regular occurrence, I still find their submerged ways and dinosaur-like appearance compelling. They are like a creature out of another time or universe, and I sometimes feel that way, too.
   My father-in-law recently passed away, and in his house there are two tortoises, or as my wife called them, so interestingly for me, "land turtles". She asked if we could bring them to our house, but unfortunately, we cannot have animals where we live.
   How wonderful would it be though if we were to forget that they were in our apartment, off hidden somewhere dark as they seem to be inclined to do, and then see one by accident, as I do by chance during my morning walks.

A water tortoise