Reading and Doing

Edna and Amy at the pond

I'm reading A Country Year: Living the Questions, by Sue Hubbell. It's a book about nature, mostly, and rural life. I love this type of book and have read a lot of them over the years. Although it was written in 1983, it is still relevant today. Country life changes little over time. The things that have worked for survival and happiness there continue to work well, whereas, city life is uncomfortable and stressful, demanding constant improvements. We call this "progress".

I like the things that Sue Hubbell recorded in her book. This passage is one of my favorites:

Despite the commonness of their seasonal behavior, we have no real understanding of how birds find their way when they migrate. Theories have been put forward suggesting that birds make use of landmarks recognized by experienced members of the flock, use celestial and astronomical navigation or have a magnetic sense that allows them to detect slight variations in the earth's magnetic field, but all of these theories are unsatisfactory in some respects. I recently read that researchers have discovered birds can hear sound traveling thousands of miles at frequencies which pass right through objects, and which emanate from air disturbances around large geographical features such as mountains or oceans. This means that birds migrating across my farm in Missouri may be hearing the Rocky Mountains or the Atlantic Ocean, and taking their bearings from what they hear.

Whatever clues they use, Robert Crawford, a young Florida researcher, said, "It's like they have another dimension. We sit here in our comparatively dull world thinking that we know all and see all."

...I believe it was Sir James Jeans, the physicist, who was supposed to have observed that we live in a world that is not only queerer than we think but queerer than we can think.

I haven't done much knitting during the last week (still working on these socks), because I got sucked into this instead:

When I opened the kit and saw the maze of teeny tiny spaces and numbers I laughed. It seemed impossible. The spaces are so small that I have to double up my reading glasses to see them (no kidding, I wear two pair one on top of the other!). My daughters are painting by number, too. Amy is doing an owl picture, Emmeline a pair of chickadees. Can you tell what mine is yet? Paint by number is thoroughly addicting. It is relaxing in a "Zen" kinda way. The world fades away. You look at the clock and can't believe you've been at it for an hour. Leonardo da Vinci used it as a teaching technique. He would sketch out paintings and number code them for his students to paint.

Joining Ginny in her Wednesday Yarn Along.