The world appears as a complicated tissue of events in which connections of different kinds alternate or overlap or combine and thereby determine the texture of the whole.

 W. Heisenberg

THE FINAL WEEK OF MIDDLE SUMMER
THE THIRTY-SIXTH WEEK OF THE NATURAL YEAR
The Lily Moon enters its final quarter on August 2 at 11:59 p.m. Rising late in the evening and setting in the middle of the day, this waning moon will be overhead in the morning.

Venus moves retrograde into Virgo during August, remaining the evening star in the far west after sundown, joining Saturn, which has stayed in Virgo throughout the year. Mars also moves back into Virgo, accompanying Venus and Saturn. Jupiter keeps its position in Pisces. By sunrise, Jupiter will be the brightest light in the western half of the sky.

ON COLLECTING ROCKS
Isolated material particles are abstractions, their properties being definable and observable only through their interaction other systems.
Niels Bohr

Several decades ago, I went to interview a man about his elaborate garden; it turned out he was also a collector of rocks. In fact, his house contained what seemed like thousands of medium-sized stones placed on bookcases and in cabinets, in drawers and in boxes and even in plastic storage containers under his bed.
He knew the story of every rock, and he took out special ones to show me, telling me where they were from and who in the family had found them and when.

He was well into his 80s at that time, a widower, and his children had moved out East.

“So what will you do with all this?” I asked, but he seemed to pay no attention to my question, and he kept on, almost urgently, telling me his stories.

This past spring, I returned to that interview as I picked up seashells from the beach. I was thinking about what I would do with the shells, why I wanted them.  That made me think about the stone collector and what he had made of his collection, and what they had made of him.

He had transferred so much of his own story to those objects that each one, through his words, had taken on a life of its own. The stones were like a series of markers left behind on a trail to prevent a hiker from becoming lost. They were guides, maps back in space and time.

Years after our conversation, when I worked for a brief time in a nursing home, the man I had interviewed was admitted for care. A stroke had left him unable to speak or move, and I sometimes fed him on my shift.

At his death, I wondered at all the losses such a separation brings, but especially I wondered about what would become of his collection without its interpreter. I wondered at its futility and ultimate sadness. But then I wondered if there was for him no loss at all, and I realized that he had once tried over and over to tell me how his rocks were no longer static objects or isolated material particles but rather dynamic intermediaries between one life and another.