WITH A SONG IN MY HEART
Here’s something worth thinking about: Investigators have found that even when newly hatched White-crowned Sparrows are kept where they can't hear any kind of bird song, when they're about a month old they begin singing simple notes. This bird babble, known technically as subsong, continues for about two months. When the birds are about 100 days old, their subsong “crystallizes” into a form that thereafter doesn't change much. The singing of White-crowned Sparrows of this age who have never heard other birds of their species sing is not nearly as rich and pleasant to hear as that produced by birds who have grown up hearing their own species sing, but experienced birders can definitely hear the White-crowned Sparrow element.
Think of it: The power of the genetic code is so great that it enables a bird to sing its song, even if the bird has never heard that song before. Melodies can be passed through the dimension of time encoded in the genomes of living things.
Furthermore, when a female Canvasback duck is about a year old and builds her first nest, she builds a nest exactly like all other Canvasbacks, even if she has been kept in isolation, and couldn't have learned Canvasback nest-building technique from other ducks.
These facts cause me to wonder to what extent the songs and "nesting instincts" in our human hearts are genetically fixed. Just how much of each of us is any more than what our genes say we have to be?
*****
SASSAFRAS ROOT
I have some fine kinfolk in Kentucky who know what I like, so the other day my cousin Miles dug some sassafras root back behind his house and my cousin Eva Ray packaged it up and sent it to me. When the package arrived I could smell the sassafras through the cardboard.
My cousins had read in this Newsletter that we have Sassafras trees around here but they are so uncommon that I don't want to harass them by chopping at their roots. In contrast, in the hedgerow behind my cousins' homes in Kentucky, Sassafras grows like a weed. Same with Persimmons. Both Sassafras and Persimmon trees are abundant in Kentucky, but around here they're uncommon.
I got to drinking Sassafras tea when I was a kid. Each spring Papaw Conrad would say he needed some "to thin out the blood" after sitting inside all winter, and he'd always make sure I got my share. In fact, all the old folks around there spoke of needing their blood thinned at winter's end, and Sassafras tea was known as the drink that would thin it. In college my professors were of the mind that winter didn't thicken blood, and that Sassafras tea didn't thin it. They shrugged off my family's tradition as just another hillbilly superstition.
However, history books tell us that sassafras tea was once much used medicinally, first by native Americans, then by the colonists. It was believed that the tea made the body more resistant to diseases in general. Eventually our culture's affinity for synthesized name-brand medicines caused nearly all interest in sassafras to die away. Sassafras began making a comeback right before World War I when it was shown that people who drank sassafras root tea were more resistant to severe sore throat infections and colds than those who did not. Later it was found that sassafras has a general antiseptic power, and that it also induces the liver to cleanse toxins from the system. Is that "thinning the blood?"
The original natural flavor of root beer was sassafras root. Though I have seen chips of what appeared to be sassafras wood sold in US stores meant for making sassafras tea, on the Web I read that, because sassafras root contains the dangerous chemical safrole, the wood cannot be sold in the US for human consumption. Sassafras root bark can be sold because it contains less safrole than wood, so maybe the woodchips I saw were classified as bark, despite their appearance.
I can't say that sassafras tea makes me feel any better or keeps me healthy because I nearly always feel good and seldom get sick. But I can say that on a cold morning with an orange flame flickering beneath my pot of steeping sassafras root, a good cup of sassafras tea more than hits the spot. It evokes memories, spreads a sweet warmness all through my body, fills me with a sense of well being, and I'm pretty sure it thins my blood, too.
*****
"PAPAW'S DIRT"
Before the package of Sassafras root arrived, cousin Eva Ray emailed me that the roots were still a little dirty but, she added, "It's Papaw's dirt."
What she meant was that the roots were dug from land that used to belong to Papaw Conrad, and therefore to us older folks in the family it was invested with a touch of sacredness. This was the dirt that Papaw plowed with a team of horses, the dirt on which he'd set his rabbit traps, and the dirt that stuck to his shoes when he just wandered around looking at things, which people used to do.
Maybe the two most profound way to divide humanity into two parts is this:
1: Those who do and those who don't have a feeling for family
2: Those who do and those who don't have a feeling for the land
In the old days nearly everyone fit into the "do" part of each grouping. Nowadays the trend is definitely toward the "don't" side. That's too bad, for my impression is that people living in emotional solitude are generally unhappy and dysfunctional in one way or another. Similarly, those with no feeling for the land tend to live their lives without regard to the environmental consequences, the cumulative effects of which, done by so many who also have no feeling, is to threaten all life on Earth.
Of course there are remedies for this state of affairs, and they are simple and well known. Most religions, most philosophers, most Black mammies and most backcountry Papaws agree on them: "Live simply"; "don't be a hog"; "be decent to one another." But there's something in the human character that causes us to choose other paths.
Anyway, Papaw's dirt on the sassafras root was a double-barreled hello from my family and from the Earth. Many a good, hot cups of tea I have enjoyed this week ruminating on the thoughts those dirty roots stirred up.
*****
VULTURES AND THE NITROGEN CYCLE
In a certain spot along the road along which I jog each morning, on recent mornings about twenty vultures have been hanging out, for below them there's the remains of a pretty doe whom the hunters wounded. She had pulled herself to behind a log beside the road, lain down and died.
It's a mixed flock attending the corpse -- both Turkey and Black Vultures, with more Black than Turkey. When I approach the flock the birds make a racket as their wings clumsily slap against tree limbs and make whooshing sounds lifting heavy bodies upwards. Beneath the trees where the flock hangs out the ground is heavily splotched with white droppings.
When I jog, my body goes onto autopilot. I don't think about running, but rather the mind effervesces or obsesses on completely unpredictable topics. These days, seeing the ground beneath the trees growing whiter morning after morning, my thought process usually goes something like this:
In my mind's eye I see the hunter wounding the doe, I'm touched by the deer's fear and pain, and I see her lying down to die there behind the log. The vultures come, and then two kinds of processes begin.
The events of one are expressed in terms of vultures, the ripping apart and gorging of flesh, bird digestion and bird defecation.
The events of the other are expressed in terms of nutrient cycling.
As I jog, my mind replaces black images of vultures in winter trees with the pregnant thought that an atom of nitrogen lies at the heart of every molecule of every amino acid. Amino acids not only are the building blocks of protein, of which muscles and many other body parts are made, but also they are the basic constituent of DNA, which carries the genetic code for all living things. Nitrogen atoms lie at the center of molecules of ADP and ATP, which enable energy transfer during photosynthesis and many other vital processes. Obviously, without nitrogen, life as we know it on Earth is simply impossible!
So, when the deer lay down to die, she bequeathed to her local ecosystem untold numbers of nitrogen atoms. Now the vultures are helping spread those atoms over the ground around the doe's body, and later when rain comes dissolving the white splotches, the doe's nitrogen will seep into the ground. Comes spring, the grasses, vines, bushes and trees in that spot will be a little greener, will photosynthesize a little more lustily, because of this generous bequest. In my mind's eye, the ever-increasing numbers of white splotches of vulture shit are no less than spontaneous funereal blossoms appropriate for a dignified passing.
In fact, as I jog I understand that this is how I'd like my own body to be received into death. In view of the fact that I have accomplished what insights I now have as a passenger inside this body, it's clear that it would be disrespectful to discard the body into the hands of those whose beliefs and behaviors are opposite to mine.
Please, if any reader ever hears of my passing, please do what you can to keep the morticians, preachers and politicians away from this body. At my death I wish to lie atop the ground and have my nitrogen received into vultures and ants exactly as has this deer, to have the wild boar and coyotes rejoice in gnawing my bones prior to redistributing my calcium to the Earth from which it came. I do not want this honored body's final metamorphosis to be impeded by embalming fluid and I do not want my spirit insulted by the presence of any religion's formulated prayer or anybody's stock phrases at all. I wish my body spontaneously to sing in the wind as black wings rise, to become white rain that helps spring grass grow.
*****
ODOR OF YELLOW JESSAMINE
Near my trailer, Yellow Jessamine, Gelsemium sempervirens, climbs into young Sweetgum trees, letting a few of its bright yellow, foxglove-like blossoms dangle fairly low. Saturday afternoon after a long hike in the cool sunlight I passed by this plant and of course I had to take a sniff.
Though the odor was almost timid, for a moment it hit me like a good kick in the stomach -- the mingling of sparkling sunlight, fresh air and this unexpectedly sweet perfume evoked a practically suffocating half-second-long pang of romantic yearnings and memories. In that half second pure Eros tinged with poesy and "music of the spheres" rampaged through my soul like all the redneck hounds of Hell.
This is one of the problems with being a hermit, of keeping things simple for long periods of time: Little things like incidental flower-whiffs can knock you flat. If I had been nibbling cellophane-wrapped K-Mart candy all morning, or if lately I had been indulging my libidinousness, that Yellow Jessamine flower's odor would hardly have registered.
This experience recalls one of my theories. And that is that, in the end, most people who lead lives of regular lengths usually end up amassing pretty much the same measures of the world's pleasures and pains, its ecstasies and anguishes. If a life lacks down-home sensuality, then more ethereal satisfactions blossom out of nowhere.
*****
FROG EGGS & RELIGIONS
One morning this week while listening to Public Radio I wandered over to the pond to admire some frog eggs. While cogitating on them, the radio reported that officials in Georgia sought to remove the word "evolution" from that state's school curricula.
That juxtaposition of my frog-egg reverie with the news from Georgia cast me into a certain combative mood. How dare they seek to rob me of one of the most important words I use when cataloging the wonders I ascribe to the Creator. This news from Georgia got me to thinking this: Maybe now is as good a time as any to clearly and concisely explain why I am so antireligious -- why I am a hardcore, dyed-in-the-wool pagan.
It is precisely because I regard all religions as artificial, unnecessary barriers between people and the higher states of spirituality to which they naturally aspire.
We look into the heavens, experience love, or contemplate frog eggs, and we become aware that something, somewhere, has created these marvelous things and circumstances, and that this Creator and the creation itself are worthy of adoration. Human spirituality begins like this and should continue through our lives in the same vein, perpetually growing and maturing. The highest calling of every community should be to nurture its citizens' quests for spirituality, to inspire them toward ever-more exquisite sensitivities and insights, and to encourage them to love, respect and protect that tiny part of the creation into which we all have been born.
Instead, religions divert the energies of our innate spirituality-seeking urges into the practicing of mindless ceremonies and rituals having little or nothing to do with the majesty and meanings of the universe. Religions insist that we must disbelieve the evidences of our own minds and hearts, and submit to primitive scriptures interpreted and transmogrified by untold generations of clerics who, history reports, all too often have hustled to promote their own bureaucratic and political agendas, and continue to do so today.
In my opinion, anyone wishing to "get right with God" should begin with cleansing from his or her own life all traces of religion. And the first step in doing that is to get straight in one's mind what is religion (dogma in scriptures), what is spirituality (one's personal relationship with the Creator and the creation), and what is love (intense empathy and well meaning). You do not need to believe in someone else's curious dogma in order to be spiritual, or to love your neighbor and do good works.
Finally, why is a diatribe like this appropriate for a naturalist's newsletter? It is because this newsletter springs from my passion for all that is natural -- the Creator's Earthly creation. Natural things on our planet are now being destroyed at a rate greater than at any other time in the history of the Earth. That destruction is being committed at an ever-increasing rate by human societies such as our own that are more and more rationalizing and excusing their excesses in terms of religious doctrine.
*****
CYCLOPOID COPEPODS
Last Sunday I passed by a woodland pond, so down on my belly I went with the handlens. I focused down through the water until my handlens edge touched the water and suddenly a vast migrating cloud of tiny beings came into focus. They were pale cream animals with single black eyes and forked antennae jerkily paddling through the water. They were tiny crustaceans (like crayfish and shrimp) called copepods. In fact, they were one of the few copepods I could identify, because of their single eyes and curious antennae. They were Cyclopoid Copepods.
Yes, a cloud of them, millions and millions surely, completely invisible until I got close enough for my nose to touch the cold water, a cream-colored cloud streaming along the bank about an inch below the water's surface. Long I watched, sometimes so attentively that I forgot to breathe. A kind of Cyclopoid Copepod reverie came over me so that it became as if I myself were in that cloud, my brothers and sisters all around me as far as could be seen, flowing, flowing, flowing, suspended inside a three-dimensional universe spangled with alga cells glowing yellow green in sunlight flooding through crystalline water.
Abruptly a creature shot onto the scene shaped like a T, a fast-moving, streamlined thing ten times larger than my little Cyclopes, its long, stiff antennae bright red and its transparent body boldly splotched green as if in places it photosynthesized (and maybe it did photosynthesize). This rambunctious creature, another form a copepod, careened among my Cyclopes so fast I couldn't see what it was doing but I could guess that it was preying upon my flock. I felt as if I were witnessing an outrageous slaughter of innocents, yet I was fixed in another dimension of reality and could do nothing about it.
To calm myself I rose from the water's edge, caught my breath and looked into the silent woods awhile. I brought out my little "Golden Nature Guide" called Pond Life and read about Cyclopoid Copepods. "They seize and bite their small prey," the book said.
So, while the big T-shaped copepod ate them, they themselves preyed on clouds of grazing beings even smaller than they...
Then the big tree trunks around me echoed my cackling, for what other response is there when we glimpse how this world really is put together?
*****
SNAIL SHELLS IN THE LOESS
You simply can't walk in the bayous here without finding fossils. Our most abundant fossils are white snail shells embedded in loess forming the bayous' almost-vertical walls. Loess is dust deposited by wind at the end of Ice Ages. My trailer sits atop about 30 feet of it, and on certain bluffs along the Mississippi River it may be over 200 feet thick.
Loess-embedded snail shells were used by geologists to figure out when our loess was deposited. Snail shells just like ours were removed from a roadcut through loess at Vicksburg 70 miles north of here and their age was determined using Carbon-14 dating. Shells toward the top of the roadcut were found to be 17,850 years old, give or take 380 years. Shells from the middle of the cut were placed at 19,250 years old, give or take 350 years, and shells at the bottom of the loess registered at 25,300 years old, give or take 1,000 years. Of course it makes sense that the deeper you go in the loess, the older the shells would be, since what's on bottom is what was deposited first.
These dates -- between 17,850 and 25,300 years ago -- mark the end of the last Ice Age. At that time the ice sheet north of the Ohio River was melting, producing enormous quantities of meltwater that passed by our present location on its journey to the Gulf of Mexico. The Mississippi River then was a vast "braided stream" much larger than the present river. Its water gushed over a vast plain bearing unfathomable amounts of gravel, sand and silt.
As now, less water flowed during winters because precipitation north of here was frozen. When water in the Mississippi River of that time was relatively low, large mudflats and many islands appeared between the big river's widely separated shores. It's theorized that mud coating those emergent land masses dried, then strong westerly winds stirred up silt particles from the dried mud and carried them as dust. This dust then dropped on the Mississippi's bluffs and highlands immediately to the east -- where we are now -- and that deposited dust became our loess. It was a slow process, with thousands of years of dust deposition leaving only a few hundred feet of loess.
Life atop the accumulating loess went on as always. And when snails died their shells remained as stonelike fossils. The 25,000-year old shells pried from our local loess today look just like last year's bleached ones atop the soil.
****
ON THE BEAUTY OF HUNKERING DOWN
Much of this week has been both cold and wet -- a painful combination in an unheated trailer. Sometimes I had to crawl into my sleeping bag just to keep it together. In times like that, you can't be very creative. You have to hunker down and wait for time to pass. I am glad to have had these days. Let me explain.
First of all, the other day I was discussing this matter via email with my friend Rengyu in Bangladesh. I said that once such a trial is over, it's as if you have acquired a new measure of inner strength. Rengyu could relate to that, especially because at that time he was fasting during Ramadan. By voluntarily enduring hardships and denying one's natural instincts to seek comfort and security, and by stubbornly following a secret star even when to others what's going on looks appallingly dreary, one gains something of great value internally that can't be explained to someone who doesn't already understand.
Earlier when I described the effect on me of sniffing a Yellow Jessamine blossom, the point was less that Yellow Jessamine really smells good than that by exercising self control most of the time I am priming myself for later forays into a realm of sensuality that no debauched hamburger eater can imagine. When these cold days finally pass and cascades of golden sunlight gush over me, who do you think will feel the return of spring more acutely than I? One reason I live the way I do is simply because I love to feel alive, strong, hungry, aggressive... I like to feed my senses. There have been times in my life when that meant eating a lot, other times when it meant being with special kinds of women. Right now it means preparing myself so that the odor of Yellow Jessamine just knocks my pants off.
A third reason is this: I am convinced that there is no greater Earthly "sin" than to needlessly abuse and endanger the living system -- the ecosystem -- with which the Creator has graced this good Earth. And I know that when I flip a switch to warm my feet I am ordering electricity to be produced, which increases greenhouse gasses and radioactive wastes. I will not belabor the point. Every human appetite translates into environmental destruction, and it is up to each of us to identify for ourselves how much destruction we wish to be responsible for.
*****
POOR BIRDS
"Poor" in the sense of "unfortunate." "Poor birds" is what I've said more than once this week as I've watched what's happening to them.
For example, all winter during my breakfasts the White-throated Sparrows have peacefully foraged on and along the forest trail between my outside kitchen and the blackberry field, pecking seeds and the occasional bug or spider, the very picture of a contented little community of meek, hard-working citizens. But this week one of them acquired a splendiferous white throat patch, a throat so white and well defined it looked painted-on, actually artificial.
The white throat wasn't the problem, though. It was the attitude that came with it. The same spring-induced hormones causing the dazzling white throat to suddenly, seemingly overnight, pop into existence had bestowed this little male bird with unbounded machismo. He claimed the entire pathway for himself, attacked whomever else wanted to peck seeds in his domain, and sometimes he attacked for no reason at all.
It wasn't just the White-throated Sparrows, either. That tightly knit little family of titmice I told you about a couple of weeks ago now is having family problems. One of them, supposedly an oversexed male, chases the others around like a demon possessed. The chased ones squeal and squawk in indignation like teenage boys being chased from home by a father "finally fed up, finally at his limit." Other birds look on in wide-eyed amazement. It's clear that the congenial bird gatherings I've known this winter are growing dysfunctional and soon will break up, the members in them metamorphosing into territory obsessed, male-female breeding factories.
Hormones. Where there was peace now there is strife and it's just because the Earth tilts in a certain manner causing days to grow longer, sending light and more light flooding into our lives, and this light tickles photosensitive glands in our bodies so that they issue chemicals guaranteed to drive us all crazy and make us do outrageous things.
When I saw that White-throated Sparrow running amuck on my trail I thought of a conversation Plato reports as having taken place with the aged poet Sophocles. Someone had asked Sophocles whether he was still capable of enjoying a woman. Sophocles replied, "Don't talk in that way. I'm only too glad to be free of all that. It's like escaping from bondage to a raging madman."
Poor birds. Poor humans who behave as if it were spring and as if they had the whitest throat pouches of all. Poor all of us living critters to whom the coming of spring means submitting to the bondage of a raging madman.
*****
SPARROW COLORS
It's interesting that sparrows can be divided into two general groups according to whether their breasts are streaked or unstreaked. Both chest types provide sparrows with good camouflage. You can imagine a bug looking upward, seeing the Swamp Sparrow's dark, gray chest very like the wintry sky behind it, or the Song Sparrow's strongly vertically streaked chest blending with the sky-reaching, winter-brown tussocks of grass or sedge behind it. Chests are generally lighter than back colors, to compensate for shadowing.
The backs, or tops, of sparrows are essays in brown and black splotches and streaks. From the falcon's perspective they look very much like the messy floor of a field or a forest's leaf litter.
Therefore, sparrow colors and patterns make sense. Still, you can't help feeling that something is going on there other than the sparrow species having blindly evolved random camouflage patterns. Sparrow patterns are so elegant and the colors are so sublimely complementary that surely they can't arise from mere Darwinian selection. One senses a hand at work here that creates with a flair. If this Creator were to walk into the room, you'd not be surprised if She were whistling a jaunty little tune.
I think that the question of whether one finds a sparrow's plumage pretty or not is a good measure of how comfortable that person is with reality at large. I am struck by the general "earthiness" and "hominess" of sparrow colors and patterns. Since I regard "earthiness" and "hominess" as hallmarks of a peaceful, happy, sustainable life, it seems that sparrow colors and patterns abstractly express something to which I aspire. It's as if what I regard as the Creator's guiding principles for life on Earth were somehow expressed in terms of sparrows.
I'm not suggesting that Nature teaches us to live exclusively in a subdued manner harmonious with earth-tone sparrow colors. After all, the Creator also produced Cardinals, Blue Jays and Painted Buntings.
But, if in your bird fieldguide you scan the species from cover to cover, you'll see that maybe 80% of the species are, you could say, modest looking but elegant -- like sparrows, sandpipers and thrushes. Maybe 18% are colorful (but not spectacular) or somehow novel in appearance, in the manner of woodpeckers and hummingbirds. And only a handful are outright bodacious, like the Cardinal and Blue Jay.
So I would say that if in nature the Creator provides paradigms upon which we humans should pattern our lives, the bird fieldguide reveals one view of the matter: The enlightened and fulfilled life will be 80% modest and dignified; 18% colorful but not gaudy, and; maybe 2% outright rip-roaring.
*****
FROST LOOKING
Earlier this week we had mornings when every grassblade and every shrub and sapling was white with frost. At dawn before the sun had fully risen I was jogging by a pasture holding about twenty cattle, including several newborns. The pasture’s grass and trees shimmered silver-white and the cattle were black silhouettes. Slow-billowing steam rose from a pond just behind the pasture and other clouds of steam puffed from the cattle's' nostrils. I ran along pat-pat-pat feeling hot, wet and rosy inside, wondering how those cows felt, wondering what they were thinking about and what their world felt like to them at that very moment.
During breakfast next to the campfire my tunnel-like view down the path through the woods to the overgrown field between here and the hunters' camp showed a field like an essay in hoarfrost and sunlight, and I went there to walk in it. I looked closely at things, with my hand lens saw perfect crystals encrusting brown goldenrod stems, I smelled the frost and listened closely as frost-rimed grassblades brushed my shoes, and I felt what it's like when white crystals sprayed onto the corners of my eyes and meltwater ran down my cheeks. Most beautiful were the leafless Sweetgum saplings, their stiff, sunlight-exploding limbs white-lacy against obsidian-black forest beyond.
*****
VOLUNTARY SIMPLICITY
One of my all-time favorite quotations is one by Friedrich Nietzsche. In general I regard the thrust of Nietzsche's thoughts as being a bit unsavory and small spirited. Still, he did make this point:
"Most people don't really see something until it has a name"
("Wie die Menschen gewönlich sind, macht ihnen erst der Name ein Ding überhaupt sichtbar")
With that insight in mind, I just want to place before Newsletter readers the following "name" of a concept I think needs more consideration, and that is, "voluntary simplicity."
If you have some time this week to reflect upon life and the state of the world, I hope you will remember to conjure up that term and spend some time turning it over in your mind as if it were a mantra that could possibly open doors to new levels of happiness and fulfillment.
Several sites on the Web deal with voluntary simplicity. You might Google the term and let destiny lead you forward at your own pace. But be wary of sites trying to sell you things to simplify your life.
Simplicity is free.
*****
PICKLE JUICE
Monday morning I awakened groggy and annoyed because Eastern Woodrats had thumped and bumped all night beneath the trailer. This was unusual because the rats have done this all winter and usually I find their presence good company. Often I have to laugh, imagining what shenanigans must be going on below for such unlikely noises to be produced.
"Pickle juice," I concluded.
The plantation manager periodically cleans out her refrigerator and sometimes I am the beneficiary when she sends my way her sour milk (good in cornbread batter), fungusy cheese, and delicacies such as pickleless pickle juice (also good in cornbread batter). Well, the day before the woodrats, the manager had set next to the garden gate a jar with pickle juice in it and I had used it.
Like so much in the American diet, this pickle juice contained outrageous concentrations of salt. Just a little salt causes me to retain water so that within an hour or two of ingesting some I get blurry-eyed, my ears ring, I can't think or sleep well, and later feel grumpy. One day all's right with the world, then some salt slips into my diet, and the next day the world is wretched and insidious.
This is worth thinking about.
For, is the "real me" the one with or without pickle juice? What are the implications when we discover that we think and feel basically what the chemistry in our bodies at that particular moment determines that we think and feel? And if what we think and feel isn't at the root of what we "are," then just what is the definition of "what we are"?
Actually, I can shrug off that question, but only because a larger one nudges it aside. That is, is "reality" like Chopin's gauzy, dreamy etudes, the way I experienced it on Sunday, or more like Schönberg's angry, disjointed, atonal piano pieces, the way I experienced it on Monday after taking into my body the pickle juice?
Thoughts like these have led me to distrust all my assumptions about life no matter how obviously right or wrong they appear at the moment. I have long noted how huge blocks of my behavior appear to depend exactly on how much testosterone happens to flow in my blood. An acquaintance's tendency to weepiness corresponds precisely to whether he's taken his blood pressure medicine and another's whole personality depends on her remembering to take her lithium pills.
In the end, however, you have to accept certain assumptions just to get through the day, even if you don't quite trust them. I have chosen two insights in particular to serve as bedrock on which all my other assumptions about life and living rest.
One insight arises from meditating upon the grandness, the complexity, the beauty and majesty of nature -- the Universe at large -- and thus I recognize that the Universe has a Creator worth contemplating. (This has absolutely nothing to do with religiosity, by the way, for religions are manmade institutions.)
The other insight is that love in whatever context is worth seeking and sharing.
This latter insight is the one that keeps me hanging around in this quaint biological entity, my body, with or without pickle juice.