True Nature Stories: Twenty Percent Chance

Sun and Clouds at Seal Rocks

I completed most of my morning walk before I needed the rain jacket. I'd circled through Forest Hill and West Portal and was up near Golden Gate Heights Park when it began to drizzle, and the clouds had already passed by the time I reached the Cascade Walk stairs. As the sun came out, a trace of rainbow lit up out toward Mt. Tam, and I took a snapshot with my phone camera, then dropped it and cracked the screen in two places. It still works, but this might be the excuse I've been waiting for to get a new phone with a top-notch camera.

Today's forecast called for a 20 percent chance of rain, so I figured the early morning sprinkle might have been it, and I headed out on my bike soon after I got home. I dropped down Golden Gate Park via JFK Drive until I reached the Great Highway, where I usually turn south. But when I looked to the north, the contrast of bright sun and dark clouds lured me toward it like singing Sirens.

The clouds and ocean provided beautiful drama, but since I wasn't getting any rainbow action, I rode up to Land's End where I arrived just in time to view a faint bow over the water with the Marin Headlands in the background. Unfortunately, as faint as it looked through my polarized eyeglasses, it was even fainter in the phone snap and soon disappeared as a huge rain cloud moved in and blotted out the sun. The cloud was impressively dark, but the rain was forgivingly light, and I managed to stay fairly dry under the branched awning of a cypress tree.

When there was a brief let-up in the rain, I coasted back down to the old Cliff House to find a more secure refuge to wait out the next line of squalls. Another faint rainbow appeared in the rain's wake, but it was 11:30 by then and the bow was very low in the sky.

On the way home I wished I'd brought my FZ80 to photograph a great blue heron on the fallen tree at Metson Lake, where I last saw one on December 21st. I've looked for the heron every time I've passed by since, and today was the first time I've seen it again. Incidentally, I haven't seen the great blue herons I recently saw in their nests at their eponymous lake (formerly Stow Lake) since the big wind storm.

And finally, apropos of nothing, I learned that Alabama's Supreme Court has ruled that frozen human embryos are children. The striking thing to me was the Court's reasoning. I thought I heard a reporter on the radio state that the Court reasoned that destroying embryos would incur the wrath of God.

Really?! Here we are in the twenty-first century, and our highest courts are invoking the wrath of Zeus (or whatever name one chooses for God)!

I downloaded the Court's decision to make sure I heard right, and indeed it says on page 37, "In summary, the theologically based view of the sanctity of life adopted by the People of Alabama encompasses the following: ... and (3) human life cannot be wrongfully destroyed without incurring the wrath of a holy God, who views the destruction of His image as an affront to Himself."

Variations of the word "God" appear 41 times in this Court's decision, and the Court relies, at least in part (I haven't read the whole decision, and even though I worked as a litigation assistant for many years, I do not have the expertise of a lawyer), on the U.S. Constitution's declarations about God for authority.

People are entitled to believe whatever they want, but a state supreme court that bases its legal ruling on relgious beliefs and metaphysics should be an affront to so-called sober judges everywhere. A lot of people in this country have already abandoned reason and science, but now even a court of law has woven its own logic out of mythological cloth. This seems like a misunderstanding of what it means to be rational.

("Mythology may, in a real sense, be defined as other people's religion. And religion may, in a sense, be understood as popular misunderstanding of mythology." --Joseph Campbell.)

One more apropos of nothing item: Last night I watched an excellent documenary, Radical Wolfe, about the writer Tom Wolfe. As a teenager I never took to reading beyond our set of Encyclopedia Brittanica until a kid four years younger than I was turned me on to The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, and I've been, if not voracious, at least hungry for books ever since. Thanks, kid!