December

12/15- Tis the season to clear an inch or more of snow from the car and sidewalk every morning, or at least five mornings out of seven, as lake effect snow drops daily squalls like frozen summer showers. So there was an inch this morning, two and a half yesterday and another nine inches over the past week. Overall it has been much colder and snowier than last December.

       The dog and I walked Hatch Run on the 13th for the first time in weeks since deer season had ended, and she boldly scratched to remark her territory not realizing the folly of her claim. I imagined the fox and coyote who passed that way afterward wondered where their potential meal had wandered off to. Someone had blazed the trail with snowshoes which made walking easier for both of us, and the abundant hemlock trees lessened the accumulation which reached the ground.
        For as complaining as I become about winter sometimes, there is always a part of me that admonishes myself for my poor attitude, and the enthusiasm of the dog as she runs and jumps through the snow, oblivious to the challenge with her short legs, reminds me of my good fortune.
        -   Reading about the human brain, or rather, about the injuries and illnesses that inflict some people makes me question the reality of any perceptions and beliefs I hold dear. As J. Browne writes " If I'm truthful, I'll say that I was blind to everything about this life but what I had in mind".
  According to neuroscience, there are people whose brain afflictions cause them to believe with all conviction that they are dead, or that imposters have taken the place of  people they have known all their lives, or that their own limbs are attached to other people- and no amount of logic can persuade them otherwise. Neuroscientists make the analogy to how optical illusions fool the healthy mind; our brains have trouble believing the truth despite the false witness of our eyes. I have always suspected that consciousness is what I call a 'constructed illusion', but the narrowness of some of our perceptions and exactly how angles and lines and smells and textures are arranged and retrieved from specific groups of neurons to form "reality" makes me wonder if such a thing as reality exists. If  memory can be destroyed with a few excisions to the hippo campus, what is that which we call our past? So a crucial question is whether some sense of reality/consciousness exists independent of the brain, perhaps in what science calls a 'collapsing of the quantum wave function' that is unrelated to human beings? Science believes in a reality independent of us, but is there anyway to prove it, or at least, to ascribe any meaning to it without our consciousness to measure and describe it? Of course to think the moon disappears when we are not looking at it is the height of egoism, and we see evidence of a reality that preceded us in fossils, but still it is this collection of neurons in our heads interpreting those things with our senses. I have no answers, except to assume that it is this enduring mystery which inspires religion and science and all of human striving.