I can't find it any more. There was something otherworldly about it - the few minutes of video on youtube.com from film from a small town Idaho television broadcast circa 1959. It was one of those Saturday-afternoon type shows, where locals got a little air time. (Most programs at night and weekday mornings back then were from national broadcasting companies.)

This youtube clip had about a dozen high school kids doing the walk, a kind of dance or promenade that actually has ancient roots, to a popular slow-rhythm radio melody. The boys were on the right side, the girls on the left. One by one, they paired up, and kind of boogy-walked slowly down the middle of the lines. They looked camera shy - all of Idaho was pretty rural - and earnest, dressed in their best, stepping away from childhood into adulthood.

vitamins

Sunshine for birds and bugs and primates such as the human toddler in a buggy yesterday...

some people count and study and isolate specifics about the various vitamins and minerals that nourish most species of life on earth. Is it possible one can sum up the vitamins as sunshine? perhaps not the minerals, which come to us dissolved in water - from the rivers and from limestone-lined aquifers...but vitamins may come from our bodies absorbing sunlight (Vitamin D being one we associate with sun), and embracing foods - oranges, grapes, vegetables - that take shape in the sun. We drink milk and eat cheese, yogurt, pudding, and other milk products from cows who graze in the sunshine and eat grasses that reach toward the sun, grasses that are reliant on sunlight for growth. As are we.

Most life on the planet has evolved under the sun, and very likely is dependent on, intricately interlaced with, sunlight. Sunlight may not provide vitamins, but be the vitamins.

I do not 100 percent know that this is true, but I ponder at times.

faith

Sometimes you receive a little gift that you never would have thought to ask for, but that grows big over time in meaning and value. As a kid, I received a necklace - a thin chain - with a  very small pendant - a sphere of water with a seed in it. In the box was a bit of paper with a quote something like this: If you have faith as in a mustard seed, nothing will befall you.

Some time around the turn of the century, there was a news article about the largest living thing on earth. Scientists had decided it was a fungus - was it in the Minnesota area? - that stretched for many miles beneath the surface of the soils, and from which mushrooms erupted here and there.

I blogged a little blurb about that, and have also blogged a couple of times about about the Redwood trees and Sequoia, how new trees spring from their roots, a circle of new trees around the oldest tree.

Perhaps there have been trees interconnected via the roots across large masses of land - where acres of a certain species of tree, a whole forest, are actually one living entity. Of course, if we open this door a little wider, we might understand that all life is networked in some way; trees and possums and Cajuns and barnacles that are individuals are yet all connected, one life.

float

When I was perhaps five years old, my family and I visited a friend who had a swimming pool. The most shallow part of the pool was close to four feet deep - I spent much of my time in the strongly chlorinated water clinging to the edge of the pool, afraid of letting go and breathing water up my nose.

My dad taught me two things I remember still. One was that if someone was ever drowning, you could save them by pulling them through the water by their hair to a safe spot out of the water. You have to be careful their face is upward so they are not breathing water. That sounded crazy, and like it would hurt, but he pulled me around the pool by my hair, floating on my back and it didn't hurt. It was fun.

The other thing he taught me was the 'dead man's float', which is a way to stay alive if you're in deep water and too tired to swim. He said you don't even have to know how to swim to do this.

Unlike when being rescued by one's hair, this is face down. You float in a calm relaxed way, without fighting the water. Your arms and legs are limp and motionless. You hold your breath long as you can, then turn your head up, out of the water to catch another breath, and relax again, face down. He said you can survive for many hours this way if necessary.

Over the years, I learned to love swimming. There are a few times in the Gulf of Mexico I've been pulled by an undertow, and become afraid. The dead man's float kept me calm until I could swim back to shore again.

and today came the wild onions
and the one-eyed bears

As psychologists in training, we were taught to pay attention to the details of dreams, our own dreams as well as those of clients. If something was vivid, an orange citrine, or a tiger in a taxi cab, we didn't have to know what it meant, but we could give it a nod in some way during the waking day.

As the years have flowed forward, I've come to see that the details of the waking day, such as wild onions showing up in different settings in a single day, can be just as vivid, and just as worthy of respectful attention as the images in dreams. Such encounters are sometimes the source of what I share on this blog each day.

Chimney swifts and gorillas
came my way today.