In thinking about the universe and mankind’s place in it, Albert Einstein spoke about the “optical delusion” of our consciousness. “This delusion,” he said, “is a kind of prison for us restricting us to our personal desires and the affection for a few persons nearest us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circles of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.”

Few of us grasp “the whole of nature” the way Einstein did. His mind ranged freely, well beyond the time and space that confines the rest of us, to describe the esoteric escapements, verges, and balance wheels in the clockwork of the cosmos. With great turtle-like galaxies, 10 billion years old, crawling outward beyond the rim of our dull and distant imaginings, our ordinary consciousness seems stuck in the mud like… well, like real turtles.

I’ve been watching the painted turtles at a nearby pond when they drag themselves up on a sunny rock these late-summer mornings. The turtles are poikilotherms, which like other cold-blooded creatures, vary their body temperature to match their environment.

The end of July is the time of year when I begin to question the gardener’s conceit that plant life can be arranged and ordered to serve a personal aesthetic. I have seen gardens where this appears to be the case, but they are the illusions of master gardeners working in the privileged realms of botanical sorcery.  As this fevered July expires in the sere arms of August, our mortal gardens have taken on a feral look of desperation as purslane serpents coil at their feet, and beetles batter their blossomed brows.

We go through the motions of weeding, watering, trimming up the tattered trailers of plants bent on mischief, but Kate and I are already telling each other that we’ll do better next year. There is an air of surrender in our work. But in surrendering ourselves to a hot summer’s cruel indifference to our efforts to bring some refinement to our largely untamed yard, we have found some consolation on the wild side.

Without the benefit of gardeners – master, or otherwise – the summer scene has arranged and ordered itself into beautiful displays of wildflowers: red and white clovers, roadside chicory and, outdoing everything else, … Queen Anne’s Lace.

The shy catbird gave up the comforts of his birch-leaf lair for some uncharacteristic exposure atop a sun-baked stone wall – a perch that afforded him a better view of the low-bush blueberries Kate and I planted in a new dooryard garden this year. (Bird thought: So many berries, and so few opportunities for pillage unhindered by the proprietary dog, or the man waving arms.) The catbird gave its mewling squawk of approval and launched his raid. I ran out from the kitchen, waving my arms.

It’s berry season, and there is plenty of contention over the spoils of fruiting plants.  It’s war, and as always, the victors in this particular war are the plants.

The fruit lovers in the animal kingdom, ranging the least wisp of a wren to the earth-thudding elephant have been led by the palate down the evolutionary path by plants with a critical interest in seed dispersal. Every fruit is a conveyance system wherein a seed rides in its own lunch bucket of nutrients and sweet calories. It is more than happy to share the bounty with those birds and beasts willing to give it a ride to some far-flung ground where it won’t compete for sun and sustenance with its immediate ancestors. Often the seed is planted at its destination with a generous dose of contributed fertilizer.

I would love to watch a time-lapse film of the hill where we live from the day the first settler decided to farm its sunny southern slope to the present. I know our house was built in 1790, but what about the barns? Was a shelter for animals built first? Who cleared the land of trees, and whose poor back strained to build the five-foot by five-foot 300-foot long stone wall along the west side of the property? When did the crossing paths in the woods become the crossroads at the southwest corner of our dooryard? And who were the characters who cobbled together the various hodgepodge constructions that constitute our barns today. I have a lot of questions that a two-century fast-forward film would answer.

These questions arose for me as our back porch fell. Not of its own accord – though that day was near – but with the help of a couple of carpenter brothers who show up at our place periodically to keep things upright or, in this case, to pull them down when the cause is lost. The screened-in porch was the size of a living room. It was attached to the back of the house, I’d say sometime 40 or 50 years ago, and it sheltered innumerable summertime porch suppers over the decades. Its wobbly wooden underpinnings had rotted with the help of poor drainage behind the house, and it had to come down.  We replaced it with a much smaller and simpler open-air overhang that returned the house to its original profile and created a terrace for plants and people in the footprint of the old porch.

It is remarkable how much sound is associated with our notions of peace and quiet.  Whether we sit in the shade of  a palm tree on a deserted island, or on a sunny rock in the middle of a forest, or just slouch in a chair on our own back porch, natural sounds massage the hard knots out of our daily experience. Peace isn’t really quiet at all. When you think of it, is there anything quite so unnerving as total and absolute silence?

Perhaps the silence we seek, then, in our quest for peace and quiet is the cognitive hush that attends those rare moments when the incessant clatter of  our own thinking stops to listen to something outside of ourselves. Natural sounds always rock the cradle of my own relaxation: waves on a beach, wind in the trees, and birds – always the birds. For me, these sounds carry no messages, need no interpretation, and require no response, which can be quite a relief. They are nothing more than quiet sensations of the moment, passing manifestations of an untethered present. My ignorance is bliss.

And it is ignorance. There are few natural sounds that are not fully freighted with information about the past, present, and future for those sensate creatures who have learned the language of nature’s aural articulations. Even the pampered pets that loaf around our house in a super-sated state have a fluency in the language of random sounds that I can only guess at. Mid-snooze, their ears pivot and pirouette picking up information out of thin air about the doings of proximate bugs, rodents, mailmen, and the occasional ghost. And this is just inter-species information. The signal goes to hi-def when species are trading sounds with their own kind.