Carbon 59

I never can decide if chaos or order is the more handsome, but it certainly seems that the choice is much less important away from the city. Out here you can even argue there's not much difference between the two. Any old walk in the woods - stalwart trees inevitably falling, rushing water frozen into billows, the shapely flights of finches a marvel of randomness - will tell you that. The carbon cycle is so obvious.

The rock-hard wood yields grudgingly to the saw, giving up its lovely rings to the eye. Each log, heavy with H2O, strains your back when you lift it to the wheelbarrow and then stack it on the pile. The axe reveals the rushing rivers of fibers inside. After the logs are split you stack them - more carbon pain in your back - in the garage to dry. Then, some years hence I expect, given the amount of wood we now have, each corporeal log-body vanishes in an inferno of burned oxygen and escaping carbon and contentment around a stove. I don't understand how an atom can do all this - pure energy by itself, nothing really but imagination and belief; airy in leaves and in our lungs; soft and supple in the shivering of an aspen; hard and bountiful in the trunk of a tree; beautiful in the shape of a cheekbone. It just does, and the mind/brain gets excited/depressed by its antics, and a man in his 59th year rejoices.