Is our government too big?  I don’t mean in terms of programs, budget, sheer numbers of people, etc.  I mean in terms of being able to see the whole picture, in terms of keeping the welfare of the entire country front and center in its mind (if government can be said to have a mind, but you know what I mean). 

Call me myopic, but I think the major problem with our government (and not coincidentally with our educational system, our health ‘care’ system, our banking and insurance system, many of our large corporations, etc.) is that they are too big.  In government, our representatives have lost the ability to see and the will to work for what is best for the country as a whole.  In education, schools are turning out students who can’t think creatively or critically but who can pass the state tests (and don’t get me started on why graduating seniors have to be able to pass an exam that that tests only to the level of 9^th grade).  In health care, drug companies can’t afford to develop much needed medications because the ROI is too low or too risky in the first place.  Do I really need to say anything about our banking and insurance systems?   In those businesses and others, our leaders have allowed themselves to be committed to next quarter’s growth at the expense of long-term viability. 

Why do we have all these problems?  Because people are no longer part of the equation.  When people disappear from view, all sorts of aberrations become rationally justifiable.  And people disappear from view when things get too big.

Buddhists say everyone has been our mother and our father.  How would we treat each other if we could see each other that way?

I sat out on my front porch this morning and listened to a storm approach.  I love listening to an approaching storm.  The first low rumbles of thunder somewhere over the horizon, the flicker of lightning, so subtle against the gray sky it barely registers.  It was hot and muggy already at 7:30 a.m., the air thick and close and heavy. 

I had abandoned my chores, drawn to the drama of the storm as I had been as a child.  Then my brothers and sisters and I would run out onto the sidewalk, separate ourselves by the width of the small front yard, and walk backwards towards each other, hoping to crash just as the thunder sounded.    

So I stood at the edge of the porch this morning, watching the gray clouds move in from the northeast.  The thunder swelled.  A small, deliciously cool breeze lifted a few strands of my hair. 

I fixed my gaze on the treetops.  Often I have traced the progress of the wind by following the movement of the trees.  I wanted to see that now.  It took some minutes, but—there!  The topmost branches of several trees, a good 300 feet away, swayed. 

Buoyed, I kept my vigil.  At my level, the cool breeze had vanished, but then I spotted movement in several clusters of branches in a nearer clump of trees.   I dared hope.  The atmosphere, I noticed, had grown quite dark.  Overhead, the sky cleared its throat.

And then it came.  A sound I heard for the first time when I was standing at the end of a pier at a rural college in New York, looking out at a lake.  A high rustling, like a taffeta skirt.  It grew louder and louder until, up in New York, I finally turned toward it, muttering, “What is that?”   And saw a broad, heavy curtain of rain moving across the water directly toward me.  Transfixed—and really, what else could I do—I opened my arms to it.  I was drenched.

That was the sound I heard now.  At first, it mimics wind in the trees, and I can never be sure.  But it grew continually, the minute pattering  of a thousand tiny impacts, multiplied and amplified as it engulfed more and more of the woods that surround my house.   

Finally it roared in my ears, and great fat drops of rain splattered at my feet.   A moment or two more, and I had to retreat into the house as the storm claimed my sheltered space.  I stood in the living room and drank in the sound, the glorious sound of rain.

I walked outside to have my coffee and toast on the deck this morning, and I was met with air that was already thick with humidity.  “It’s muggy,” I thought.  And that got me to wondering about this word.

Turning it over in my mind, I could immediately come up with several different uses, not for the adjective—that seems to have only one meaning—but for the verb and the noun.

There’s mug, to assault someone usually intending to rob him or her. 

Or mug, to make faces, especially for an audience.

And that leads to mug shot, which is slang for a police photo but is also used to describe the singularly unflattering photographs that people must be trained to take at the driver’s license bureau.

And of course, there’s the common mug, or drinking cup of a certain size and shape.

A quick exploration of dictionary.com yielded the following clue to a thread that might link several of these.   It appears that the mug-as-cup may have come from Scandinavian roots, the old word meaning drinking vessel.  The notation that such vessels were sometimes molded to look like faces provides a plausible link to mug-as-face and mug-as-making faces.  Scandinavia also appears to provide the root word for the mug-as-assault usage, as there was an ancient word that was apparently a slang term for fighting or striking in the face.  (There’s that face connection, again.)

Muggy, I discovered, also has Scandinavian ancestry, an old Norse word that meant mist.   Now I can draw a tenuous line (my favorite kind sometimes) from the wet contents of a drinking cup to the feeling of wetness engendered by exposure to humid air, as if someone had poured the contents of said drinking cup over my head.  I love it when an exploration comes full circle (even if the circle is possibly a bit lopsided).

But then I learned that mug is also a British slang term used to indicate a fool or a gullible person.  And now I’m stuck.  Maybe there’s a saying somewhere (England, perhaps?) along the lines of, “She’s got the brains of a mug.” 

Not that I feel that way … particularly.

The nail on my left index finger keeps splitting vertically.  I don’t know why.  Some soothsayer might read the sign of a deep internal flaw in my psyche, trying to get my attention.

The pattern on the carpet runs diagonally from where I sit.  But if I turn my head, it becomes vertical.  Just a slight adjustment of my view.  And if I glance into the narrow space between the book displays, there is chaos for a moment before the pattern appears.

The mind loves patterns.  It thinks it understands something when it sees them.  Never mind that the whole thing is a fabrication.  The truth is neither chaos nor pattern. 

This morning a gray curtain of rain fell continually outside my windows on the world.  The house was dark, even at 11 a.m.   I fancied I felt the force of gravity pulling the rain drops fiercely down, or was it?  My mind tells me the rain is falling down, but what if it were falling up?  Am I sure it’s not?  I see what I expect to see.  What do I miss?

The other day on a whim, I decide to recycle some bags of plastic bags.  I grabbed them and took them upstairs.  It was lunch time and I was thinking how much I’d like a sweet potato, but I didn’t have any.  I dropped the bags on the floor in the mudroom and one went thunk!  Bags don’t thunk, I thought.  I investigated and what did I find?  A sweet potato!

I wonder how often a gift waits for me to discover it.  I wonder how often I don’t know where I’m going until I get there.

Does the split in my index fingernail warn me I can’t keep it together, no matter how hard I try?  Or is it the universe laughing at me for excavating meaning out of nothingness.

Well, that’s what we human beings do.  And now I’ll file my nail, solve the problem, and forget about it, while the mystery beneath persists and waits for another chance to catch my eye—or my sleeve, which is how I got started on this in the first place.