Left: M31, Spiral Galaxy in Andromeda       Right: Gastropod exoskeleton, Sanibel Island

Seashells are the exoskeletons of mollusks such as snails, clams, and oysters. They have three distinct layers and are composed mostly of calcium carbonate with only a small quantity of protein. These shells, unlike typical animal structures, are not made up of cells.

I picked up the shell shown above on Sanibel Island. It is the exoskeleton of a gastropod, more commonly known as a snail, and is part of a large taxonomic class within the phylum Mollusca. The class includes many thousands of species of sea snails, as well as freshwater snails, limpets, and land snails, second only to the insects in overall number. The fossil history of this class goes back about 500 million years. There are 611 families of gastropods known, of which 202 are extinct and appear only in the fossil record. They are the most highly diversified class of mollusk with 60,000 to 80,000 living species.

Often, I look up and marvel at the Milky Way, its 400 billion stars, and the galaxies beyond, the faint smudge of Andromeda. Today, I look down and marvel at the beauty of a very small part of the Milky Way: The delicate exoskeleton of a snail.

Calm is the soul that is emptied of all self,
In the eternal moment of co-inherence.
A happiness within you – but not yours.

Dag Hammarskjöld

On the right:
Lilian picked four peony blossoms from the bush outside the bedroom window and put them in a vase. I photographed them against the backdrop of flowers in the bush from which they had been picked. I could not remember ever having taken a similar photograph before.

On the left:
Quite by accident, I came across this earlier photograph. It shows the peony blossoms outside the window although, because the image is intentionally indistinct, the flowers could just as well be inside the window. The photograph was taken almost a full year before the second photograph on the right.

Does not remembering the earlier image mean that one is living in the moment? Then, some loss of memory can be good.

The image on the right is delicate, almost fragile. That is how life sometimes is. On the left, the image is dark and indistinct but, if we look carefully, we see how the sunlight has caught the top of the flowers. We, too, are sometimes caught by passing light.

I now remember that the peony is an early bloomer: An early splash of color in an otherwise still green garden. And I remember that it doesn’t last long. It is here in the moment and then it’s gone. Like us.

Once or twice every few weeks, I record something in my View from the House file. Just a few lines. Sometimes, it might just be a cloud, or a full moon shining through the branches of an oak in winter, or workers on the street. Yesterday, I wrote about the female cardinal feeding her chicks.

Mid-morning, a female cardinal flies in and out of its nest in the trumpet vine outside the sunroom window. There are three chicks, not yet ready to fly.

In the early evening, a snapping turtle struggled up the small embankment from the creek behind the house. As the creek would soon be dry now that the rain has ended, I carried it down to a nearby pond where it scrambled into the vegetation in the shallow waters. Snapping turtles are territorial by nature. Something to think about as the turtle disappeared from view.

Eighty years ago, my mother dedicated me to Our Lady of Perpetual Succour whose icon is on the left. In the Eastern Orthodox Church iconography, the image is known as the “Virgin Theotokos of the Passion.” This 15^th century Byzantine portrayal of Mary has been housed in Rome since 1499.

I bought the Zulu sculpture on the right more than forty years ago during the Apartheid era. It isn’t a joyful sculpture of mother and child but, instead, a sad image of the oppressed. One can only gaze at it, speechless.

And now we have Gaza, Syria, Sudan, Ukraine, Haiti and more. Men killing women and children.

As I look out the window, a bird, a female cardinal, sits safely in her nest patiently waiting for her eggs to hatch.