I just got back inside from taking a walk for about half an hour around the area that my office building is located in in Milwaukee. I wanted to step out in part because I hadn't been outside all day, and my office doesn't have any windows, so it's nice to get outside and feel the air on you, hear the sounds of the city, but also of nature.
And in my case, something else that's particularly refreshing, for both my eyes and I would say my soul, is seeing all the flowers that are still in bloom, while there's an opportunity to do so. If you follow me in social media, you've no doubt seen me posting from time to time as the season rolls from spring into summer and then into fall all the different flowers that I walk past and register. And I've got some musings about them that do have some philosophical import.
But before that, I'm going to kind of sketch the scene for you. So our office building is located on a short road that runs parallel to the Menominee River Canal. And the Menominee River is one of three significant rivers that flow through Milwaukee. They all will end up terminating in the Milwaukee River. There's the Milwaukee itself, the Menominee, and the Kinnickinnic. And then they all flow out together into Lake Michigan. And I'm fortunate in that I live and work close enough that I can walk to any of these if I want to.
But since I'm already there on the Menominee, I like to take a walk along what's called the Hank Aaron Trail, named after one of our great ball players, the Milwaukee Brewer Hank Aaron. The Hank Aaron trail goes for quite a ways. Some parts of it are simply spectacular. Others are just a path that you walk along. And the portion that we have here, before this massive company and building came in called Rite-Hite, was actually on the spectacular side. But it's still pretty good.
And it's nice to walk along the river, and to see the waves, the wildlife, there's a lot of birds, sometimes ducks, or geese, or seagulls, lots of chickadees, swallows, other sorts of birds. Occasionally there's some crows that live around there that I always enjoy seeing.
And there's a lot of pollinators, particularly honeybees, and various solitary bees and wasps, and a lot of bumblebees as well, which is a great sign for the health of the area. We get a lot of sulfur butterflies. Those are those beautiful little white and yellow butterflies that we used to actually call cabbage butterflies when we were young. We didn't know their proper name. And occasionally you'll see a monarch or some other butterfly as well.
This time of year, the cicadas are in full time living, mating, doing whatever it is that they do activity. Much of it is their singing, which isn't really singing. It's, I think, produced by rubbing their legs together, but it's very loud. And it's a sound that I associate with high summer and the end of summer, as we move into the beginning of the school year. And it's a sound that I particularly like and respond to.
I think many people don't enjoy hearing it, but for me, it's a bit of home. And in fact, since I lived far away from here in different regions for so long, to be back in a place that smells and sounds like what I am used to from my childhood, and teenage and early 20-something years, is really comforting on a deep level. So not every single day, but many days that I'm here in my office, I will get out and take a walk around.
And we're fortunate in that there's a lot of green space in this city, some of it in the form of parks. That's a relic of Milwaukee's socialist past, that we have a lot more parks than most American cities do, because the socialists who ran the city were dedicated to the idea that ordinary people should be able to enjoy nature. And subsequent political changes haven't really succeeded in closing down or privatizing our parks.
We also have, on the other side, a lot of empty space where things just grow. And because we have a lot of native wildflowers here and some non-native invasive species, there's a lot that you get to see as you walk through abandoned lots, or places that have just been allowed to go back to a kind of semi-natural, semi-urban state. And then there's things in between where people have deliberately replanted native plants. Sometimes along parking lots or along paths or things like that. And businesses seem to be, at least in certain areas, pretty cool with that.
So there's a lot of natural beauty to enjoy and appreciate. And in these walks, I get to see many different types of flowers and insects and birds and to hear both the sounds of the city and traffic, but also to hear the calling of the birds, or the murmur of the water, or the blowing of the wind, sometimes through the tree leaves, or through dried grasses and flowering plants and bushes.
I'm very thankful for that. And I do enjoy all four seasons of the year that we have here in southeastern Wisconsin. But I have to say that this is one of my favorite times of year, when there's still a lot of colorful flowers of different sorts to walk past and take in and to see the pollinators drawing nectar from trees. That's a aspect of natural beauty that I have been responding to since I was a child.
And as a matter of fact, a bit of trivia about me that I think very few people know is that when we had to take aptitude tests and figure out what sort of jobs we might want to have, way back when I was in high school, one of the professions that I seriously considered was florist. I never went any further with it, but I've always been taking in the beauty of blooms, and cutting flowers and making arrangements both for other people and for myself, and appreciating when other people do that well also.
So I mentioned that there would be some philosophical meat to this. And you could say that the appreciation of beauty is an aesthetic topic. And so we've already done a little bit of philosophizing on the way, even though we haven't mentioned Plato, or Augustine, or Kant, or any other person who writes about aesthetics.
But what I want to focus on is something a bit different, namely, the contingency of the sights that we get to see, meaning that they didn't have to be that way. It's possible that there could have been no flowers whatsoever, that the weather patterns could change, that we could have blights.
It could be that the kinds of flowers that we see would be replaced by other things, types of plants, maybe flowering, maybe not. It could be that the people who lived in this city didn't value natural beauty and just paved everything over instead, as indeed has happened in some places, or allowed it to turn into wasteland or desert without the rich profusion of that.
So every time that we're able to enjoy that, we're really enjoying something that we might call hyper-contingent. It's not just that one efficient cause brought all this about. There are myriad interlocking intersecting causes, some of which are of this season, some of which date back perhaps centuries, and many of which are entirely contingent themselves, not depending on big-picture things like laws of nature or the way that species evolve and express their being, but rather incredibly contingent things, like seeds having sprouted in this particular place or somebody volunteering to plant a certain flowering plant or even berry producing plant.
(There's some beautiful berries this time of year on various bushes that we can see before the birds come around and eat them all up.)
All of this could be very different than it is. And indeed in just a few days, some of the things that are flowering will have dried up and won't be flowering anymore. And some new blooms until we reach the end of the season will not take their place so much because they don't occupy the same space, but instead draw the eye away from what is dead to what is living.
And what is the proper response to this? I would say that thinking about things in this way, and you don't have to think about it constantly or very deeply, but thinking about things in this way opens up the possibility for some aesthetic and some emotional responses.
I think that joy is certainly one of them. Pleasure. Perhaps desire, drawing you on further into seeing them. It could be tinged with a bit of sadness or melancholy as you think about all the flowers past, and the fact that these flowers will be gone soon. Also, satisfaction as you think about how they are furnishing food for all of these wonderful pollinating creatures that are part of this vast world that we live in. One might even feel a sense of awe or wonder or gratitude for the possibility of walking along and running one's eyes and perhaps even reaching out and touching and smelling some of these flowering plants that are available to us, fortunately, for the short time that that we have them.
So I thought I would share this with you. It's not, I think, particularly profound reflections, but it might be something that at least some of you listeners resonate with and make you recall your own experiences of natural beauty or whatever it happens to be. Maybe flowers aren't your thing, but you like looking over a landscape or looking at a dry desert and watching long enough to see some of the signs of life in it.
Whatever it happens to be, I think that engagement with nature, in a kind of unprogrammed way, is something needed for us human beings. Sometimes people don't realize that, but it's usually because they haven't had the opportunity to experience it much, or they've forgotten about it or locked it away. But I think this is something quite important. And I'll just end these reflections with that.
