I am neither a trained scientist nor an accomplished sailor. I am inclined to use facts for unfactual ends and do not have enough knowledge of the wind not to be tipped over at any time, but if you feel complexity and admire mathematics while in a state of comparative ignorance then perhaps you have some claims on knowing. Most of us have had a hand in observing the weather or gauging the levels of the tide. Weather guessing or complaining is second nature, and on the beach, or by means of the pilings on the wharf, you can guess the tidal range quite easily or judge whether the tides are in or out. On some level below that we have air and tides in us that know the energies of earth from past acquaintance, but we are much too ready to mistrust these depths and to let other authorities do our work for us. Perhaps our natural senses are becoming atrophied. In any case, we do not seem to be sure whether it is the energy of the head or of the heart that we should use for our purposes. But put yourself in the middle of the weather and within the reach of the tides and they sometimes begin to roam in concert in as many ways and to the incalculable extent that you have responses stemming from your brain. All the distant swelling and swinging, the synchronization and intermoving of the waters, becomes as real and immediate as the repositioning of the sun and the changing of its shadows. The over-all wind; the light that shines on the beach grass, moves over the pebbled ground, and sparkles the sea, or turns it into a blazing white cauldron; the knowledge of cold massive depths in one place, warm shallows in another, come into feeling as both unified and infinitely complex. I may fail at mathematics but be an unconscious mathematician, judging galaxies by the ways of light before my eyes. At my feet, as I sit on the sandy ground on the cliff top, there is a hole made by a spider, neatly defined at the top by a little rim of grasses. Rabbit dung lies here and there. There are a broken puffball, dried leaves, and seeds; and the wind has blown so constantly over the level and open parts of the ground as to take away loose sand and leave a surface of pebbles, which are more or less stable, while mounds and hillocks are held together by shrubs and grasses. These are evidence of a poor community, holding down as best it can, though it is open to migrants and migration all the same. What lies underfoot changes in a few hundred yards toward vegetation which is a little more protected, and less exposed to violent light and dessicating wind, with low oaks and pitch pines, wood floors, with a certain amount of decaying litter, graduating upward in the quantity of organic life, but the open, exposed, diminished look of this environment also suggests its inherent mobility with all the other component parts of this running world, taking original light and shadow from the vast sky.