Low Tech Communication Aids

 

The latest development on my YouTube channel is Memberships. In order to support my research, you can join the channel as a Donor, a Patron or a Benefactor. Here is a link:

https://www.youtube.com/c/AyaKatz/membership

Among the perks available to members are previews of videos about Bow's writing, literacy and other intellectual pursuits at a time when these are not yet available to the general public. Since revenue from viral videos comes primarily from people who are not subscribed to my channel and could not care less about ape language research, this seems like a fair allocation of our resources. The general public gets to view grooming videos right away, but more recent advances in ape language studies are shared first and foremost with our Donors, Patrons and Benefactors.

Since the inception of  Project Bow, I have found that low tech methods work better and are more cost effective when working with a strong but intellectual chimpanzee such as Bow. A talking machine was quickly replaced by laminated menus, self-flushing toilet by a plastic potty chair and a touch screen computer by an old fashioned notebook and pen.

The problem that the touch screen computer was meant to solve was Bow's reliance on caretakers' hands to point at letters on the glass. This is a problem of proof, not of communication. It looks to outsiders as if Bow is being manipulated by his interlocutors to point at the letters.  But it certainly does not look to us that way, and it does not explain why Bow can tell us things we did not know and share information available only to him. So it was suggested that the intercession of a non-manipulable computer could solve this PR problem for us.

In order to motivate Bow to use a computer to communicate, certain ape language researchers suggested pairing the touch screen computer with a food dispenser, so that Bow would essentially be typing for a food reward. "Machines can't be manipulated, so he would have to say what the machine wanted him to say," I was told.

I don't want Bow to  have to say anything. I want him to be able to say what he wants to say.  Here is an example of something ordinary, but totally unexpected, that Bow recently said to his caretaker while I was away: "Go sit outside." She was confused, "You want me to sit outside? How do you mean, like on the porch?" He answered: "Yes."

There is nothing extraordinary about this exchange, but it could not have happened with a touch screen computer tied to a food dispenser. Bow could not tell the dispenser anything. He would be totally subject to its mechanical limitations.

Recently, Bow and I watched a video of an Israeli young man who lost his voice while serving in the army. Bow identified with the voiceless man. He watched as the young man talked to a reporter by writing in an ordinary old fashioned notebook by putting pen to paper. "You could do that, too," I told Bow. "You could talk to people by writing in a notebook."

Bow was moved to try. His attempt looks like letters, though hard to tell what he wanted to say.  You can contrast his attempt to write letters  with his drawing on  this other page in the same notebook, in which a  month earlier he had tried to draw a face. (The face Bow drew is only in black ink. The other bigger face in blue was one I tried to draw.)

If you want to see the videos of Bow writing and drawing, you can join as a member of my channel. Eventually, these videos will all be released to the public, but you will see them in advance, and you can know that you helped finance my research.

Thank you!

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCMFOFKeAjwLWAlNrCvQVxvQ

Grooming Videos Save the Day

You may have noticed that I have been writing in my blog here less and posting more and more videos on YouTube. There's a very simple reason for that: YouTube pays. This blog does not. But there are some things that you can say in a blog post that are harder to say in a video. I am primarily a writer, not a performer. So I will continue to blog, albeit not as often.

After I came home from my brief illness, I kept posting more and more videos on my main YouTube channel, and within a month, as I recovered my strength and stamina, I also regained my YouTube income. Here is the video I posted at the time I learned that monetization had been restored.

In February of 2018, with the advent of the new YouTube rules, I lost my monetization, because I did not have a thousand subscribers. I had many more than the required views and minutes watched, but I had not asked people to subscribe. I had no interest in my viewers, was not counting how many there were, and I was perfectly happy with the extra pocket money I was earning to pay for Bow's bananas.  But when they took all that away, I was really put out. I did not understand why I needed subscribers, when subscribers did not pay a subscription fee, and people can see exactly the same videos when they do not subscribe. But if that is what YouTube wanted, I figured I could probably get most of the people who were already watching to subscribe, if I asked them nicely. They would be doing it as a favor to me, because it's not as if they would be cut off from the videos if they didn't subscribe. This is why it felt like a slightly non-commercial transaction between me and my viewers. They were doing me a favor when they subscribed, because this was information they were handing over to Google, when they could just as easily watch incognito. For all I know, some of my most ardent viewers may still be unsubscribed.

After nine months of asking people to subscribe, I gained the required one thousand subscribers and got my monetization back. Now my channel is bringing in about fifteen times what it had brought in before. And right now, as I write this blog post, I have 4,582 subscribers. I got 3,126 of them in the last 28 days. Most of these subscribers like to watch "grooming videos". Most of them will never read a novel by me, much less a scientific article about ape language studies. For them, it is all just stimulus and response, grooming and ASMR. But luckily for me, I believe in the free market, and I feel no compunction about exploiting their interests, so that I can be free to pursue mine.

Thanks to my new subscribers, I was able to get Bow a new hammock and a new sleeping bag for Christmas, not to speak of a number of other items for Leo, Summer and the cockatiels.

Things are looking up. Julia Hanna and I have expanded our interview show to include important researchers, scientists and academics. We had a whole series with Dr. Sue Savage-Rumbaugh.

Last night, we interviewed a linguist and author in Iran.

I feel very lucky to have as much freedom as I do to live as I want, despite the fact that many liberties have already disappeared from the American way of life. Though I do not understand YouTube or the reasons for its rules, I am happy right now with the deal they have offered me. In the coming year, I plan to continue working with Bow, while posting more and more interviews with leading thinkers, writers, scientists and academics. 

As for Bow, he is always happy as long as there is someone there to read him a story.

Bow has Personality!

Yesterday was Halloween. Bow and I celebrated in our own way. You can watch our Halloween special right here.

Watching this video, you might be asking yourself: is this really a chimpanzee who can spell out words? Is he really sixteen going on seventeen? Is he really an intelligent being? There are those who when they see too much playfulness or behavior that in a human we might associate with a lower IQ become even more skeptical about my claims about Bow's literacy.

However, language ability does not necessarily imply overall high IQ in humans. Literacy can also exist in the form of hyperlexia, implying excellence in decoding letters into sounds and patterns into words, without a high level of comprehension. Many humans I know who are perfectly normal use their language skills just to express their feelings or interact socially with others, without ever having to encode new information. They keep talking and talking, but all they are really communicating with all that hot air is how they feel at the moment or how they want to relate to another person. They can go their whole lives without expressing an original thought or comprehending an original thought expressed by someone else. That is all normal behavior for humans, and chimpanzees like Bow are not all that different.

Recently I was sick and was away from Bow for two days. He was in good hands, and people were taking care of him in my absence. When I got back, he was very gentle with me, grooming. He did not say anything at all about my illness. But one time, totally spontaneously, after a couple of days of my being back, he took my hand and spelled:  שתי דודות שמרו עלי      "Two ladies watched over me."

I think he just wanted me to know he had been well taken care of in my absence. There is nothing super deep about that, but it did touch my heart.

This morning, I noticed Bow had not yet used the potty. So I asked him if he needed to pee.

                                                                                                       ?אתה צריך לעשות פיפי

His answer tickled me: רק קצת  "Just a little."

This is not a deep interspecies communication moment. But that is how Bow uses language to express his personality.  He is not a needy person. He only needs to pee "just a little."

Bow's Halloween Costume

When I first adopted Bow, the woman who brought him to me knew I was going to do ape language research, and she was concerned that maybe I was too serious and would miss all the fun moments that come with raising a baby chimpanzee. I assured her that I would be open to the joys of every single moment, and not just the educational ones.

Bow's nails painted for Halloween

By the same token, there are other people who don't take my research seriously and who think that I just wanted to "play with a chimpanzee". When they voice that opinion, they remind me quite a lot of the clucking married old ladies who expressed the same sort of opinion about my having my daughter on my own. "She just wanted a baby," they said, as if wanting a baby were a terrible reason for having a baby, or as if all the other matrons in the world had a much more serious child rearing goal than mine. I did want a baby. But I didn't "just" want a baby. I gave the matter much more serious thought than most parents.

What they were all really saying was: "You can't just go out and do that on your own, You need government approval." You need a certificate of some sort. For the sake of the child. For the sake of the chimp. For the sake of society.

The truth is that you can't be expected to do a good job raising a child, unless you actually want a child. All those serious, duty-bound matrons who will tell you everything they sacrificed for their children sometimes forget to actually enjoy their children, which can make the children feel like unwanted burdens. Whatever errors I have made along the way, I have always let my kids, both human and chimp, know how lucky I feel to have them in my life. I did not make sacrifices for them. I made sacrifices so I could have them, which is a totally different story. I consider them both to be treasures, not burdens.

Sword had her own Halloween party this year. And Bow and I are also celebrating, in our own way. Yesterday, rather than work on a costume, we painted nails together.

Bow loves to groom and be groomed. Painting nails is a kind of grooming. He enjoys the process. He understands how the nail polish is applied. He just has this uncontrollable urge to put things in his mouth. Other than that, his engagement in the process is complete.

This morning, the atmosphere was just right for Halloween.

Bow went outside into the outer pen, and before lying down on the bench rim, he admired his nails.

Then he came in, and we admired his nails some more.

No, Bow does not have a costume this year, because he does not like to wear clothes. But who needs clothes, when you can completely disguise yourself using a blanket?

Engaging in pretend is important to a child's development. Socializing with a chimpanzee is important to his mental health and development, too. But your motive for doing so can't be entirely out of some kind of altruistic self-sacrifice. That would ruin it for the chimp or for the child. That's why there has to be mutual benefit. It has to be good for both of us. We both have to enjoy the interaction.

Cross-fostering works in that way. I am not the only primatologist who practices it. But if you talk to official primatological organizations  --IPS, ASP -- then they will tell you they are against contact between humans and chimpanzees, and they refuse to accept research based on that kind of contact. This year, at the joint IPS/APS conference in Chicago, they boycotted research that involves cross-fostering. This was not directed exclusively at me. Many established researchers were barred from presenting their work. You won't hear about this in the news. But you can read about it here.

We are all being targeted right now, and I am one of the few who are speaking up. Chimpanzees benefit from human interaction. Even in Africa, it's the people who care about chimpanzees who are crucial to chimpanzee survival. Trying to minimize the importance of contact and relationships with humans does not help anyone.

That's a human being in with those adult chimpanzees in the picture from Liberia. The fact that he happens to be black does not change the situation. If those chimps did not have a relationship of trust with this person, their survival would be in jeopardy.

When will the establishment allow you to see that?

A Choice of Mugs and the Issue of Preference

My friend Michelle would like to give Bow a special mug that he can use for those chilly days when hot chocolate is the drink of choice. Michelle has exquisite taste, and she has picked out eleven beautiful images for Bow to look at so as to better understand his personal preferences.  It's not that she can necessarily get him exactly one of these mugs, but if he tells her which one he likes best, or arranges them in order of preference, then she will habe some idea about Bow's general preferences when it comes to teacups and mugs. So the question is which one does Bow prefer and how on earth am I going to get him to express his preference?

Choice Number 1: B for Bow

He could choose mug with the letter "B" for Bow.

Bow might like this cup with a blue bird in stylized rendition.

Or how about this cup and saucer with the words MORE LOVE ?

This one, which is mostly floral, reminds me of our Blue Willow china set.

Or how about this one with the giant blue polka dots? Or the one with two deer covered in flowers?

I decided to make a video and to number the eleven mugs for ease of choice.

I showed the video to Bow, but he was so much more interested in playing on the keyboard of the laptop than in looking at any of the mugs on the screen.

This brings us to the many ways in which attempts to prove what Bow knows have failed so far. It's not that Bow is not smart, and it's not that he isn't interested in using a computer. It's that he's never interested in using the computer in the way that I want him to and for the purpose of answering the question that is being posed.

There are several different, but related issues:

1) Bow may not have a preference as to his choice of mugs.
2) Even if he does have such a preference, he may not see any immediate benefit to him in expressing that preference.
3) He may not see the question or its answer as having a very high priority on his list of things to do.

You would think that being asked about your preferences would be one of the easiest sorts of tests to take, but even the standard question of "what is your favorite color" may be hard for those people who don't actually have a favorite color or are not sufficiently introspective to determine what that color happens to be. The clip embedded below from Monty Python and the Holy Grail illustrates this point.

Preferences are a tricky issue. Those with strong innate preferences find it impossible to understand people with no strong inner preferences or with only socially mediated preferences. Those who seek to manipulate others by means of rewards or punishments find it confusing that not everybody is equally easy to manipulate. Even on penalty of death, not everybody will answer the "favorite color" question correctly. 

 Intelligence tests assume that the test subject will want to do well on the test. Objective test writers sometimes forget that the subject may know more about the question than they do, and hence that their questions about the air speed of unladen swallows are inadequately phrased.  Tests based on rewards for correct answers assume that the subject will do anything for a reward, even read the mind of the test writer to figure out what answer was meant to be correct. Those who are incapable of being bribed to do that are often presumed to be stupid. Sometimes that is true, but it isn't always true.

Of course, maybe Bow just does not know how to operate a computer. Maybe a computer with reward dispensers could guide him through the process step by step, without his being aware of being manipulated into learning, so intent would he be on getting the reward. That's one plan of action. But what if he doesn't want the reward? Wouldn't we actually need to find out what he wants first, in order to properly bribe him? 

If the reward is a beautiful, artistically crafted mug, my guess is that Bow will not be induced to do anything the teaching program prompted him to do. I'm thinking that maybe his choice of a mug depends almost entirely on what's in the mug, and almost not at all on how the mug looks. But this does not mean that he will do anything, if only the reward is food. 

Bow is a complicated, intelligent being. He may not be an aesthete, but that does not mean he does not have standards of conduct for himself and for others. He may not share with me every preference he has, but it does not mean that he hasn't got any. They just may not be along lines that would make him an easy target for manipulation.

Here is a snippet of  conversation I overheard recently: "They tell you that high school will be hard. That the work will be hard. But it's not the work that is hard. What they don't tell you is that it will be hard to care how well you do. It's just so hard to care..."

Bow cares about a lot of things. But it would be very difficult to tease apart those things that he cares about that would make him want to do well on a test. 

Sometimes It's Good to Laugh

Not everything turns out exactly the way we plan.

We might go to great extremes to get one political candidate nominated by our party, only to have to accept another in his stead. We might work very hard, anyway, to try to help the nominee get into the debates, even though he was not our first choice. We might then learn that our party and all its ideals will be kept out of the national debates altogether. 

.
It might rain all day long almost every day, so that we cannot go out to play.

And then when we do finally go out to play, the pollen may be so high that it does crazy things to our system.

But if we have a sense of humor about it, and someone to laugh with, it is always better.

This will all blow over soon. Hang on in there and remember to laugh.

We just might survive it all, anyway. Who knows, there might be a meteor coming.

    Related Stories

http://libertybuzz.us/story/breaking-cpd-invites-clinton-and-trump-excluding-johnson-and-stein-from-presidential-debate/2016/09/16/992/

http://thelibertarianrepublic.com/fda-50-epipen-alternative/

http://libertybuzz.us/story/donald-trumps-maternity-leave-policy-even-more-progressive-than-clintons/2016/09/13/963/

http://thelibertarianrepublic.com/daily-journals-endorsing-gary-johnson/

What's on the Menu?

When Bow was little, we arranged his words on menus. So Bow was used to picking out food items from the menu. And for those things that were not on the menu, he used "Something Else". Now Bow can spell any word he knows, but occasionally, when faced with an unidentified food, he says that he wants "Something Else". That's what happened yesterday when I offered him leftover takeout. He called it "Something Else" when requesting it.

Bow gets very excited about the possibility of eating restaurant food. He remembers when he used to go out to eat with us, and he knows where those styrofoam containers originate. The entire dining out experience is evoked by the appearance of those little takeout boxes.

But then at other times, Bow can be very coy about what he wants. When he knows that it's not quite time for dinner and no food is being displayed to him, he will ask me over and over again for other things which are readily available, like his blanket, before he ever admits that what he actually wants is food.

Yesterday, frustrated by his asking for things he clearly did not want, I asked him pointedly: "Bow, what do you want?!"

He paused for a moment as if to think about it, and then answered back with a typical question:
"?נו מה יש" -- "Well, what is there?" -- Meaning -- What is available? What's on the menu?

Unless something is being offered, sometimes Bow does not even bother to ask. Forced choice is sadly a part of all our lives. When we ask people what they want, they will rarely tell us. Instead, they ask what is on the menu. That's why it's so important to list Libertarian candidates by name in the polls.

Nature Abhors a Vacuum

In nature, one food source displaces another. For instance, the Virginia Mountain Mint that had all the insects gathered at the fence line in the spring  has now given way to bright yellow bidens flowers.

A Monarch in flight

I've come to expect the Monarchs at this time of year, and so I watch for their arrival on my side of the fence.

The Monarch butterflies suddenly appear at the fence line and are drawn to the yellow blooms, but many of the other insects that were there are all along, so excited about the Virginia Mountain Mint a few months ago,  are now just as happy to feed on the nectar of the beggar-tick bidens.

If I had not watched this compilation of nature clips that I had made over the past few months, I might not have noticed how the predominant white of the Virginia Mountain Mint gave way to the overpowering yellow of the beggar-tick  bidens. From a distance, they remind me of the safflower fields in the movie Only Yesterday. 

If all the same flowers were blooming throughout the spring and summer, how different it would be for the butterflies and bees! Wouldn't they neglect some flowers in favor of others? Bow is like that, too. I had to learn to buy fewer apples when there are pears to be had. And when handing out a snack between meals, it is important that it not be calorie dense, or else Bow will not be ready for dinner at the usual time.

That's why Pickle Ice is such a wonderful snack! Bow enjoys it very much, but I don't have to worry that it will spoil his dinner.

Because there are no calories in Pickle Ice, just water and vinegar and salt, Bow finds it refreshing, but it does not alter his diet. It does not displace other foods.

I remember when he was little, and we brought him to Orchard House to be tested on his literacy and language skills. It was an objective test, and he was offered chocolate, if he did it right. But even though Bow has always liked chocolate, he did not even try to do well on the test. In fact, he stubbornly insisted on answering every single question wrong. When a test subject consistently does that, and his wrong answers exceed chance, you know he is resisting. And one of the interns asked me: "Didn't he just have breakfast?" Well, yes, of course, he had. What mother would bring her child in to take an academic test on an empty stomach?

And what were they thinking?  That I should deprive him of breakfast? That I should starve him before the test? That he would skip breakfast and then fill up on chocolate? I was never going to allow that.

So here's a question that I have for researchers who use food as an incentive to do well at a task: does the reward food displace the everyday ordinary meals, or do the test subjects have bottomless pits for stomachs? I sometimes wonder if the same basic issues that plague academic economists in understanding the free market are at work in the studies of behavioral researchers. Nature abhors a vacuum. You cannot change what's available without changing the balance of things.

But... if I were to offer Bow an incentive to do well on a test today, I wouldn't offer chocolate. I'd offer Pickle Ice, because Bow likes that a lot, and he can even enjoy it on a full stomach. So there's a thought.

How We Live Now

Almost every day it rains. When it does rain, Bow sometimes acts as if it is the end of the world. It pours and pours and the sky is dark, and everyone has to take cover, even the butterflies.

But Bow manages to stay high and dry, even when the ground is wet outside.

Sometimes, he achieves this goal by perching high on his bench. At other times he uses the swing to keep his feet out of the puddles.

Higher and higher he swings. 

Sometimes a rainbow appears in the sky when I go shopping for groceries in Licking.

After the rains we are often visited by the coquettish orange-spotted purple butterfly. "Catch me if you can!" she cries and leads me on a merry chase. I finally decided to put her dance to the music of the Habanera.

The orange-spotted purple sticks so close to us that one time Leo was actually able to sniff at it.

Apparently, it did not smell all that interesting, as Leo let it go on with its business undeterred after a a single sniff. Other butterflies seem to want to get close to us. One day I found an eastern Tiger Swallowtail trapped in the garage.

It kept looking  longingly out at the green back yard, until I finally let it out. 

So what are these butterflies trying to tell Bow and me? I compiled a video of all my recent EasternTiger Swallowtail encounters into a video. Can you see Bow in the outerpen at the very end, when the butterfly flies out?

Are the butterflies trying to trap me?  Or do they think that I am trying to trap them?  Or are we all free spirits, striving to maintain our own independence, while engaging in fulfilling interactions?

Hard to say!

Bow and the Touchscreen Today

Yes, Bow does own a touchscreen. It's a computer that is dedicated to him. Nobody else uses it. But Bow does not use it much, either,  This is by his own choice. For years we tried to entice him to use his computer to type out words which would then be sounded out for him. But he didn't want to. On the other hand, whenever he sees that I am using my laptop to watch a video, Bow keeps asking me to bring the laptop in so he can see the video, too.

There are several reasons why the serious attempts to get Bow to use the touchscreen didn't work. One, we were afraid he would destroy it, so we could not leave the computer in with Bow unsupervised. Two, we tried to get him to use chopsticks to point at letters through the grid. Three, we didn't want to have Bow changing the settings on the touchscreen, so we put barriers in the form of plexiglass to keep him from touching anything but the letters we wanted him to touch. Four, with all these limitations in effect, Bow could hardly do anything with the computer. Five, Bow caught on to the idea that using the touchscreen was nothing but work, so he did not choose to do that. If he said "no" to an offer of a touchscreen session, we had to respect that. So "no" it was for a very long time.

But today Bow was bored. We have finished all the electronic editing we could do on "Our Lady of Kaifeng: Courtyard of the Happy Way" and are waiting for the first proof to arrive,  And when I asked Bow what he wanted, he told me תני לי הכל  -- "Give me everything." Well, everything, I figured, includes the touchscreen. So I asked him if he wanted to use the touchscreen. He said yes, and so I brought it in.

The touchscreen does not have a battery, so it has to be connected by  a cord to the electricity, This makes getting it into the pen Bow is in a little awkward, as there are now outlets where Bow is, for obvious safety reasons.

I propped the computer up against the glass window between the two pens for support. Bow got distracted at first by something that was going on outside. Then he turned on not one, but a couple of different video games, and the music was very loud. He proceeded to dance to the music, getting more excited as time went by.

Eventually, he got so excited that he knocked down the computer, but when I reprimanded him, he set it upright again and settled down to try to play the video games.

Unfortunately, neither Bow nor I understood the rules to the video game he was playing, so we did not score any points.  After a while, we switched off the computer.

There has got to be a way to motivate Bow to use the touchscreen more productively. Nothing is going to happen unless he wants it to happen.  He does not want to use the word sounding out program we have for him. But I think he would actually enjoy a language-based game better than whatever it was he was trying to play.

Telling True from False

After it rained yesterday, I noticed that some of the tiny real flowers at the center of the dogwood blossom had started to open.

All these years of living here, and this is the first time I have seen the true flowers blooming. Up till now I had been focused on the showy white false petals that are really just bracts -- not seeing the flowers for the leaves.

Bow and I went outside and I looked very carefully at the tiny flowers at the center of the bloom. Some were open, and some were still shut. Many of the blossoms had a single little green flower at the center open, while all the other flower heads were still in expectancy. The clapping that you hear at the beginning of the video is Bow, in the outer pen, trying to draw my attention.

Bow is so expressive with his hands. In the video embedded above you can clearly see him beckoning for me to come and open the door, because he wants to go back inside.

Yesterday morning I struggled with Bow for over an hour, holding off breakfast, trying to get him to spell by himself. We are both very stubborn. But I wasn't going to starve him, and our life is very much dependent on civilized routines, like pouring cereal into a bowl and eating it with a spoon, and clearing away at the end of a meal,  so eventually I gave him a very limp hand to use, and he spelled with my hand in his. But the fit was very, very loose. This morning, I would not give him a whole hand at all. I would only offer a finger.

At first Bow was not happy with this, and he tried to gently pry my hand open.

 But when that did not work, he started spelling with my balled up hand in his.

This is not good enough to prove anything to the skeptical. But it's a way to loosen the dependency on my hand. I think if you look closely, though, you can  see that my hand is not the driving force behind Bow's choices.

In life, lots of what we see is only a show, to protect something else that we can't see. People say one thing and mean something else. They point you one way, when the real answer is in the opposite direction. There are flashy, showy petals that are really not petals at all. But sometimes if you look a little closer, you will discover where the real flower is hiding, right there in front of you where it has been all along in full view.

The Status Quo

Outside it is raining this morning.

In the pens, we are having a bit of a battle of wills.

Bow keeps gesturing to me that he wants me to give him my hand, and I keep telling him that he can spell by himself.  I want things to change, and he wants everything to remain exactly the same.

When you are in a state of equilibrium, sometimes you don't notice when a major status changing crisis is right around the corner. Things seem the same day after day.

The wildflowers in the woods are blossoming, and in the unmown lawn what look like tiny, miniature irises are springing up.

Soon the mowers will come, and this flower will be no more, and the entire state of equilibrium that it was counting on to grow will be gone. Things may seem like a steady state, but there are cycles that come and go.

When something cataclysmic is about to happen to us, we don't always know. It may seem to come out of nowhere, but there are usually signs.

The ants have been on patrol for three days and counting on the peony by the lagoon.

They have not harmed the flower head, but they clearly have some objective in mind, something not known to me.

Bow is not angry with me, and I am not angry with him. We just each want something different. To try to cajole me, he picks up tiny specks of dust and hair from the corners of his pen and throws them into the potty. See, he seems to be saying, I am keeping it tidy. I am good. But still I will not give him my hand to use as a pointer. So he takes it and grooms it, instead,

Then he takes my hand and leads me to the letters on the glass. "But I want you to spell by yourself, Bow!" I slip out from his grasp. "Write 'give' by yourself," I tell him. In Hebrew, when Bow is speaking to me, it is just a three letter word תני. He spells it many times each day, when he is requesting things. But always he uses my hand as a pointer.

 I try to bargain with him, just as he earlier tried to bargain with me. "If you spell 'give' by yourself, I will let you use my hand for the rest of the sentence." But he is not swayed.

He keeps offering me his hand, but when I ask him to spell by himself, he turns away.

We can go on like this for hours. Nobody gets angry, but the status quo will not change.

It's a delicate equilibrium, but eventually something has got to give.

Just on the edge of the woods, where the lawn meets the trees, the delicate clover flowers sway in the breeze. Their life seems the same every day, but one day the mowers will come.

Just inside the woods, where it is no longer lawn, the cypress spurge is blooming. They say it is an invasive, and it grows in transition areas, that are neither fully wooded nor fully open. The balance of woods and fields on my land is changing. While it may seem that everything is always the same with me and Bow, that is also a delicate balance. Someday the status quo may change, and we might have our next big breakthrough.

You never know when a delicate flower is about to push up from the ground and bloom, not because you planted it yourself, but just because the seeds were there.