Nature seems to be designed just for us.

First, it's important to acknowledge that nature would exist just fine without us. Life, on a lower scale, would go on: everybody eating everybody else, all bent on just surviving. But how long can a system like that survive? And why?

It takes human intelligence to make sense of it all, right? Or not. Maybe we flatter ourselves. But really, wouldn't it be ultimately kind of boring if mindless creatures just kept eating each other or spent all their time trying not to be eaten?

At some point in "The Great Scheme of Things", human intelligence comes into play. Creatures evolve who don't want just to chase down other beings for food but who want to explore the world, to travel, eventually to learn how to grow things, and to seek out mates who aren't just like us but who may be, in subtle ways, different from us.

Picture yourself as a primitive human, not so long removed from the jungle or the savanna, where you had to track down and kill animals to survive. You brought back to your cave or your settlement whatever you'd killed, and your women had to butcher it and cook it over a campfire built of whatever wood they could scavenge. Not a pretty life.

But suppose that at night, when all had eaten and the young ones were sleeping, in whatever shelter you'd managed to scrape together, you and your missus lay back and looked up at the stars. What a wonder they must have seemed! Spread out against the sky, all those points of light, obviously far away: what did they mean?

In one sense, they meant nothing. They were and are just stars in the night sky. But a primitive imagination -- the first sparks of human intelligence -- assigned them meaning. Hey, what else was there to do with budding intelligence in those long ago days? Thus were born Orion and the Big Dipper and all the other constellations. Do they really mean anything? Probably not. But they were manisfestations of the dawning of our understanding of who we were.

Fast forward to today. Take a drive through the Colorado Rockies and gaze upon those peaks filled with pristene snow. Rent a car and drive the coastline of California, north from L.A., all the way having your breath taken away by the ocean breaking on the bluffs. Spend a fall in New England and see the trees break into a color show that you have to take pictures of so you'll remember it and be able to show your relatives who haven't been there. Or take a tour of the South when the flowers start to come out in early spring: you thought you went to Alabama or Texas or even New Orleans for the music and the food, but the flowers do you in.

From the stars overhead to the flowers under our feet, from the peaks of the Rockies to the ocean pounding the cliffs in California, nature seems designed to entice our senses, but we know this can't be true, since all these natural phenomena would exist even if humans didn't.

So why is all so pleasing to us humans? Why do we travel so many miles every year to see the ocean and the mountains and the flowers and the trees: the magnificent redwoods, the live oaks with their spreading limbs, the last proud giant elms? Why are we so enthralled with the way out country looks? The way the world looks? Why this fascination with nature?

Because, for whatever reason, the physical world is configured in a way that appeals to our senses. It may be an accident, but what an accident that would be!

My suspicion is that it's all of a piece: that the physical world is what it is -- whether we're in it or not -- but that we are built to appreciate it, to revere it, to render it as art, to soak it up and marvel at it. Why? I'll leave that to wiser men and women.

In the meantime, could you take a picture of me and my family in front of this geyser?

We are all jugglers.

Let's say you're a mom, married, with two kids, living in a house. You have a job. Or not.

Now let's imagine you're a juggler. How many balls do you have in the air?

1) kids

2) job (or all day at home with the kids, which counts as a job)

3) husband

4) a house.

That's pretty daunting right away. You have four balls in the air at all times. If you read one of the many books on juggling, you'll know that's way too many for anyone but a pro. You should start with two (maybe even one). Work your way up.

But most of us do start with one or two. Maybe a job. We work at it a while, get good at it, and look around for something else. You pick up a second ball. A husband or wife. A boyfriend. A house. A demanding pet.

Over time, you get better at juggling the various obligations in your life, the balls, but suddenly someone offfstage tosses in an extra. Like your parents starting to go downhill and getting more dependent on you. Or a health problem. Or a wreck that totals your car. It could be anything: that extra ball tossed into the mix. You don't know how many balls you have in the air! They're everywhere!

At some point, it almost always seems to be too much. Too hard. Every minute of your time seems to be devoted to keeping all those damned balls in the air. God forbid you drop one! Let your kids go hungry or your husband/wife be mad or the boss think you're imcompetent or the house get foreclosed! It seems like you don't have a minute to yourself.

So what do you do when you hit the breaking point?

Most of us just keep juggling.

We don't always do it well, and we don't always do it gracefully -- and yes, we do sometimes drop a ball (and maybe pick it up again, maybe let it lie). We know that we signed up to do this and that the show must go on. Too many are watching us perform and depending on us to let them down. We may not end up being applauded or appreciated, but we go ahead and do our best, awkwardly and with little confidence, knowing that we were never trained to be jugglers and only start to get good at it when we're too old to put it to use, except as grandparents.

Like any true performer without a script, we improvise. Juggling is an art, not a science.

And the Nobel Prize goes to . . . the person who takes the gas out of beans!

This may seem frivolous, but it's not. Beans are a miracle food, high in protein and absolutely delicious in recipes from every culture. So why don't we all eat them at least once a day? (They are also good for digestion and its aftermath.)

You know why. It's because they cause gas to build up in our intestines that can only be expelled in a socially unacceptable way. It happens to all of us repeatedly thoughout the day, whether we've eaten beans or not, and we try our best to minimize the effect or just be sure we're not in a group setting. But eating beans -- or other foods like cabbage -- exacerbates the disturbance. The need to get rid of built-up gases is unavoidable, so many of us just avoid beans altogether.

And that's the problem. As I said, they are amazingly nutritious, and great-tasting in everything from chili to that wonderful French cassoulet. It''s almost a sin (a crime?) that no one has come up with a way to take the gas out of these delectable dishes.

It's a matter of chemistry, something about our systems not being to break down sugars or starches or whatever in the bean, but come on: we've put men on the frigging moon! That took money and brainpower beyond most of our imaginings. What if those people, with that money, tackled the problem of gas in beans?

Most of the world eats beans and, in whatever way they've decided on, deal with the effects. But I know many people who won't touch them. Beans are an absolute necessity for vegetarians -- a prime source of protein -- but some I've known steer away from them for the reasons discussed.

What if chicken had the same gastrointestinal effect? Or lobster? Or chocolate, for God's sake!
Don't you think scientists would have come up with a remedy by now? Why is the miracle bean so dissed by science, when it holds so much more promise for humankind than chicken or lobster or even chocolate? Have you ever had a pot of pintos cooked forever on low heat with leftover ham chunks? I'd put it up against the trendiest pasta dish at your most expensive restaurant.

It's time to liberate the bean! It's time to de-gas it!

And I'm all for the government spending lots of my tax money to do it. Because in liberating the bean, we're liberating ourselves to eat it. Any time, any place. In all its redolent possibilities. And they are almost endless.

Viva the bean!

No one knows what dreams mean.

Sorry to report this, especially if you've just had a "reading" by someone who told you he/she could tell your future based on what you'd dreamed. The reality is that no one has a clue what dreams mean.

That isn't to say that dreams mean nothing. They are common to all of us and are often as real, when we're dreaming them, as the lives we're living when we wake up. They are, in a very real sense, more real than the movies that move us or make us think or that stick in our memories.

Those, after all, were constructed to have just those results. Dreams just happen.

They come out of our own brains. Dreams are totally of our own doing, even though we're hard pressed to claim authorship. We can't predict them, and they often come in snippets. Once in a while, a dream will seem to have something to do with our current lives, but not often.

Dreams are marvelous constructs of our brains and psyches working together to come up with an elaborate new thing based on nothing -- and based on everything we know. Our subconscious free-painting, free-writing, just being creative.

We long to make sense of our dreams because we're rational beings, but they usually don't.

There have been many explanations of dreams, ranging from repressed memories to the brain shuffling off extraneous material at the end of the day, but none of the existing theories explain why our dreams are so visual and so often narrative and are almost always so REAL.

I love the whole idea of dreams. Any of us and all of us can be so creative in our dreams!

It's a shame that some us -- victims of abuse or war or crime -- may have dreams that disturb us and keep us awake. Those who have such dreams over and over need to seek some kind of counseling, as these aren't normal dreams. And even those of us who haven't been through harrowing events have bad dreams from time to time. Sometimes it's a result of stress at our jobs or in our relationships or whatever is making us miserable. If such dreams persist, again it's time to seek counseling, because something is probably wrong in our waking lives that is causing such dreams.

Most dreams, I think, are fairly pleasant. Sort of like the mind relaxing at the end of the day.

And though I have to say again that dreams really don't mean anything -- or anything you or I can use in planning our lives -- some dreams sometimes are pretty transparent. I have a recurring dream that I'm in the army. And I'm my current -- way-over-the-limit -- age. I'm this really old dude in basic training. There obviously has been a mistake.

So why do I have this dream? Why not one about Viet Nam, where I served a year out with the infantry and even got a bullet hole in my helmet as a souvenir? Probably because the shock of moving from civilian to soldier was more traumatic to my central nervous system than moving from stateside soldier to wartime soldier. Maybe I still haven't processed it.

I also have dreams about my children as babies. Nothing bad; just remembering the endless duties of looking after brand new people I've invited into the world. They're all cute in the dreams, and nothing bad happens. And they've all turned out more or less okay as adults.

So why am I dreaming about babies? Maybe the shock of being a new parent still hasn't quite registered? After all these years?

Dreams are real. We've all experienced them. But the explanation of them is beyond the reaches of physics and chemistry and biology and philosphy and any religion you can think of. Not one human who has ever lived has a clue what they're about. And there has never been an experiment devised to analyze one.

They come to us from us, the mystery of us. And ain't that cause for celebration? Hallelujah!

Eating is like sex-- but not how you imagine it.

Suppose someone gave you, for Christmas or whenever, a box of chocolate-covered cherries. We all know those, right? They're cheap but always welcome, especially if we have a sweet tooth. We wouldn't buy them for ourselves but are grateful for them.

Okay, now suppose you pop one into your mouth.

The first sensation is the hard, but not too-hard, outer coating of chocolate. We mash it between tongue and upper palate, releasing all that sugary nougat. We enter a dream state, knowing what's coming.

But wait. What is really happening?

First, the flavor is sensed on the front of our tongue: sweet, right? But it's not really registered until the sweetness spreads throughout the mouth, engulfing the taste buds that aren't in the front of the mouth but toward the middle. Soon we have an over-powering desire to chew that sweet thing, to break it down into its component particles.

Once that happens, once the jaw teeth are engaged -- and the taste buds located there -- there is no way you're not going to swallow that tasty morsel.

And when that happens, there do seem to be taste buds down the throat that complete the act.

That's where the simile with sex comes in.

Consider the first chewing as foreplay: we taste, we determine this is something we want; we keep the process going. The more we taste and start to chew -- the more we get into the act of sex -- the more we move along toward that point we can't stop because we enjoy it so much.
Think of those jaw teeth chewing that wonderful morsel, unleashing taste buds whose only purpose is to make us swallow, and you have the whole picture.

When we swallow, we climax.

It's done. We can sleep.

But you know as well I do that the taste lingers in the mouth and makes us want more, makes us want to do it again.

What to do? Rinse your mouth and put those candies away for another day.

Go to sleep and resolve to exercise more tomorrow.

I suspect that this natural instinct to swallow what tastes good comes from our earliest days of being human, when we had to recognize what was good for our survival or not by taste alone. Unfortunately, we've evolved to the point that we can have anything we want to eat by a simple trip to the grocery store or our favorite restaurant, whether we need the nourishment or not.

We're so lucky to be living in a time of plenty, in this country anyway. In fact, we have to be sure that we don't eat too much. Most societies before us, and many today, don't get enough to eat. But that's a topic for another day.

Back to this one: Eating is like sex.

If I'm right, and of course I think I am, what we need to do to avoid over-eating and obesity is to interrupt the process of taste before it gets going to the point of swallowing. Wine-tasters have done this for years: they sip the wine, swirl it in their mouths, and then spit it out. I'm not convinced that they get the full flavor of the wine this way -- since they don't swallow, they lose some dimension of taste -- but maybe this is a way for food addicts to sample what they want but not suffer the consequences of actual digestion and weight gain.

The problem, again, is that the "satisfaction" comes in swallowing. You can toss that Caesar salad around in your mouth, savoring its varied flavors and textures (even the anchovies), but something in your brain and your mouth want you to swallow it to get the real and final taste.

Try it yourself. Melt a chocolate-covered cherry (or any other food you truly love) in your mouth for a moment, let it slide toward the back of your mouth. Don't you feel different taste buds kicking in? Don't you feel the urge to chew? And once you've chewed this wonderful item, don't you feel an overpowering need to swallow? And doesn't that complete the act?

Nature is so insidious this way and so efficient. Can you really think this is all an accident?

I bow my hat to a system I could not, in my wildest dreams, have invented.

And yes, I will have another chocolate-covered cherry. And maybe a snifter of that Cognac.

I promise not to swallow. Yeah, right.

What would life be like without mirrors?

So you wake up in the morning and go to the bathroom. You look at yourself in the mirror. You're the only one looking at you, so you accept yourself pre-fixing-up. You know what you look like and you know what it will take for you to be presentable to the rest of humanity.

But what if you had no mirror?

What if you woke up every morning and had to guess about how you looked? What if you'd been born, in other words, before mirrors? What if you had no idea what you look like?

I don't know when mirrors were invented. I assume people used to look at themself in the waters of lakes, but any ripple would distort that view, right? Somewhere in history, someone perfected the kind of chemical transfer that made mirrors possible. And what a change that must have wrought in society, in the world!

For the first time -- and wouldn't it be great to know that first time, to experience it? -- a human could see exactly how he or she looked to his or her fellow humans. I'm sure there were some pleasant moments but am just as sure that there were jarring ones. "Mirror mirror on the wall, Who is the fairest of them all?" Remember that from Snow White? The point was that the mirror didn't lie.

Now, of course, we can see ourselves on websites we post or on friends' e-photos of us, but still the best representation of us, of you and me, is the mirror. It captures us at our best and at our worst, dressed up or falling down, with non-judgmental accuracy. I have known people who, like vampires, never looked at mirrors. There is something to be said for that if you think about it: those people wanted to think of themselves the way they saw themselves and didn't want any visual contradiction. Or were they fooling themselves, avoiding the awful truth? Either way, they were bypassing an invention we have come to take for granted but that didn't always exist.

Have you ever been camping or otherwise in some place where you didn't have a mirror? What did you do about it? You don't need a mirror to brush your teeth, but do you need one to brush your hair? To put on make-up? To see if your clothes match? What is it you need a mirror for?

I suspect we all need mirrors to see if we look presentable, to tuck in what needs to be tucked in, to suck in what needs to be sucked in, to adjust this or that article of clothing, maybe to dab on a bit more of this or that make-up. But such was not always the case. If you were a princess or a prince a thousand or more years ago -- two thousand? three? -- you would likely have had to trust your servants to tell you if you looked okay. You would not have been able to look yourself in the eye and vote yay or nay. And that's a whole other subject for thought, no?

Nowadays mirrors are everywhere. Pretty ones, ugly ones, fancy ones, exotic ones, small ones, huge ones. Count the mirrors in your own house. You may be surprised. And aren't you a little disconcerted if you go into a clothing store and can't locate a mirror? We're used to seeing ourselves. We get fidgety when we can't.

Our forebears had no time to look at themselves. They were too busy working and fighting for food and land. Now we just buy both because we have jobs they couldn't have imagined.
We have come a long way, and good for us!

But let's not forget that being able to see ourselves as others see us is a curse and a blessing.

Some days I'm with the vampires.