This afternoon I was walking through woods when I happened upon a brisk thump thump thump from above. Right there, thirty feet up, a woodpecker was dutifully in search of a resonant dead birch for snack. The fullness of its knock seemed to resound with unusual clarity amongst the unbound space we occupied.

I reached out to touch the tree; were I deaf I'd have just as easily swallowed the full character of the sound. Each whack of beak into wood transmitted cleanly through the trunk like a telegraph. I pressed my ear up to the smooth still-white bark and listened, for some moments, to the crisply amplified foray.

Mosquitoes ushered me onward too hastily, but I walked with a smile to myself in an unexpected and welcome contented wonder.

Also this afternoon I happened to read a quote of the famed physicist and humanitarian Richard Feynman: "Far more marvelous is the truth than any artists of the past imagined it. Why do the poets of the present not speak of it? What men are poets who can speak of Jupiter if he were a man, but if he is an immense spinning sphere of methane and ammonia must be silent?" Perhaps appropriately coincident.