August

 The heat is in "full swing". June and July were really not so bad but I knew that August would be a killer. And so it is. Dry air continues, we continue to have a bit of a breeze, and mornings are not bad at all, and days are becoming noticeably shorter. I remember reading Raymond Lully years ago, and I recall that he made much of what he called "equilibrium", imagining that an equilibrium state was necessarily so precarious that an act of will and focused thought could disturb it. Of course that is not necessarily the case. Most of what we see is very stable. On the other hand the effect of a small disturbance can sometimes be amplified over time but then the results are generally quite unpredictable. Most of the systems that appear so stable are actually only metastable. The solar system is only metastable. The possibility of a chaotic excursion is always there. If you think in terms of a trajectory in phase space, it takes time for a chaotic departure from a pseudo-stable state to develop. But when it does, watch out!