The thundering rain is now a gentle rain. The birds stayed away from the thunder. Today they came back, dining in the gentle rain in the hallowed hexagon.
They were seen having breakfast this morning, seen by me, since no other person lives in the house, and witnessed by the cat, who watched them with stalking eyes, her tail flicking rapidly from side to side.
I created the hexagon, not in any godlike way, more like an aging widower with nothing better to do way, by placing six flat stones to mark the sides of a six-sided piece of ground about two feet square in the backyard just below the kitchen window.
A hexagon was my geometric choice because it is a religious symbol of harmony and balance. I do not follow any religion, but I do like harmony and balance — particularly, now that I’m in my fall-prone seventies, balance.
Geometry is a fascinating subject. In what is referred to in dry literature as boring I see as sacred, the hexagon being the most powerful.
One of most famous hexagons is the Star of David, which represents (and I quote) “the history, culture, and religious beliefs of the Jewish people, signifying God’s rule over the universe in six directions — north, south, east, west, and up and down.”
I’m not Jewish, I’m not anything, I am a something from somewhere, which is a step up from being a nothing from nowhere, although not by much, but I’m cool with the Star of David.
The Hexagon Factor
The hexagon, moreover, is at the very center of human life, found in the structure of DNA. And far beyond the make-up of earthly creatures a hexagon-shaped cloud vortex was discovered on the planet Saturn, 900 million miles from Earth.
The six-sided vortex was photographed by NASA’s Voyager mission of 1980-81, and Cassini mission of 2004. The spacecraft Cassini spent thirteen years exploring Saturn’s atmosphere before plunging to its planetary doom in 2017.
In case you’re wondering, as I did for a moment, the word hex is not derived from hexagon, but from the German hexe which means ‘witch’ and by extension to practice witchcraft. To put a hex on someone is to cast a spell that will bring bad luck.
Nothing like that will befall the birds dining in the hexagon. They have been blessed by the gentle rain.