Among the Fall Asters

Metallic Green Sweat Bee (Agapostemon cockerelli)

Michaelmas Daisy (Symphyotrichum novae-angliae)

Thursday Poem - Directions (excerpt)

The best time is late afternoon
when the sun strobes through
the columns of trees as you are hiking up,
and when you find an agreeable rock
to sit on, you will be able to see
the light pouring down into the woods
and breaking into the shapes and tones
of things and you will hear nothing
but a sprig of birdsong or the leafy
falling of a cone or nut through the trees,
and if this is your day you might even
spot a hare or feel the wing-beats of geese
driving overhead toward some destination.

But it is hard to speak of these things
how the voices of light enter the body
and begin to recite their stories
how the earth holds us painfully against
its breast made of humus and brambles
how we who will soon be gone regard
the entities that continue to return
greener than ever, spring water flowing
through a meadow and the shadows of clouds
passing over the hills and the ground
where we stand in the tremble of thought
taking the vast outside into ourselves.

Billy Collins

Wordless Wednesday - Just a Little Rain

Architecture of Fringed Fragrance

White (or Dutch) Clover (Trifolium repens)

Hedgerow Ripening Red

Thursday Poem - The Wishing Tree

I stand neither in the wilderness
nor fairyland

but in the fold
of a green hill

the tilt from one parish
into another.

To look at me
through a smirr of rain

is to taste the iron
in your own blood

because I hoard
the common currency

of longing: each wish
each secret assignation.

My limbs lift, scabbed
with greenish coins

I draw into my slow wood
fleur-de-lys, the enthroned Brittania.

Behind me, the land
reaches toward the Atlantic.

And though I’m poisoned
choking on the small change

of human hope,
daily beaten into me

look: I am still alive—
in fact, in bud.

Kathleen Jamie
(The Wishing Tree from Waterlight)

Signs of the Season (I)

On our morning walk we discovered ripening apples...

green tomatoes on the vine...

 sunflowers and tiny riders.....

the first Michaelmas daisy and a blissed out "bumble".

The Secret of the Mountain

The secret of the mountain is that the mountains simply exist, as I do myself: the mountains exist simply, which I do not. The mountains have no "meaning," they are meaning; the mountains are. The sun is round. I ring with life, and the mountains ring, and when I can hear it, there is a ringing that we share. I understand all this, not in my mind but in my heart, knowing how meaningless it is to try to capture what cannot be expressed, knowing that mere words will remain when I read it all again, another day.
Peter (Muryo) Matthiessen, The Snow Leopard

May your trails be crooked, winding, lonesome, dangerous, leading to the most amazing view. May your mountains rise into and above the clouds.
Edward Abbey

Winding river, endless mountains— the dark forest breathing mist. There is no road into the sacred place. It’s just that, the deeper you go, the more wondrous it becomes.
John Daido Loori

Among the Jeweled

 

 Red-blue Checkered Beetle (Trichodes nuttalli)

Friday Ramble - For Summer's Jeweled Singer

Dog-day Cicada (Tibicen canicularis) 

He climbed (or more likely dropped) onto the sundeck and the railing, and he just sat there for a while, breathing slowly in and out.  His tymbal muscles contracted and relaxed, the rhythmic vibration producing what is, to me anyway, a brief rendition of summer's most resonant and engaging song.  I took a few photos and told him how beautiful he was, thanked him for being here with us this summer.  A few minutes later, he became still, the light in his eyes receding as he tumbled from his perch to the ground. For the first time after days of lighthearted cicada love songs in the garden, the old tree over the deck is silent, and I am bereft.

Nothing lasts forever.  We are here for a while, and then we are not - that is, quite simply, how life unfolds.  That is how it unfolds with big sisters and little sisters and blithe sisters of the heart, with canine companions and jeweled summer singers, with bumble bees, dragonflies and grasshoppers, frogs and snakes, rivers and trees and fields even.  That is how it will unfold with me too one of these days, and I know it, but knowing how things work almost never makes it easier to handle them when they show up in life and insist that we pay attention.

It seems to me that there is more to mourning a cicada's passing than marking the silencing of an aestival song, the passing of a single tiny being who lived for a scant handful of days in the light and the overstory, the slow irrevocable turning of one season into another.  If I have learned little in all my years of wandering around on the planet (and that is probably true), I do have some small inkling about that.

My cicada on the other hand, knew exactly what was happening, and he was easy in his mind with the whole thing - I could see it in his eyes and hear it in his last sonorous vocal offering.  There's a lesson here.  Our task is one of cultivating that kind of patience, acceptance and unfettered Zen mind, the willingness to dissolve effortlessly back into the fabric of the world when the time comes - in future, I think I shall simply call whole thing, "cicada mind".  A young friend and I interred the little guy among the antique roses in the garden, and we will both think of him whenever we pass by that sunny corner.  I wish I had thanked him for his teaching too.

Thursday Poem - Looking for Gold

A flavor like wild honey begins

when you cross the river. On a sandbar
sunlight stretches out its limbs, or is it
a sycamore, so brazen, so clean and so bold?
You forget about gold. You stare—and a flavor
is rising all the time from the trees.
Back from the river, over by a thick
forest, you feel the tide of wild honey

flooding your plans, flooding the hours

till they waver forward looking back. They can’t

return; that river divides more than

two sides of your life. The only way

is farther, breathing that country, becoming

wise in its flavor, a native of the sun.

William Stafford, Looking for Gold

(The Way it Is: New and Selected Poems)

Postcard From the Edge

Alas, my mail server is down, and I owe some of you a note or a message but have no way of retrieving new messages or replying to those which have already been downloaded to my computer or are sitting in my provider's message tank.  My apologies.....

It's at times like this that notions like keeping carrier pigeons, making use of a semaphore or just plain old banging on hollow logs (an ancient and reliable jungle mail relay system) begin to make sense, a LOT of sense.

Looking on the bright side, I do have access to the web and can post here.  Please bear with me on "the mail thing" and direct a plea to the cosmos too. Until things are up and running again, I can be reached here. 

Wordless Wednesday - The Sound of Temple Bells

Mornings in Red and Gold

You are trying, really trying, to describe something that is quite beyond description. Do you realize it?  You certainly do, but you try to describe it anyway and make a complete shambles of the exercise. Oh well...

Morning skies in August come in shades intense and fetching, the early sunlight burnishing clouds into brilliance and lighting up contrails against skies that often as not have a touch of violet in them.  Now and then, everything up there looks like stained glass.  There are high fluffy streaks from horizon to horizon, the gossamer strands of light touching everything with copper and oro pallido - the pale lustrous gold that only visits the world at the beginning of day (although I seem to remember that Tuscan skies sometimes held such fiery wonders in late afternoon when I was a student there many years ago).  One thing is for sure - you need a large brush to paint such sweeping confetti colored expanses, or a wide angle lens that takes in all of the Old Wild Mother's creation. Perhaps it's time to consider acquiring another lens for my camera and more tubes of scarlet, gold and indigo for my paint box.

Spencer and I went out to greet the morning together as usual, although I am supposed to stay indoors for a few more days.  Slipper clad, I sipped my tea (Earl Grey)  thoughtfully, and my sweet companion looked up at the sky and around the garden with his tail oscillating back and forth like an exuberant metronome.  As we stood out there in sleepy wonder, thousands of geese were flying up from their night's rest on the river and out into the corn to feed, vast waves of joyous honking as they passed overhead on the way to their breakfast buffets in the wide farm fields beyond the village.

August mornings have always been like this, we told each other as we eyed the clouds and watched the skies for incoming flights. This is the traditional music of August, "the music of what happens" 'round here as the season draws to a slow and honeyed close.

Gold at Heart, Pink Without

Harbingers Along the Trail

Virginia creeper, also called Five-leaved ivy

(Parthenocissus quinquefolia)

One morning everything is green, and then suddenly, there they are a day or so later - showering cascades of vibrant red and bronze draping the trees along the edge of the forest and dancing all the way along the trail up into the woods.  

There are a thousand and one hues, and they are fabulous stuff, engaging both eye and lens completely, but they're the heralds of approaching autumn, and you know, you just know, that your favorite season is not so far off.

There have been hints here and there, of course, cooler evenings, breezes and skies full of stars at night.  August dishes out grand vistas by the handful, and September is an artist's month for sure (aren't they all?), but here are the first exotic racy reds gamboling and cavorting on ahead as blithe heralds of the grand and spicy times to come.  Here we come too in our own fashion (or the lack thereof) - not draping the trees in shimmering waterfalls and swaths or tangoing along the trail like leaves, but doing our own translating into autumn nevertheless, an ardent lurching jig of sorts.

Ripening Slow and Easy

Thursday Poem - Song for the Deer and Myself to Return On

This morning when I looked out the roof window

before dawn and

a few stars were still caught

in the fragile weft of ebony night

I was overwhelmed. I sang the song Louis taught me:

a song to call the deer in Creek, when hunting,

and I am certainly hunting something as magic as deer

in this city far from the hammock of my mother’s belly.

It works, of course, and deer came into this room

and wondered at finding themselves

in a house near downtown Denver.

Now the deer and I are trying to figure out a song
to get them back, to get all of us back,
because if it works I’m going with them.
And it’s too early to call Louis
and nearly too late to go home.

Joy Harjo (From How How We Became Human: 

New and Selected Poems 1975-2002)

Wordless Wednesday - Morning in My Cup

In the Great Blue Bowl of Morning

You awaken to skies that would make an impressionist painter feel like dancing, the late summer music of Canada geese singing in unison as they fly up from the river and out into farm fields to feed.  This year's progeny are singing loudest of all up there in the great blue bowl of morning, and their pleasure amplifies your own as you stand watching and listening in the garden with your mug of chai, your eyes shielded against the rising sun with a sleepy hand.

On an early walk with Spencer, you pause together by your neighbor's fish pond to watch the white and scarlet koi finning their way around in circles, and you notice that the first fallen maple leaves of the season have already drifted into the pool, making eddies and swirls and perfect round spirals on the surface.  No need to panic, it's not an early autumn, just the dry heat of August setting the first leaf people free to ramble.

If only (you muse to yourself) you could actually paint a sky as magnificent as this one.  You can't, and the camera will simply have to do - what the lens manages to capture, the person (you) holding it notwithstanding, is absolutely sumptuous.  Sky blue, rose, gold, violet and scarlet lodge in your wandering thoughts, and on the way home, you consider hauling out your potter's wheel, throwing a whole bunch of clay bowls and glazing them in just those perfect colors.  Emaho!

Eye to Eye and Leaf to Leaf

White-faced Meadowhawk (Sympetrum obtrusum)

Could anything be more delicate or more perfect than these luminous eyes and gossamer wings, the delicate legs and gracefully attenuated thorax?

For a moment, there is no up and no down, no in and no out, no here and no there.  There is just you and a small crimson dragonfly looking at each other over the edge of a spotted and rusty leaf in a Lanark thicket and sharing a late summer moment in utter stillness.  Everything else fades or dissolves or just falls away. 

When you return home, you ponder the idea of tapping in a few field notes about the dragonfly and decide that, no, your single photo says it all.

Willow, Rust and Quiet River

One on the Rocks

Green Frog (Rana clamitans)

My little friend on the rocks near the beaver pond is a true frog with a distinct tympanum (the round bronze spot on the side of the head).  A hearing device, the tympanum transmits sound waves to froggy's inner ear, protecting it (the inner ear, that is) from water and floating debris.  The prominent dorsolateral ridges down the back identify our lad as a green frog and not a bullfrog, similar in appearance, but bigger and lacking any dorsal ridges. Above the upper lip is a band of vibrant green, and the bright yellow throat below identifies this specimen as being male.

I don't mind admitting that I've always had a "thing" about frogs, particularly this species.  They look like cloisonné jewelry to me, and I love their dear little faces and cheerful expressions, their lustrous gold and black eyes and delicately webbed toes, their way of seeming quiet, at ease and completely attentive wherever they happen to be in the world. Frogs' legs will never appear on the menu here.

Their deep resonant twanging "gronk" in springtime is cheerful and a sure sign that warmer times are on their way - one of my favorite amphibian resources describes it as being like the vibration of a loose banjo string.  The pond musics are happy stuff, and they continue blithely well into midsummer and the end of the froggy mating season. Obviously the virtuoso vocal performances are being given to attract mates.

Once fertilized, clutches of eggs are secured to strands of underwater vegetation, and because of the long breeding season and extended larval stage, tadpoles normally overwinter in the ponds of their infancy before morphing into adults the following summer - both tadpoles and tiny adult "greenies" can be found in wild waters all through spring and summer. Small adult frogs are particularly fond of lily pads, and I've spent many an hour with younger members of my family looking at them through the eye of my camera or binoculars. There is always much "oohing and ahhing" when we return home and download the images from our outing into the computer.

It gos without saying that our own tadpoles have reams and skeins and clutches of questions about the life of frogs...  It's another field of study for the coming winter, and looking at the list compiled so far this year, I will need at least another century to cover everything.

Friday Ramble - Sweet Abundance

I rise early (by five o'clock) and trot out to the garden wearing my favorite faded cotton caftan, straw hat and sandals, and carrying a mug of Earl Grey.  It's already wickedly hot out there, and the scrap of waning moon dancing overhead is somewhat obscured by a high gossamer heat haze.  Yes indeed, another scorcher is on the way, and the only sentient beings here visibly (and audibly) happy about it are the mindfully foraging bees and the ripening vegetables in our garden: beans, peppers, tomatoes, carrots, chards and emerging gourds.  The zucchini vines (as always) are on the march and threatening to take over the garden, if not the whole wide world.

Oh honey sweet and hazy summer abundance....... That luscious word made its first appearance in the fourteenth century, coming down the years to us through Middle English and Old French from the Latin abundāns, meaning overflowing. The adjective form is abundant, and synonyms for it include:ample, generous, lavish, plentiful; copious; plenteous; exuberant; overflowing; rich; teeming; profuse; prolific, replete, teeming, bountiful and liberal.

Abundant is the perfect word for these circumstances of fullness, ripeness and plenty, as we weed and reap and gather in, freezing things, chucking things into jars, "putting things by" and storing the bounty of summer for consumption somewhere way up the road - like bees and squirrels, we scurry about, hoarding the contents of our gardens to nourish body and soul when temperatures fall and nights grow long.  Our cups are truly overflowing, but for all the sweetness and abundance held out in offering, there is a subtle ache to these long aestival days with their heats and hazes and ripening vegetables.  We love summer's heat and long for cooler times too, but these summer days are all too fleeting...