Friday Ramble - Golden

Large Yellow Lady Slipper

(Cypripedium parviflorum var pubescens) 

I sign on here in the morning, look at my photographic efforts, utter a silent "meh" and decide to say (or write) as little as possible. That seems to be happening more often than it used to.

Sequestered safe at home, I plunk myself down in front of the computer with a mug of tea and skim the early news. I cringe. I think about what is happening in the great wide world and am left speechless by horror, by sorrow and outrage. It isn't just the pandemic, but the hatred, barbarity and deliberate cruelty of recent human doings. How can we be doing this to each other? I can't find words for what is going on, or at least not the right words.

As I write, lady slippers are blooming in the Lanark highlands as they have for time out of mind. In their flickering alcoves, the orchids sing a capella in their own lilting voices, a testament to wildness and belonging and community. Whole hillsides of nodding golden beauty express the indwelling incandescent spirit of the living earth without any help at all from This Old Thing. Wild orchids are comforting and a balm to this world weary spirit.

My departed soulmate and I loved our wild orchid colony and watched over them for many years, protecting them from being eaten by deer and trampled by bears. Every year, I would lie down in the grass nearby and marvel at their perfection, have long conversations with them and capture them with my lens whenever I visited. In the midst of global disease and rampant human brutality, here they are again in all their golden perfection.

Events on the world stage have broken us wide open, and they compel us to confront aspects of our humanity that we would rather not acknowledge, let alone address. The orchids are a reminder of what it means to be human, and I am grateful for their counsel. Time to get to work.