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 is happening more often than it used to, a lot more often. There are times when I post an image or two and don't scribble any words at all, just letting the images speak for themselves.

Plunking myself down in front of the computer with a mug of something or other, I skim the early news, and I cringe. I think about what is happening in the great wide world and am left speechless by the hatred, barbaric acts 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. I finish my mug of hot stuff and go out to the garden. Luckily, the bee sisters are good listeners. They offer wise words when I need them. They uplift my spirits and gladden my heart.

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

My departed soulmate and I watched over our wild orchid colony for years, protecting them from being eaten by deer and trampled by bears. Every year, I stretched out in the grass when they were blooming and marveled at their perfection, captured them with my lens and had long conversations with them. Now it is just Beau and I hanging out with the orchids, and we still do that, every year. In the midst of greed, global disease and human brutality, here they are again. Here too are we.

Events on the world stage are breaking many of us wide open, and we are confronting aspects of our humanity (or inhumanity) that we would rather not acknowledge, let alone address. My wild golden orchids are a powerful reminder of what it means to be alive in this beautiful world, and I am grateful for their counsel.