Easing in

Light when the power goes out.

You wake from dreams of doom and – for a moment – you know: beyond all the noise and the gestures, the only real thing, love’s calm unwavering flame in the half-light of an early dawn.

~ Dag Hammarskjöld

A Friday farrago: In the woods and swamp

A moment in the woods.  (Janes Island)

Peace is this moment without judgment. That is all. This moment in the Heart-space Where everything that is is welcome.

~ Dorothy Hunt

The Great Cypress Swamp

View from out on the river during Sunday’s boat excursion.

If we want to use forests as a weapon in the fight against climate change, then we must allow them to grow old, which is exactly what large conservation groups are asking us to do.

~ Peter Wohlleben, The Hidden Life of Trees 

A Monday meander: Janes Island

Crown shyness.

But we shouldn’t be concerned about trees purely for material reasons, we should also care about them because of the little puzzles and wonders they present us with. Under the canopy of the trees, daily dramas and moving love stories are played out. Here is the last remaining piece of Nature, right on our doorstep, where adventures are to be experienced and secrets discovered. And who knows, perhaps one day the language of trees will eventually be deciphered, giving us the raw material for further amazing stories. Until then, when you take your next walk in the forest, give free rein to your imagination-in many cases, what you imagine is not so far removed from reality, after all!

~ Peter Wohlleben, The Hidden Life of Trees

November

Leaves cascading.

November–with uncanny witchery in its changed trees. With murky red sunsets flaming in smoky crimson behind the westering hills. With dear days when the austere woods were beautiful and gracious in a dignified serenity of folded hands and closed eyes–days full of a fine, pale sunshine that sifted through the late, leafless gold of the juniper-trees and glimmered among the grey beeches, lighting up evergreen banks of moss and washing the colonnades of the pines. Days with a high-sprung sky of flawless turquoise. Days when an exquisite melancholy seemed to hang over the landscape and dream about the lake. But days, too, of the wild blackness of great autumn storms, followed by dank, wet, streaming nights when there was witch-laughter in the pines and fitful moans among the mainland trees.

~ L. M. Montgomery