A Monday meander: The greening

So pretty in pink.

I am thinking about time in both directions now — not just a future that will roll on without me, and without so many of the creatures I love, but a past I was not alive to remember.  I think about the American chestnuts, today so rare that their locations are often closely kept secrets among researchers trying to understand why this scant handful survived.  All the vanishing plants and creatures I love so dearly are, I know, only the barest remnant of the abundance this landscape once sustained.  There were twice as many songbirds the year I was born as there are now, and even that teeming number is paltry by comparison to those who lived when chestnuts reigned over the eastern forests.

… The world will always be beautiful to those who look for beauty.  Throats will always catch when the fleeing clouds part fleetingly and the golden moon flashes into existence and then winks out again.  Tears will always spring up at the wood thrush singing through the echoing trees, at the wild geese crying as they fly.  A soul touched by the scent of turned soil or sun-warmed grass, a spirit moved by crickets singing in the grass, will spend a lifetime surrounded by wonder even as songbirds drop one by one from the poisoned sky and crickets fall silent in the poisoned grass.

Apocalyptic stories always get the apocalypse wrong.  The tragedy is not the failed world’s barren ugliness.  The tragedy is its clinging beauty even as it fails.  Until the very last cricket falls silent, the beauty-besotted will find a reason to love the world.

~ Margaret Renkl, The Comfort of Crows: A Backyard Year

A Monday meander: Imagining what’s possible

Imagining what spring will bring.

There is a pattern to the universe and everything in it, and there are knowledge systems and traditions that follow this pattern to maintain balance, to keep the temptations of narcissism in check. But recent traditions have emerged that break down creation systems like a virus, infecting complex patterns with artificial simplicity, exercising a civilizing control over what some see as chaos. The Sumerians started it. The Romans perfected it. The Anglosphere inherited it. The world is now mired in it. The war between good and evil is in reality an imposition of stupidity and simplicity over wisdom and complexity.

Sand Talk: How Indigenous Thinking Can Save the World by Tyson Yunkaporta

Watery thoughts and questions

A pool of light in a dark swamp. (Reflections.)

Water has great generosity and humility. It insists on no particular shape. It takes on the shape of whatever contains it: jug, stream, well, river, lake, ocean, tears, rain, mist or moisture. In this sense water holds a wonderful imaginative invitation in it.

The imagination is always drawn to the hidden form of things. Through its patience it coaxes the form to emerge.

….

… the imagination is a faculty that is oblique and indirect. It works to discover the forms of perception and possibility that we need for our journey. Imagination attends to the great flow of life, and in this way it elicits the form of one’s identity as it emerges from the matrix of one’s experience.

text excerpted from © The Four Elements, John O’Donohue (2010, Transworld Ireland, pp 45-46)

What are you scared of?

Entering the cave.  Mixed media on paper.

Meanwhile, at the edge of consciousness, we sense a kind of absence. It is not easy to articulate, but it carries its own dark middle-of-the-night fear, its own harrowing. It’s the sense that we have become disconnected from meaning in a way that we don’t even know how to perceive. We sense it when we worry that we cannot stem the flow of our materialism. We sense it when the pull of our smartphones feels a lot like an addiction. We sense it when we realise that our lives are lived in the controlled climate of air conditioning, but we still don’t want to feel the weather outside.

~ Katherine May, Enchantment: Awakening Wonder in an Anxious Age

The Cosmos is filled with precious gems. Each moment you are alive is a gem, shining through and containing earth and sky, water and clouds. It needs you to breathe gently for the miracles to be displayed. Suddenly you hear the birds singing, the pines chanting, see the flowers blooming, the blue sky, the white clouds… We should enjoy our happiness and offer it to everyone. Cherish this very moment… Let go of distress and embrace Life fully in your arms.

~ Thich Nhat Hanh

A Monday meander: Traveling back to the swamp

A walk in the Great Dismal Swamp.

We are this wondrous walking machine. We have evolved to set one foot in front of the other. We are exquisitely tuned to do this.

~ Paul Salopek

swamp

Our common word swamp comes from a rustic dialect of English, and only became widely used in North America in the seventeenth century.  Swamp is a truly popular word, with a broad range of meanings, referring to wet spongy ground and often used interchangeably with bog, marsh, mire, and fen.  But in precise usage, swamp refers to land with more trees than a marsh, better drained than a bog.  A swamp has stretches of low-lying ground often interspersed with pools and hammocks of raised soil.  Swamp water steeps roots and rotting vegetation, and is often colored like tea… Swamps are Noah’s Ark of species, where scores of birds, insects, spiders, and amphibians  live in the recesses.  A paradise of alligators, muskrats, sometimes bears and panthers, swamps are a significant refuge for wildlife partly  because they are of little commercial use unless drained.  The Great Dismal Swamp in Virginia and the Okefenokee Swamp in Georgia are two of the largest and best known.  Swamps are places of overwhelming diversity of life, or primeval, melancholic gloom and ecological subtlety, haunted by poisonous insects, spiders, reptiles, and rare flowers, and sheltering great beauty.

~ Robert Morgan, from Home Ground: Language for an American Landscape

Future or past?

Nature’s mandala in the woods.

The circle is a reminder that each moment is not just the present, but is inclusive of our gratitude to the past and our responsibility to the future.

– Kazuaki Tanahashi

Colleges and universities

Borderline. (On Sassafras Mountain in South Carolina, sometimes North Carolina, October 2023)

Study hard what interests you the most in the most undisciplined, irreverent and original manner possible.
― Richard Feynmann

Wisdom is not a product of schooling but of the lifelong attempt to acquire it.
― Albert Einstein