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: 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

A few prompts behind

At the start of the day.

As we apprentice ourselves to the way of nature, we begin to understand that all of life is in a continuous cycle of giving and receiving. It is the honoring of this cycle that makes us feel at home in ourselves and in relation to the rest of nature.

~ Toko-pa Turner, Belonging: Remembering Ourselves Home

Many of us feel that longing to return, for a spiritual homecoming. This is not a return to some imaginary past when America was great. It is a return to a relationship with the holy and the wild that echoes the intimacy our ancestors knew, but also heals the wounds that severed us from the rest of our human and more-than-human kinfolk in the first place.

We re-member ourselves back into sacred relationship by responding with an open heart to the Holy Wild who calls us back into communion. It may feel like a series of odd synchronicities — a small bird who lands on the railing close to you and looks you straight in the eye for an instant, a sense of welcoming you can’t explain nor deny when you slow down on your daily walk and notice the saplings and crows as individual beings, or a feeling of being witnessed by other people who are walking a similar path of return.

~ from the Center For Wild Spirituality newsletter

Hello, my name is…

That’s not right. It’s some other bird.

Does the robin sing because the cold of winter is leaving or the warmth of spring is coming? Or might he be singing because each without the other would lessen both?

~ Craig D. Lounsbrough

Like the robin, we sometimes sing to show how strong we are, and we sometimes sing in hope of better times. We sing either way.

~ Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

Security blankets and stuffies

Sitting in church. (Antioch Church in Princess Anne, MD. They have a bear in each pew as comfort for those who need them.  If someone feels the need to take the bear home with them, someone else comes along with a new bear.)

Books, for me, are a home. Books don’t make a home–they are one, in the sense that just as you do with a door, you open a book, and you go inside. Inside there is a different kind of time and a different kind of space.
― Jeanette Winterson, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?

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

A Monday meander: Sassafras Mountain

Misty morning sunrise here on the ranch.

… Bliss is like the sun, which represents pure, unfiltered, energetic experience of the mind.  It is too much for us, as embodied beings, to experience.  It would annihilate the body in the same way getting too close to the sun would annihilate our planet.  It is an experience of the mind; the body cannot hold it.

Happiness is the heat and light we experience from the sun as earth-bound creatures.  However, we can’t always feel the full light and warmth of the sun.  There are cloudy days and cold, wintery days during which we feel disconnected from the sun.  Joy, on the other hand, is not only about feeling the warmth and light from the sun but also remembering that the sun is always there, even when the day is cloudy and cold.  Joy is the consistent state of believing in the sun and having that belief constantly sustain us when we choose it.

~ Lama Rod Owens, The New Saints