Beautiful October days

Good morning from the garden where the zinnias have gone mad with blooms.

We’re all — trees, humans, insects, birds, bacteria — pluralities. Life is embodied network. These living networks are not places of omnibenevolent Oneness. Instead, they are where ecological and evolutionary tensions between cooperation and conflict are negotiated and resolved. These struggles often result not in the evolution of stronger, more disconnected selves but in the dissolution of the self into relationship.

Because life is network, there is no “nature” or “environment,” separate and apart from humans. We are part of the community of life, composed of relationships with “others,” so the human/nature duality that lives near the heart of many philosophies is, from a biological perspective, illusory. We are not, in the words of the folk hymn, wayfaring strangers traveling through this world.

Nor are we the estranged creatures of Wordsworth’s lyrical ballads, fallen out of Nature into a “stagnant pool” of artifice where we misshape “the beauteous forms of things.” Our bodies and minds, our “Science and Art,” are as natural and wild as they ever were.

We cannot step outside life’s songs. This music made us; it is our nature.

—David George Haskell

Walktober begins today

Sumac putting on her autumn colors.

Let’s take a walk. You can show me some of your memories and I’ll show you some of mine.

~ Adam Berlin, Number of Missing

Who can open the door who does not reach for the latch?
Who can travel the miles who does not put one foot
in front of the other, all attentive to what presents itself
continually?
Who will behold the inner chamber who has not observed
with admiration, even with rapture, the outer stone?

Well, there is time left —
fields everywhere invite you into them.

And who will care, who will chide you if you wander away
from wherever you are, to look for your soul?

~ Mary Oliver, excerpted from Have You Ever Tried to Enter the Long Black Branches?, West Wind: Poems and Prose Poems

Windy and hot

Nearing the end.

The true harvest of my daily life is somewhat as intangible and indescribable as the tints of morning or evening. It is a little star-dust caught, a segment of the rainbow which I have clutched.

— Henry D. Thoreau

A Monday meander: Wild and green

Hostas on a rainy day.

I believe that if one fathoms deeply one’s own neighborhood and the everyday world in which he lives, the greatest of worlds will be revealed.

~ Masanobu Fukuoka, The One-Straw Revolution 

You can’t know who you are until you know where you are.

~ Wendell Berry

The flowers are insane this year

A touch of sunlight.

The ‘what should be’ never did exist, but people keep trying to live up to it. There is no ‘what should be,’ there is only what is.

~ Lenny Bruce

In every age “the good old days” were a myth. No one ever thought they were good at the time. For every age has consisted of crises that seemed intolerable to the people who lived through them.

~ Brooks Atkinson

A Monday meander: Light and blooms

Star seeds.

We are not separate from this Earth; we are a part of it, whether we fully feel it in our bodies yet or not.

~ Sharon Blackie, If Women Rose Rooted