Posted in Nature on August 31, 2011| Leave a Comment »
In life and in nature, the aftermath of a storm oftentimes becomes the defining feature of its passage.
What takes seconds to damage or destroy, may take weeks, months, or years to repair. Trauma. Loss of power, loss of place. Some damage – to relationship, psyche, or home – is irreparable.
To those I know, and those I do not, affected by the tide and tumult of Hurricane Irene, my thoughts are with you.
Posted in Nature, Psycho-Bubbles on July 22, 2011| Leave a Comment »
Do you remember them? The secret things. Touchstones. When you were very young?
Big things like trees, and floors, envelopes, the corner space inhabited by…something. A picture you should not have seen, conversations overheard, strings you tied, the marble you took.
Troll doors, special stones, digging in the dirt – a head full, a handful, waiting for life to start.
And it did, and it flew, and maybe it never came back.
But for some it does, it did for me. Unchained day and one trilling cicada.
Inhabited, forever…and a day. Those secret things.
Posted in Nature, Reflections on the everyday on July 20, 2011| Leave a Comment »
Flash! One second on, two seconds off, flash, flash.
No, not a lighthouse, just a perimenopausal female.
Being a woman of a certain age, I experience more hot flashes these days – the mark of time on my biology. While some women suffer a great deal with hot flashes, mine come and go quickly, seasonal life change registered in flesh, instead of through thought or environment.
While the very act of living is to inhabit an animal body, hot flashes, at least for me, amplify that experience. Intense, heated skin sidetracks an ever busy mind into grounded, expansive physicality. A pause, a flash, the wanton luxury of feeling deeply, searingly alive. Makes a gal want to toss back her head and howl at the moon – or the sun.
This aging business – sometimes it is not so bad.
Posted in Nature, Reflections on the everyday on July 16, 2011| Leave a Comment »
Watching the midnight moon do a silhouette tango with a grove of trees I had not before noticed.
Tall, swaying, reaching. Following them branch to base, had to laugh. They are my trees, quaking aspens, planted from slender sticks years ago, now long above the roofline.
Populus tremuloides, known for their sensitive hearing and responsive nodding to notes on the wind. Archaic associations with the regenerative cycle of the moon itself. Folks of that ilk always find favor with me.
The music ended, the moon glided on, leaving the trees to their onward stretch to the stars.
Posted in Nature, Reflections on the everyday on April 15, 2011| Leave a Comment »
Wind out of the east. Wind out of the south. Barometer says rain, my weather stick says sun. Flags whipping in a strong breeze, halyard rapping the pole sounds like a Christmas bell.
The wind is scouring – garden debris, summertime watering cans, holiday decorations, toys out for adventure in a different yard. Trees in the greenbelt swaying ten feet side to side, their voices as loud as airplanes passing overhead.
Blue sky wed by wind to greening earth. Presence. A powerful landscape otherwise mistaken for a suburban neighborhood on another spring day. But I saw it. Heard it. Awaken. Time has come to call.
Posted in Nature on March 24, 2011| Leave a Comment »
Time is a human construct – how we measure life, classes, services. Abiding by its own rules, Nature plays with time, evolving forward, recoiling back.
Despite the tight grip of humanity on chronology, its measure is intruded upon regularly. Common experiences fiddle with time – boredom stretches, ecstasy evaporates time, anxiety deepens it.
Trauma can reduce an entire life to flashback, yet seem endless, leaving a permanent, but ever-changing mark on a personal landscape.
Recently, the 8.9 magnitude earthquake near Japan resulted in untold personal grief and tragedy as well as a geographic shift of Earth’s mass – potentially shortening our days (albeit a couple millionths of a second) – and contributing further to the tilt of Earth’s axis.
Time and Nature. As above, so below. By person, or by planet – when ground shakes – time flies.
Posted in Nature, Reflections on the everyday on October 21, 2010| Leave a Comment »
The tree in front of me is tall, but young. A maple, with drifts of chartreuse leaves shifting and fluttering on the breeze. Opposite, another maple, orange red, lifting, breathing. An intimate, soulful, autumnal room.
By nature I am a springtime gal – inquisitive, alert for the novel, how things grow, a million starts, the skipping glory of old ideas grown new.
But never has the beauty, the whispering decay of autumn been so affecting. As vibrant, as energetic as spring, but mellowed with age. Bright spring colour replaced by deeper shades, deeper thoughts. Weathered resilience.
Am I alone in thinking leaves know their way? An invisible thread leads each on its path. To twirl among falling leaves, to partake in a thousand stories.
I sit before that landscape now. Deciduous forest, carpet of colour, vertical, textured grey-brown trunks. Shssssssh, Shsssssssh, omnipresent wind animates the place entirely.
Pneuma, spiritos. Were I a mystic, I would laugh aloud, clap once and say I am the world I see. I swallowed it years ago and it feeds me still.
But I am not. And so I twirl through these woods, with the leaves, with the threads – the profound beauty of decline.
Posted in Nature, Reflections on the everyday on October 15, 2010| Leave a Comment »
Sunny days and crisp nights have conspired to create a symphony of foliage in my neck of the woods.
Hues of gold, red, sienna, purple. Fantastic licks of green, burgundy, black, orange. Autumnal riot.
The dimming sun coaxes deep colour forward like no other time of the year. Degradation of green chloroplasts defines summer’s demise, allowing pigments – carotenoids, xanthophylls, anthocyanin – to blush brightly, transforming a ubiquitous robe of shimmering greens into a patchwork cloak.
Individuals stand forth in the autumn of life, from the great crowd of green. No more one of the same, but distinct, with colour that highlights, speaks the story of life lived from those roots.
The forest tells the tale – the gift of the genotype, played out in the unique expression of the phenotype. Where that seed landed, was the soil rich for its personality? Was it lean? Did the sapling grow straight? Was it shaded, crowded, or attacked by disease in a way that shaped its form otherwise?
Did lightening destroy the canopy that protected it? Did fire sweep through and create altogether different conditions? Did it get enough water, nutrient, at critical moments, or did it make do?
And once grown, each year brought different challenges, different grace, until it is, as they say, what it is.
True colours show with age. Deepening, flickering, from year to year, from breath to breath.
Their stories – the beauty, the ugliness – exhilarate me. Were I to stand among them, quiet, I could disappear.
Posted in Nature, Reflections on the everyday on September 17, 2010| Leave a Comment »
The cirrus clouds are marvelous today. Covering half the sky, wisps and curls tow tufts from the western horizon. Formed at very high altitudes, cirrus clouds are composed of ice crystals – heavy things light enough to fly. Awake only to themselves, they stretch in glory under the sun.
High and away, cirrus clouds have no connection to our ground, our world of minutiae. Theirs is a grand scene, visible from before to after. They have not the ponderousness of storm clouds, lightening does not ensue, and they do not ensnare building and driver in foggy clutch.
A passing beauty to our too-important-world, they snort and toss their heads at our drudgery.
But they move for a reason – in flight from an upper air disturbance, maybe a frontal system. They can see, and so could we. But so many look and so few see – what really comes this way.
Posted in Nature, Psycho-Bubbles on August 7, 2010| Leave a Comment »
The weeds scared me.
Growing through my gardens, knee-high, choking out Agastache, Asclepias and Liatris. They spread from the lawn, where they had taken over scorched patches caused by built-up thatch and too closely shorn grass.
Abundant rain and sun facilitated their growth, my neglect provided ample opportunity. By late July, my only haven, the secret sanctuary of roots I do not have, almost unrecognizable.
Last summer, X announced his liberty just as I began a minor restorative campaign. Summer into autumn and the disorder that trails that soul left my garden to its own devices.
It bore it well. By October, its wildishness remained intact. No one died, they only waited. I promised I would return.
By spring, drama from X intensified, but still the clematis bloomed, the spicy fragrance of lilium volatilized by hot days wafted in the windows at night.
But by July, the gardens lost form, unable to hold their own any longer, they gave way to the insidious greed of broadleaf weeds. Too occupied by worldly demands, I could not help, and my Other-world receded behind a featureless green scrim.
It was then the weeds scared me. A thin metaphor for my own existence, the enormity of neglect was beyond my power – grown beyond any reasonable hope of salvage by me. Too much thatch, cut too close, overtaken by things that know no bounds.
Being overwhelmed is usual for me these days, but this experience gave rise to fears of unsustainable life, deep detachment of hope, that beauty – vast, hidden and resourceful – is no longer a domain I am entitled to. To shrink, shrivel roots, and blow off, not as seed, but dead waste, coarse stalk, chaff.
The new lease came from the Practical Friend. As tenaciously gripped with this world as I am with the Other, this one is also a gardener. Day blended into evening and still we pulled weeds from turf and terrain, bushels, the mosquitoes fed well that night. By conclusion of next day, hot and humid, the gardens were cleared, visible, breathing again.
It frightens me still, that my hold here is so tenuous, that I needed help beyond my self to retrieve, to revive a connection so invaluable to me. Can I maintain it? I remain shaken by the closeness, the ease of heartless, adaptable weeds.
My gratitude to the Practical Friend is immense, as it is to those who quietly emerge in moments like these in my life. I wish I did not need help, I wish I understood.
Shouldn't...but Do 