Posted in Nature, weather, tagged Precipitation on December 5, 2021| Leave a Comment »
It started as pelting sleet, cold thoughts melting on arrival.
Gaining fortitude, graupel fell, bouncing with more intention. Then snow, thick, real, and complex, making a statement.
But not for long. Unfavorable conditions, the parties withdrew. Nobody noticed.
Posted in Eternal moments, Nature, Psycho-Bubbles, Reflections on the everyday, The Garden, tagged autumn, shadows, time on November 8, 2021| Leave a Comment »
The shadows of bush branches outside the window fall on the sunlit wall by my table.
The wind waves and they dance on the wall and along the tabletop.
Life is in those shadows. Seasons pass, decades, and the shadows send a signal of what is present somewhere, but not within my reach.
Their impression, more fluid than their being, is energy just passing through of the solid object upon which we are more inclined to focus.
Shadows can traverse time, forward and backward, infinite. While the object that opens that door is even now withering to autumn.
Posted in Nature, Reflections on the everyday, time, tagged consciousness, human body, time on July 19, 2021| Leave a Comment »
Have you noticed? You are getting older. So am I.
At my annual physical recently – a systems check of moving parts. cardiac, respiratory, gastrointestinal, musculature, neurological, and dermatological. Blood pressure — the force at which blood courses through veins to keep major organs fit. Blood pressure is a Goldilocks statistic — neither high nor low is just right.
In concert, these systems create the song that is you. Regardless of age, the collaboration of those systems, and that song, is changing, even now. The breath and thought of today cannot be the same tomorrow.
The pithy slogan “Change Happens,” reminds those with concretized views that change comes to each life. The deeper truth is we are change, conditioned upon those beautiful physiologic systems and the environments in which we find ourselves.
Sudden or chronic illness, or accident, drives home the message. If lucky, we are allowed to live within the one body granted us until it ages out of the game. Generation after generation until humans are no more.
Life is anguish for some, joy for others, maybe most of the time somewhere in between. Bridging the space between sky and earth, our bodies are the gift that allow us to feel, express, reflect, participate. They ferry us where we want to go on the planet, in its waters, and above.
Experience is the natural and sometimes hard-won aim of biological life. When systems fail and the body slumps, the kernel that is us trills on, star stuff once again. The drama, accomplishments, losses, and possessions mean naught but as the memories of others that will fade in time.
At dawn, noon, or dusk, mind the blood, mind the body, and enjoy your glorious time while it lasts.
Posted in Eternal moments, Nature, time, tagged sunrise on March 14, 2021| 1 Comment »
A single gull wends eastward against pink clouds underlit by the rising sun.
Perhaps it is Jonathon, dropping in for a visit to try a few new moves.
Posted in Eternal moments, Nature, tagged autumn, birds on September 12, 2020| Leave a Comment »
Just past full, a moon so bright only major constellations are visible.
Early morning, autumn in the air, just me and the night critters. An opossum and I startled each other mid-street.
Rounding a corner, an unmistakable call. Somewhere in the trees to my left was a Great Horned Owl, I stopped. Soon, I realized I was listening in the wrong direction. The call was coming from my right, a greenbelt behind a string of low-slung ranch-style homes.
Then I caught on. It was a duet, the conversation of two Great Horned Owls, with me in the middle. I listened in for some time before the call to my left threaded off as it flew quietly through the dark. My cue to leave.
There is magic in the language of owls. And a kind of hope, at least so says author Jane Yolen. “The kind of hope that flies on silent wings under a shining Owl Moon.”
Posted in COVID-19, Nature on July 19, 2020| Leave a Comment »
The clock stopped.
At approximately 10:55 AM or PM, on some day in the last five months, the three AA batteries powering the old alarm clock gave up. In about the same span, time stopped for more than 600,000 people globally who have, so far, perished at the receptors of an invisible viral invader.
I can replace the batteries. No one can replace the souls or salve the sorrow. Divine dictate does not drive pandemics. Germs do. That they outnumber us is a condition of residency on this planet.
Yet something stirs. Though stilled, there remains enough power in the clock for its light when touched in the dark. Something to that.
Posted in Eternal moments, Nature, Reflections on the everyday, The Garden on June 20, 2020| Leave a Comment »
Up the gentle green hill, mid-morning sun dapples through the leafy ring around this landscape. Pick up speed running down again, laughing, arms akimbo, making fluttering shadows in the sun.
What’s it all for?
Once many of us ran our own green slopes when young. Half a century later, probably few of those young’uns do. For me, time has collapsed, my future passed, and the timeless summer day comes again. If only for the exhilarating run past sun, shade, and flower on a peerless blue sky day.
Posted in Nature, tagged Bean sidhe, warnings on June 2, 2020| 1 Comment »
Has anyone else noticed how similar the wail of an ambulance siren is to the keen of the banshee?
Posted in Nature, Psycho-Bubbles on April 26, 2020| 1 Comment »
Electric medium, the mind. When Marshall McLuhan said the “medium is the message,” he meant the carrier, not the mode of the message. What, or more correctly, who is the carrier? You, me, we, and them. The background noise, the humanity of this planet.
Our flesh and chemistry, flickering substrate between heaven and earth, shadows against the wall, differing lives, intent, needs, joy, and despairs. Even socially distanced, we are a hive, like eventually finds like, online or off, the edges undulate, a sinuous dance snakes through time and space.
A fire that breathes. Inhale the future, exhale a life story. Billions of eyes peer out, taking in scenes that feed restless souls. What have your eyes seen? A sight seared into memory three decades ago, or the angle of light this afternoon? Sight or vision, outer or inner, each image adds to the primordial visual cortex that is human history.
Unlimited by distance, we share what we see, all that was, or ever is, ours to recollect.
Posted in Nature, Reflections on the everyday, The Garden, tagged Age, gardens, Home on April 11, 2020| Leave a Comment »
There are many type of gardens, most improve with age. And sometimes age says more about the gardener than the garden.
For as long as I recall, my mother kept a fair-sized garden at the house where I grew up. Only the second place she ever lived, her garden welcomed many varieties and the occasional native plant, long before native plants were popular in residential gardens.
It was not until my mother was into her 70’s that I learned she did not come to gardening on her own. It was the chain-smoking, bottle-blonde older neighbor with an affinity for Yorkie dogs that introduced her to the hobby. The neighborhood was new then, mostly rancher homes with no landscaping save for the barren hardscape of a construction zone.
Mother of two when she moved in, eventually two more children came along, and the garden began to take shape. Phlox, lilies, ornamental shrubbery, scrub oak, columbine, and a host of perennials came and stayed for the duration. A few larger trees arrived over the years, an Austrian pine, Linden, Quaking aspen, Hawthorne, and Mountain Ash, several of which remain today.
My mother was reliably found in the garden, enriching the soil year after year with a cup or two of peat moss in each planting hole, dipped out of a colorfully painted tin cup that was old even when I was young.
The gardening styles of my mother and I are wholly different. While my mother established and tended the mainstays of her garden for decades, I cultivate changeability, welcoming volunteers, being romanced by new introductions, stalking my garden with a trowel in one hand and unexpected entrant in the other, looking for the right spot–or sometimes any spot. Her garden was steady, mine forever shape-shifting.
My mother retired some time ago, her garden figuring prominently in each day after that. She volunteered for years at the local botanical garden, and there is a bench there that bears her name. When I visited home, we walked and talked in the garden, discussing plants and their habits. As any gardener knows, one of the secrets of a garden is its timelessness. There is no before, or after, there is simply the face of the garden as it is now.
I visited again last August. In her 90th year, my mother does not have a great deal of short term memory. There had been talk of a move to assisted-living, as aging in place with assistance simply wasn’t enough anymore.
After I arrived, we chatted inside the house. I had the discomfiting feeling that my mother could not altogether place me. While I was used to reintroducing topics or people, this was something different.
As we spoke, I glanced out the picture window that takes in a terraced garden in the back of the house. The garden, long home to a community of robust plantings, was three-quarters covered by an invasive grass, beautiful in the breeze, but entirely hiding the differentiated species that may yet be struggling there. Startled, I asked her about the grass. She looked out unperturbed, saying only that it grew well there.
Though lovely, the grass is homogeneous, smothering wherever it grows, it has nothing to say and little to show. A metaphor of the mind, the grass had overtaken the decades of detail of the life that tended it. The gardener is no longer in residence.
A few weeks later, my mother moved into a beautiful assisted living facility. There are kind people, good meals, and interesting activities. She adjusted well, with help, over time. There is a sunny courtyard in which to walk and the garden that I thought she would miss does not come up in our telephone conversations.
COVID-19 is stalking the residents of assisted living and nursing facilities throughout this country. Family visits curtailed, packages quarantined, employees tested for symptoms on each arrival. But like seeds of invasive grasses, the progenitors of COVID-19 are rarely seen, showing only after the virus has taken hold in a fragile human ecosystem. Like everyone around the world, we can only wait.
On my next visit, I will bring starts of some of the plants in her garden with me, and her garden will live on, far from its original setting. That is the way with gardens, even when the gardener goes home.
Shouldn't...but Do 