Spirit and flesh together manifest

Bashō might have caught

In his net of three short lines

This torrent of trills

Attadīpā viharatha

The world so vast tangled, hungry and I so small

I take this place for mine for so long we both

And on […]

Fresh snow is often an ideal medium on which diverse passages may be recorded and revealed, though their makers may remain mysterious unless actually witnessed. In this case, paw-prints are fairly distinct, but the rest? Sweeping tail, run-on landing, violent sneeze?

And more of same,

for a short span resolving into a reasonably […]

Near the bottom of winter, dawn comes late and low.

But where the sun’s elevation daily increases, open water wanes inconstant:

Some waterfowl, like the mute swans that now overwinter here, favor the pond so long as there beckons even a wing’s-breadth of open water, retreating to the rarely glassed-in river only when […]

And still they camped beside the hole, and still it never rained …

A few days of drizzle refresh the late wildflowers, helping them and their partners

to slake various hungers

and prepare for winter. But absent a hurricane to follow, these meager inches will not soon reach the deeper roots, leaving […]

Provision of an artifical puddle so close to a much larger (if somewhat less limpid) reservoir might seem redundant.

But smaller birds

and mammals

tend to dine and drink local, by preference. Even a hundred yards’ trek through broken woodland and across muddy bank consumes some effort, and even the […]

Though scarlet tanagers favor the kind of oak-rich mixed forest that prevails around Farrar Pond, they hang about in treetops and—despite dramatic coloration—are not often seen. This male

Piranga olivacea

was apparently driven into view by extreme local drought and perhaps itchy feather mites

(note eye-protecting nictitating membrane here and below), two […]