Spring flowers
autumn moon
summer breezes
winter snow:

With mind uncluttered
·  this is  ·
the finest season!

-Wúmén Huìkāi

Spirit of life

Breathing in, I calm my body. Breathing out, I smile. Dwelling in the present moment I know this is a wonderful moment.

–Thich Nhat Hanh, Being Peace

All that lives, on this planet, depends on oxygen to keep its metabolic fires alight. –All, that is, but the primordial and still vitally important […]

Separation is illusion

Speaking of ourselves

 

Two planets meeting face to face, One to the other cried “How sweet If endlessly we might embrace, And here for ever stay! how sweet If Heaven a little might relent, And leave our light in one light blent!”

But through […]

Windthrow

This sensuous tangle is not a strangler fig, nor yet any other alien monster:

~ ~ ~

Flying Squirrel Hollow, as sometime known, lies at the extreme southern point of Farrar Pond, indenting an edge of the glacial outwash plain forming the high ground to the south and west. A […]

Chromatic aberrations

Arc-en-ciel

Primary, secondary and teriary colors

They went thataway

Downfall and outflow

Sharper than needles: post-solstice sunset over Norwegian sea

Consumed walnut, outgrown collar

Lotus leaf in distress

[…]

The inconstant weed

Life is Juicy

Life begins in the waters— Not the deep, but the borders of land: The stagnants that nourish the sterile earth Like a juicy gland.

Life is the seed of the marriage Of liquid and solid events. In the coves, in the swamps, in mysterious pools …

–Leonard Bernstein […]

Shocks that phloem is heir to

The sap that sweetens our pancakes, preserves dinosaur blood in resined insects, and provides chewing gum, optical cement and incense evolved to serve many of the same purposes as our own blood and lymph, and a few besides. Injuries to bark and deeper layers lead to spillage of the vital fluid which (as with us) […]

Indian cigars

Of our many fine native trees, only a few exhibit really stunning floral displays. Of these, most offer their charms en masse, rather than in detail. An exceptional genus that in single-twig closeup can equal almost any native wildflower is the catalpa or catawba, Catalpa bignonioides and Catalpa speciosa. (The cousins are almost identical in […]

When you prune us

… do we not bleed?

Sloe shadblow sunset

Amelanchier canadensis

Prunus spinosa

Chaton de saule

French pussy willow

Seasonal sumac

Rhus typhina = staghorn sumac

 

Frosty fire

 

One for each night?

 

 

 

 

Hallowe’en shades (and tints)

Skeleton Dance (Heptacodium miconioides)

 

Antiparallel to Beltane, the cross-quarter holy day of Samhain marks the short tail of a scenic transition between riotous color and the muted browns and greys of the long half-light. Most birds and mammals

have put aside their flashy meeting-and-mating duds in favor of being invisible to […]