January 1

I acknowledge that calendars are of man’s making and his need to keep track of time, but I also acknowledge that I like the idea of New Beginnings. As an aging hippy chick I have always loved the phrase “Today is the first day of the rest of your life”. I know it would be easy to dismiss it as a cliché or heaven forbid a “duh” moment, but I’d rather not. I also have decided that I would rather not think of it as inverting an hour glass of sand, for eventually the sand will run out. No, I like the river analogy much better. I always liked the water cycle when I taught science. There is no beginning or end, just constant change, change in speed from a lazy bayou to dangerous rapids and roaring falls, change in state from solid sleet, ice or snow, to liquid that cannot hold its own shape, to fog hanging low over the valley. My favorite teaching moments were always about water, taking a cold can of soda from the icebox and watching the water condense out of thin air, or covering a plant in clear plastic to prove transpiration.

So friends, I will try to “go with the flow” but I know there will be times when I may need a set of oars, or an extra set of hands to help me, or maybe even a raincoat. I know there will be times when I float on a warm ocean current and watch the water laden clouds float above me, and I know there will be storms aplenty. Such is the nature of Life. It will not always be smooth sailing but it will always be a kick, so BRING IT On!!!

December 14, 2018

AWARENESS:

The day was clear and cold and I shuffled along like a little girl kicking the fallen dry leaves on the ground and counting squirrel nests. You can see them so clearly this time of year

In many ways winter allows us to be even more aware of the natural world around us. The scents in the air seem so clean and crisp and I love to inhale deeply and say a meditation of thanks for being given this day and not despair of the darkness that sometimes shadows over me, obscuring the path. I am learning not to panic and just run off thinking I can outrun the shadows. Often now I will just sit quietly and let them pass overhead, as I know the shadows and fear are what allow us to experience the light and the joy and like it or not they all have their place is the cosmos.

I spotted a row of some type of shrubbery showing all the stages of its transition from summer to winter. Some leaves still green and some have already fallen and some defy words in explaining the hues and textures they have. The leaves had thorns on the edges and soft white hairs. A friend recently told me that even though we think of the leaves as “changing colors in the fall” that isn’t exactly what happens. The colors were there all along. I had to check this out and sure enough the explanation I read confirmed this, though it is really just part of the story.

During winter, there is not enough light or water for photosynthesis. The trees will rest, and live off the food they stored during the summer. They begin to shut down their food-making factories. The green chlorophyll disappears from the leaves. As the bright green fades away, we begin to see yellow and orange colors. Small amounts of these colors have been in the leaves all along. We just can’t see them in the summer, because they are covered up by the green chlorophyll. The bright reds and purples we see in leaves are made mostly in the fall. In some trees, like maples, glucose is trapped in the leaves after photosynthesis stops. Sunlight and the cool nights of autumn cause the leaves turn this glucose into a red color. The brown color of trees like oaks is made from wastes left in the leaves.

It is the combination of all these things that make the beautiful fall foliage colors we enjoy each year.

I really like this explanation because it shows us that there is so much around us that is often hidden or waiting to reveal itself in the proper time. It shows me patience and humility and somehow the unimportance of time.

Everything around us is extraordinary in its own way. We just need to open ourselves to the AWARENESS.

Hope you like the photograph.

Z

Dec 12, 2018

“Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.”

― Søren Kierkegaard

Today I wandered past an old church and glanced up at the window and became mesmerized by the reflections of clouds and sky. I must have watched it for a while because when it first caught my eye the sky was dismal and overcast and then my mind cleared the sky was blue and the clouds drifting by were white and full.

I have heard it said that life comes down to a few great moments but how are we to question and evaluate the moments of our lives and know which of all the moments that have passed by with stealth and brought us times of love, sorrow, joy or despair is a great moment?

I think our lives, when reflected upon, will show us that all the moments, no matter how seemingly insignificant, are connected together and, like the seasons and the tides, our lives ebb and flow and change and sometimes burn bright and sometimes the colors are subdued, perhaps so we might hear the sounds that surround us and those sounds resonate with varying tempos. Sometimes we barely catch the beat and sometimes the sounds seems to shout at us and enter our brains and souls and set up housekeeping like they have found a home at last or even as if they had their birth there.

When I reflect on my life I cannot define any moment as great because it is the continuity and the connections of all the moments that pulsate and blend and make up my past that give me the strength and the courage to keep putting one foot in front of the other and walk into my future.

The moments that felt like the shade of a magnolia tree on a hot summer day and the moments that made my skin crawl and itch like a hot prairie wind are all part of the Plan.

Every reflection seems to showcase a different moment and give me new perspective and insight into who I am and what purpose my life has served and what possibilities lie ahead. The reflections drift by like the clouds in that church window showing me that change is not only inevitable it is not to be feared because the change is just part of the natural world I live in.

“An unexamined life is not worth living”

Plato

Paul Cezanne once said that In order to make progress, there is only nature, and the eye is turned through contact with her. The turning of the eye is a simple phrase that speaks of knowledge and enlightenment to me, to seeing the world in new and different ways.

I took this photograph a few weeks ago and I find myself going back to look at it time and time again. It was an ornamental cabbage upon which a feather had fallen. The ornamental cabbage was silverish grey with a hint of the blue/green I have seen in the shells of some Araucana chickens, and the feather a dark grey/brown that shimmered and the tiny individual vanes with their barbs so intricately woven that light cast shadows and gave then depth.

I think what attracts me to this is the subtlety of color and texture.

Sometimes Nature shows us the beauty of our world by shouting through bright colors and dancing in manic movements like storm clouds or wind howling, or white caps on blue ocean waves. When I experience this I often feel like shouting with glee and letting the immense energy take me away to that place where I can sing out of key and jump and twirl and make sudden movements like a hip-hop dance until I dissolve into giggles and hiccups.

Other times Nature shows us the beauty of soft and subtle through the blending of continuous tones and hues using light and shadow. This photograph makes me think of moonlight and a breeze so gentle it is like the erotic brush of soft lips on my cheek and a whisper in my ear that I understand not through words but through some magical tingle of understanding. I can imagine I am light as air and wearing a gown of dark gossamer silk, spun from the spinnerets of the golden orb spider of Madagascar I have read about, and woven so finely that the weave itself is barely discernible. The feel of the silk on my skin as I sway and swoop and move my arms through the air takes my breath away and moves me almost to tears.

Nature entices me and it is an invitation I am pleased to accept. I love feeling connected to the world around me as it seems to mimic my life and my emotions and give me comfort and a small amount of understanding and release from the fear that sometimes overcomes me.

Oenothera speciosa

Pretty Plucked Pressed Pink Primrose Petals

Last Spring I wanted the wild primroses to last forever. Knowing that was not the way of things I picked one and pressed it between the pages of a watercolor sketchbook. I came across it yesterday and wanted to share it. The petals were so transparent you could see through them to the stem beneath. You can even see the tiny delicate hairlike texture of the stems.

It was so wonderful to experience its joy once again, especially when I least expected to.

It made me smile and think of meadows in the mountains. I closed my eyes and I imagined I actually caught a whiff of its delicate fragrance. At least I assume it was just my imagination 🙂

“Wild is the music of autumnal winds amongst the faded woods.”

William Wordsworth (1770 – 1850)

The days grow short and the nights lengthen. I wander the woods and watch the leaves fall softly and marvel at how different each one is. 

Fall is, for Nature, a time of sowing, of scattering her bounty, of letting go of what has taken months to create, from last Spring’s bud, to new leaves and flowers, to from it and seeds. It isn’t an end at all. It is a fulfillment of Cosmic Destiny. It is just another part of The Journey. There is so much beauty and life around me and secrets to be heard if only I listen.

Deep within the fruits, nuts, and berries are the seeds of the Future. I feel it within myself.

The genetic code for each individual species is held within each tiny seed and Autumn is the time of ripening and sending these seeds out into the world so that the cycle never ends.

There are wild hickory nuts and black walnuts, pecans, and pine nuts, and seed pods galore, bursting open for the birds to eat and carry far and wide. Squirrels and chipmunks and raccoons are busy gathering and storing the abundance. I see berries of blue and pink and red and black maturing and falling. I known it is all part of the Great Mystery and I am honored to bear witness. I even spotted a wild turkey!

Everywhere I turn I see the change, the flowing of time, the turning of the Great Wheel. I feel the Purpose and the Connection.

I wander through the trees and notice that the sounds of Autumn in the woods are different. There is crispness underfoot, a crunch and a rustle of leaves. The sound of the wind as it whistles through the falling leaves has a sharpness I had not noticed before.

I walk beside the creek and watch the water carry leaves of almost indescribable colors over lichen covered rocks and down the mountainside. I feel alive and full of joy.

The sun begins to descend and I watch with wonder as the mountainside across the valley reflects the evening light and all the trees glow gold and red with a vibrancy that seems to say they know their place and their purpose and are grateful.

There are so many lessons I have yet to learn and maybe relearn as the wheel keeps turning and there is newness about and changes and facets never before seen or felt. I try to remember that Life is a Dance. It is a beautiful, graceful, and exotic dance and the steps change and the motion of my body sways to sounds I did not know existed before. I laugh when I think of the days when I used to say “I can’t dance. I don’t know how.” I reach out my hands and feel My Creator take them and I am light and I twirl and spin and I know the Future is never ending and I seem to understand that there is no need to hurry, that it isn’t going away. Every moment is as an eternity and exists forever.

Thoughts for today….
Oct 25, 2018

I shared some photographs this summer of magnolia blossoms. They were incredibly soft and delicate looking. In a few days the blossoms began to turn brown and I did not photograph those. Then yesterday I went back to the courtyard where the magnolia trees grow and found my blossom had transformed itself into seed pods and bright red seeds were forming. While I had thought its beauty passed with the dying of the bloom it was really just changing and the changes were deliberate and part of its journey. Sometimes I despair of my sadness, but I must have faith in its purpose.

Below is a quote I like…
So you must not be frightened if a sadness rises up before you larger than any you have ever seen; if a restiveness, like light and cloud shadows, passes over your hands and over all you do. You must think that something is happening with you, that life has not forgotten you, that it holds you in its hand; it will not let you fall. Why do you want to shut out of your life any uneasiness, any miseries, or any depressions? For after all, you do not know what work these conditions are doing inside you.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

This is a musing about memories of a childhood by an old lady on a old sailboat…MEMORIES are the treasures that we keep locked within the storehouse of our souls, to keep our hearts warm when we are lonely.

My mother had died when I was a baby and a few years later my daddy packed me a little suitcase and put me in a car with strangers to go south to live with his brother and wife. I have very little memory of that first trip south but have been told I cried for three days and three nights for my daddy and my brother, Johnny, and kept saying I wanted to go home. I never did go home again though I visited my daddy and my brother on trips back in the summers throughout my childhood.
It was never the same and it would be many years later that I sat and cried and asked him why.
I remember many of these trips traveling back to Kentucky and visiting family. This was before interstate highways were built and it would take several days to make the trip on the back roads of Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Tennessee, and Kentucky. I sat and watched the countryside roll by mile after mile.

South Louisiana is very flat. In fact the highest point in the entire state is Driskill Mountain up in the northern part of the state and it is only about 500 feet.
I have the mountains in my soul and I used to love it when we got relief from the monotonous flat land and the terrain began to slope and we started traveling in hilly country. In Mississippi we would pass through miles of cotton being picked by black hands in the fields. We didn’t have an air conditioned car back then and so the windows were often down and I could hear people as they called to one another.
I noticed the soil as it changed color. After passing through the Cotton Belt we would start seeing the red hills and it seemed people were really poor, barely scratching out a living from the infertile soil. Back in those days there were roadside picnic tables where you could stretch your legs. They were marked on the map with a small drawing of a picnic table and were often along a scenic stretch. We often stopped to stretch our legs at these spots and eat a snack.
Back in the fifties the roads were made to connect towns, not avoid them, and so we passed through many towns, stopping to eat lunch at a small town diner and dinner at a restaurant and to spend the night at a “Motor Inn”.
Once we entered Tennessee and the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains we started driving along creeks and forests and seeing poor small farms in the valleys. Women would hang handmade quilts on their clothes line to sell and hams that had been slowly cured in old smoke houses.
There would be signs painted on the roofs of barns advertising, “See Rock City”, and ”See Ruby Falls”. I did indeed see Rock City and Ruby Falls, and in truth I think it was Ruby Falls that first showed me there was a world underground that could amaze and enthrall. It is an underground waterfall in a cave. It was discovered in 1928 and is over 1,120 feet below the surface. It is strange that I would like caves because I have always been a bit claustrophobic , but if you have ever been in one of the huge underground caverns with rivers and waterfalls and stalactites and stalagmites you know how it can spark the imagination. Back then most caves were lit with soft artificial lights and the guides would often turn them out so you could experience total darkness. That I did not like. It is a strange and scary feeling for no matter how dark we think it is there is always some light getting in, but when there is no light at all the space around you feels, not like a void, but like something solid and oppressive.
I remember once we took this train up to Lookout Mountain. It was called The Incline Railway because it went straight up the side of the mountain about a mile at an incline of over 70 degrees. We stayed at a motor Inn on top of the mountain and family lore has it I fell off Lookout Mountain. My Daddy Lewis would tell the story that he was explaining to me one minute about how you could see seven states from there and the next minute he turned and I was gone. Obviously I simply slide down a short distance and skinned up my knees and elbows. Those of you who know me well know I am still doing that and it is not uncommon for me to always have some booboo or the other.
As we left Tennessee and entered Kentucky the tobacco farms became numerous, with their large black barns for curing. My Daddy Ashby was a tobacco farmer, among many other things. It was a hard life I am told. I liked seeing the fields of tobacco on the hillsides though.
Oh and how could I forget the Burma Shave rhymes on the side of the road! They were an advertising plan to sell shaving cream and they worked. Typically, six consecutive small signs would be posted on the side of the highway, spaced for sequential reading by passing motorists. The last sign was almost always the name of the product. Here is an example.
Within this vale
Of toil
And sin
Your head grows bald
But not your chin – use
Burma-Shave

I started this story because I was reminded of all the wildflowers blooming on the sides of the roads. That was before Roundup and 2-4-D. I especially loved the lacy delicate blossoms of Queen Anne’s Lace. It was the most beautiful flower I had ever seen. When I grew up I wanted to grow it in Louisiana but it does not thrive there. Once I broadcast a packet of assorted wildflowers out along a fence line and one came up. I tended it so carefully and it actually had some blossoms. I loved that plant, perhaps because it triggered some feelings I associated with it from my childhood of pleasant days and fun fantasies of fairies and magic.
Queen Anne’s Lace is blooming everywhere up here now and it still brings me joy to watch its delicate white blossoms sway on long stalks in the breeze and lie down and look up at it silhouetted against the blue sky and watch the clouds pass overhead. To watch it develop from a bud to full bloom is as close to wonderment as it gets. I watch people passing by, oblivious to the miracle and want to shout at them to stop and look, really look, but I am slowly learning that is not how it works. People will see what they see through their own eyes in their own time. It was enough that one car stopped and an elderly man rolled down his window and exclaimed, “That’s Queen Anne’s Lace. Isn’t it beautiful”? Another man on a Harley stopped and watched me photograph and said he thought they were just wildflowers and I told him that nothing was “just” anything. He smiled and said he could see that now and went on down the road.
May each of us look beyond ourselves because that is the only way to truly see ourselves. We are all works in progress and we are changed by what we see and experience, so be open and unafraid. I have a difficult time with that sometimes. The fear creeps into my heart and it beats fast and I get so scared. That is all right because fear too is just part of the journey and we mustn’t turn away from it, but instead walk through it.

Do not ask your children
to strive for extraordinary lives.
Such striving may seem admirable,
but it is the way of foolishness.
Help them instead to find the wonder
and the marvel of an ordinary life.
Show them the joy of tasting
tomatoes, apples and pears.
Show them how to cry
when pets and people die.
Show them the infinite pleasure
in the touch of a hand.
And make the ordinary come alive for them.
The extraordinary will take care of itself.
William Martin, The Parent’s Tao Te Ching: Ancient Advice for Modern Parents

September 18, 2016
THERE ARE MEN TOO GENTLE TO LIVE AMONG WOLVES
JAMES KAVANAUGH(1928-2009)

This was a book of poetry I read back in the seventies, but one that keeps reverberating in my mind, tugging on my thoughts.
There is so much going on in the world that is unpleasant, even downright evil. There are some doors that open to places I cannot enter. Heck I had a difficult time even driving on the interstates last month. The anxiety and sadness and the feeling of forlornness nearly suffocated me.
I have tried to talk to people about this and the feedback has run the gambit from
“desensitize” to “maybe medication adjustment?”
Maybe I could just accept that I have reached a point in my life where I get to adjust my exposure. I know I don’t want to lose my ability to feel the pain of others, but I do not want it to destroy me. Empathy doesn’t seem to be in vogue much these days.
Don’t get me wrong. I believe in taking myself to the limit sometimes. I just have to recognize that point and fade back into the natural world to be consoled and comforted so that I might once again have hope and faith in the goodness of the world. I also need to surround myself with gentle people, for I have found them to be people of strength and courage.
In the prolog of his book of poetry Kavanaugh wrote in 1970….
“I am one of the searchers. There are, I believe, millions of us. We are not unhappy, but neither are we really content. We continue to explore life, hoping to uncover its ultimate secret. We continue to explore ourselves, hoping to understand. We like to walk along the beach, we are drawn by the ocean, taken by its power, its unceasing motion, its mystery and unspeakable beauty. We like forests and mountains, deserts and hidden rivers, and the lonely cities as well. Our sadness is as much a part of our lives as is our laughter. To share our sadness with one we love is perhaps as great a joy as we can know – unless it be to share our laughter.
We searchers are ambitious only for life itself, for everything beautiful it can provide. Most of all we love and want to be loved. We want to live in a relationship that will not impede our wandering, nor prevent our search, nor lock us in prison walls; that will take us for what little we have to give. We do not want to prove ourselves to another or compete for love.

For wanderers, dreamers, and lovers, for lonely men and women who dare to ask of life everything good and beautiful. It is for those who are too gentle to live among wolves.”

And then years later, in 1984 he wrote this in a preface to the paperback….
“I will probably be a searcher until I die and hopefully death itself will only be another adventure. To live any other way seems impossible. If anything has changed over the years, and it has, I only feel more confident now about what I wrote then. I am far more aware of the power that guides each of us along the way, and provides us with the insights and people we need for our journey. There are, indeed, men and women too gentle to live among wolves and only when joined with them will life offer the searcher, step by step, all that is good and beautiful. Life becomes not a confused struggle or pointless pain, but an evolving mosaic masterpiece of the person we were destined to become.”
I hope to continue to walk gently upon the earth and to spread Love and Kindness and Joy wherever and whenever possible. To do so I must first open my heart to receive the goodness of others.