Tag Archives: nature

This Morning…

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IMG_0399dear familiar line and color

velvet spread of leaf

magenta and vermilion petal

held in the sweet curve

of glazed garden pot

one brief glimpse

telling me

this is home

“The sweetest thing in all my life has been the longing — to reach the Mountain, to find the place where all the beauty came from — my country, the place where I ought to have been born. Do you think it all meant nothing, all the longing? The longing for home? For indeed it now feels not like going, but like going back.”

~ C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces

Garden Lesson

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vine tendrils curl
clasping, climbing,
swelling pea pods full of green promise

I seem to never be able to plant sugar snap peas early enough to allow a hearty harvest. Here on the South Texas Gulf coast, it is probably over ambitious to try, particularly with our rare late freezes this year. By the time the vines were barely flourishing, Spring had jump-started Summer so they stopped blooming and started to wilt.

Still, the few sweet pea pods we collected were used to grace salads.  Some of them never made it to the kitchen since my granddaughters like to pop them into their mouths straight from the vine.  As is often the case, less can be more.  Because there were not many, we noticed and celebrated the few!  I am praying to remember this lesson: Pay attention to what I  have rather than mourning what I don’t..

This Morning, I Do!

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The cardinal pair which is faithful to choose nesting sites in our garden is a consistent source of delight for me.  Their song draws me from my own nest with pillow and lamp, put down my book,  walk barefoot on the cool wet stones of today’s path.  I am called to pay attention, to  have my heart pierced as the sun rises, to love this world and to cherish this life, to exclaim of the dearness given to me new every day.  I love Mary Oliver’s poem that prompts these words for me.

 

This morning the green fists of the peonies are getting ready
to break my heart
as the sun rises,
as the sun strokes them with his old, buttery fingers
and they open —
pools of lace,
white and pink —
and all day the black ants climb over them,
boring their deep and mysterious holes
into the curls,
craving the sweet sap,
taking it away
to their dark, underground cities —
and all day
under the shifty wind,
as in a dance to the great wedding,
the flowers bend their bright bodies,
and tip their fragrance to the air,
and rise,
their red stems holding
all that dampness and recklessness
gladly and lightly,
and there it is again —
beauty the brave, the exemplary,
blazing open.
Do you love this world?
Do you cherish your humble and silky life?
Do you adore the green grass, with its terror beneath?
Do you also hurry, half-dressed and barefoot, into the garden,
and softly,
and exclaiming of their dearness,
fill your arms with the white and pink flowers,
with their honeyed heaviness, their lush trembling,
their eagerness
to be wild and perfect for a moment, before they are
nothing, forever?
~ Mary Oliver, “Peonies” from New And Selected Poems

Remembering

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IMG_1704It is Good Friday.  I go into our garden, remembering another garden that became a place of prayer, entreaty, yearning, betrayal, and choosing a path that cost life to give life.  A rosemary bush at the end of our stone wall has wintered, died back, and now demonstrates life beginning again. .Both  the garden I  am remembering and the garden where I walk are places of revelation.

a garden is a place of revelation

seeds that survive to grow

are containers that must open and change,

releasing all that they are

in order to become what they can be.

 

a garden is a place of repair

a wildflower stubbornly pushes through

a crack in the wall, filling that broken place

with green growing hope

 

a garden is a place pointing to resurrection

though whipped by winds and dried from drought,

shattered stalks lift up and flower

beginning again

 

a garden is a place of revelation

but not a place I can stay.

I cross its threshold

and remember.

 

 

 

Today

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maddieinthepink

Photograph by Jeremy Parker, Maddie’s Daddy.

Like the flush blushing of azaleas and sun, Maddie surprised us today..  After days of chilly rain and pewter skies that made it hard to see the new green on tree branches, there is a sudden lifting of spirit and laughter rising.  There is the song of birds and little girls.  There is dancing, twirling, skipping. There is  joy. Tomorrow Maddie will go back home.  Pink petals will begin to drop on the flagstone path.  But having been surprised by this joy (thank you, C. S. Lewis) I will gather this light now, and it will be mine tomorrow.

“Light tomorrow with today.” ~Elizabeth Barrett Browning.

Seed Time

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“Nature offers us a thousand simple pleasers – plays of light and color, fragrance in the air, the sun’s warmth on skin and muscle, the audible rhythm of life’s stir and push- for the price of merely paying attention. What joy! But how unwilling or unable many of us are to pay this price in an age when manufactured sources of stimulation and pleasure are everywhere at hand. For me, enjoying nature’s pleasures takes conscious choice, a choice to slow down to seed time or rock time, to still the clamoring ego, to set aside plans and busyness, and to simply to be present in my body, to offer myself up.”

— Lorraine Anderson

Rooted

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“To be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognized need of the human soul.”                        ~ Simone Weil

Recently when family gathered to help us celebrate our 50 years of being married, we were given a small white pot which contained a plastic bag filled with potting soil and a dried, brown ball with papery layers peeling back about the size  of a small onion. It was an Amaryllis bulb.  As long as I let the pot, the soil, and the bulb wait on my counter, nothing much happened.  There was one place where a spot of green wanted to push through its crackly wrapping, but seemed to have grown weary and quit trying.  But as soon as opened the soil packet and poured it into the pot, pushed the bulb down, set it in a window, and added water, I could almost hear the dry dirt begin to breathe a lullaby to hungry roots as they began to channel new life into stalk and leaf. Two sturdy stems soon grew heavy with swelling buds.  Above, the first scarlet flower opens wide, stamens heavy with pollen.

026Then there were three, so large it seemed they would topple. And just as the first bloom began to fade, the second stalk of buds began to open.  In all, 6 magnificent delights have graced the plain white pot in my kitchen window. Without roots, this blooming would have stayed inside the brown bulb.  The roots were a potential, but not a possibility until nourished with soil and light and water.

What nourishes my soul to satisfy this need for rooting?  Do I choose that which roots and grows?  These are questions I ask again in a soul’s wintering.