“How innocent were these Trees, that in
Mist-green May, blown by a prospering breeze,
Stood garlanded and gay;
Who now in sundown glow
Of serious color clad confront me with their show
As though resigned and sad,
Trees, who unwhispering stand umber, bronze, gold;
Pavilioning the land for one grown tired and old;
Elm, chestnut, aspen and pine, I am merged in you,
Who tell once more in tones of time,
Your foliaged farewell.”
– Siegfried Sassoon, October Trees
It would be best to travel light
Between the darkness and the light,
From light of sun to blaze of star
Wherever many mansions are
Or are not, being past our sight
Between the darkness and the light.
~Vassar Miller from “Traveling Light”
I strain to see what I cannot.
I want to see like an eagle, great distances in precise and exacting detail,
or like a microscope scrolling close down to the infinity
within the universe of the cell.
I want to see where I now stand
between the darkness and the light,
how much shadow falls
on me and from me.
I hope to see where I will be,
beyond the limits of sight,
where promises prepare
the darkness to yield to everlasting light.
In my Father’s house are many mansions: if it were not so, I would have told you. I go to prepare a place for you.
John 14:2
My sorrow when she’s here with me,
Thinks these dark days of autumn rain
Are beautiful as days can be;
She loves the bare, the withered tree;
She walks the sodden pasture lane.
– Robert Lee Frost
My story from last fall has been published in the October/November issue of Country Magazine, now available for sale at your local magazine sellers, or subscribe by going to this link to read the story. This is the fifteenth story I’ve had published in this really beautiful magazine, now in its 26th year of publication.
I believe a leaf of grass is no less than the journey-work of the stars.
~Walt Whitman
All photos were taken this week while walking past Western Washington University garden plots on my way to and from meetings on campus. My routine tasks, my everyday journeyman duties, are rendered extraordinary in the light of petals, pollen, webs, pigment, fruit, seed pods and always, always the nurture of soil and rain. I chanced upon a gardener yesterday and told him the difference his work makes in my day. The rich visual and tactile variety in the gardens is like star-lit nebulae and galaxies scattered about in planter pots and plots.
He looked up, startled, so used to not being noticed, and simply said, “it’s been a good year for the plants.”
Indeed it is. A good year for us all.
I thank you God for this most amazing day, for the leaping greenly spirits of trees, and for the blue dream of sky and for everything which is natural, which is infinite, which is yes.
~e.e. cummings
There is a muscular energy in sunlight corresponding to the spiritual energy of wind.
~Annie Dillard
I tend to think of the wind, not the sun, having all the weather muscle, especially in the midst of a brisk northeaster blow in the dead of winter, far outperforming the meager and anemic sunlight. That memory of northeast blizzard muscle is still fresh in the first half of July.
But yesterday, on a warm summer day, it was both sun and wind competing with their mustered energy. With all the house windows kept wide open to keep things cool there were frequent door-slamming, blinds-beating, leaf-loosening, windchime-clanging, hay-drying gusts of up to 30 mph. Muscle was all around and through us.
There was enough sun to create a shadow tree blending like a holograph projected onto the woods. There was enough wind to shake the grasses and thistles and scatter their seed. There was enough sun to dip the evening with orange smoothie and enough wind to clear the haze from the air.
For now there is plenty of energy to spare: spirit-filled muscle to pick me up, bend me over, warm my heart, all bottled and ready to release on that inevitable wintry day that will come, sooner than I want.
I frequently tramped eight or ten miles through the deepest snow to keep an appointment with a beech-tree, or a yellow birch, or an old acquaintance among the pines.
~Henry David Thoreau
You can live for years next door to a big pine tree, honored to have so venerable a neighbor, even when it sheds needles all over your flowers or wakes you, dropping big cones onto your deck at still of night.
~Denise Levertov
Why are there trees I never walk under
But large and melodious thoughts descend upon me?
~Walt Whitman
The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The next best time is now.
~Chinese Proverb
and we move into June illumination…
“Now is the time of the illuminated woods … when every leaf glows like a tiny lamp.”
– J. Burroughs
…he sought the privacy of rain,
the one time no one was likely to be
out and he was left to the intimacy
of drops touching every leaf and tree in
the woods and the easy muttering of
drip and runoff…
~Robert Morgan from “Working in the Rain”
There has been plenty of muttering, both private and public, over the past few days. And not all of it is from dripping and runoff into puddles. Anytime a holiday weekend gets rained out, plenty of people mutter too.
Rain is what makes this part of the world special, but like Camelot, most would prefer it never fall till after sundown. To them we live not in a more congenial spot than Camelot.
I may be an oddity, somewhat typical of northwest-born natives. I celebrate rain whenever it comes, before sundown or after sunrise, as I grew up working outside in the intimacy of a drenching shower, yet am always happy to have an excuse to stay indoors to be putterer more than mutterer.
He could not resist the long
ritual, the companionship and freedom
of falling weather, or even the cold
drenching, the heavy soak and chill of clothes
and sobbing of fingers and sacrifice
of shoes that earned a baking by the fire
and washed fatigue after the wandering
and loneliness in the country of rain.
~Robert Morgan, conclusion of “Working in the Rain”
Barnstorming 