Like delicate lace,
So the threads intertwine,
Oh, gossamer web
Of wond’rous design!
Such beauty and grace
Wild nature produces…
Ughh, look at the spider
Suck out that bug’s juices!
~Bill Watterston from Calvin and Hobbes
Tag: nature
No Shame to Weep
Don’t be ashamed to weep; ’tis right to grieve. Tears are only water, and flowers, trees, and fruit cannot grow without water. But there must be sunlight also. A wounded heart will heal in time, and when it does, the memory and love of our lost ones is sealed inside to comfort us.”
~ Brian Jacques
The end-of-summer farm is silently sobbing in its loss; tears of fall, from fog, mist and drizzle, cling to everything everywhere. I arrive back in the house from barn chores soaked through from walking through the weeping. ‘Tis no shame to be drenched in such sorrow.
The memory of summer is pressed deep in our grieving its passing, our wounds healed by Light that illumines our tears.
We are never left comfortless and weep in the knowing.
Silken Ladder
The spider, dropping down from twig,
Unfolds a plan of her devising,
A thin premeditated rig
To use in rising.
And all that journey down through space,
In cool descent and loyal hearted,
She spins a ladder to the place
From where she started.
Thus I, gone forth as spiders do
In spider’s web a truth discerning,
Attach one silken thread to you
For my returning.
~E.B. White “Natural History”
No matter where I go to complete farm chores, I’m getting a face full of spider web and often a spider or two or three in my hair. The spinners are very busy in the night dropping from rafters and branches, leaping courageously into uncharted territory with only their thread as rescue cable.
I am not so brave as they, nor as industrious. Instead, I’m lollygagging in the art gallery of their fine work, appreciating the abundant crop of silken ladders and hammocks, and harvesting what I can on this page.
I’m drawn back morning after morning to see what they’ve caught and how well they endure. As long as I keep my face out of their masterpiece, all is well.
All is well.
A Sigh of Relief
It was not so much a modification of the darkness, as a sigh of relief, a slight relaxing of tension, so that one felt, rather than saw, that the night had suddenly lost a shade of its density… ah! yes; there! between these two shoulders of the hills she is bleeding to death.
~Hope Mirrlees
Dripping Sleep
I went to bed and woke in the middle of the night thinking I heard someone cry, thinking I myself was weeping, and I felt my face and it was dry.
Then I looked at the window and thought: Why, yes, it’s just the rain, the rain, always the rain, and turned over, sadder still, and fumbled about for my dripping sleep and tried to slip it back on.
~Ray Bradbury
After weeks of dry weather and only an occasional shower, it was relief to wake to the pattering and dripping, an old familiar friend returned in the dark of night.
Weeping clouds and misty eyes are not always from sadness. They can shed sweet tears, wistful wondrous full-to-the-brim tears.
This is how it was as I slipped a dripping sleep back on, lulled by the rhythm of the drops. This is how it is this morning capturing each one where it landed before it disappears forever.
My face will remain damp with the memory.
How to Pay Attention
I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
With your one wild and precious life?
– Mary Oliver, “The Summer Day”
Sometimes it is enough to kneel in the grass to capture the right light at the precise moment it is sent from above. It is prayer to be blessed so, prayer to pay attention, prayer to be grateful for that moment. I find myself on my knees often these days because it all will be gone too soon, much too soon.
Let Them Be Left
What would the world be, once bereft
Of wet and wildness?
Let them be left,O let them be left, wildness and wet,
Long live the weeds and the wildness yet.
~Gerard Manley Hopkins from “Inversnaid”
Maybe I identify with weeds as I too have grown a bit “excessive” in mid-life, growing unnecessarily and a bit fluffier than I need be. Maybe I admire their ability to thrive where they land, resilient through all sorts of trials and deprivation. Certainly they deserve appreciation for their wildly unique characteristics and their perfect imperfections. Once I get to know them, their beauty brings me joy.
I can only hope I too can be left, my over-proliferation shown grace, my greediness granted mercy.
In nature, nothing is perfect and everything is perfect.
~Alice Walker
…if the simple things in nature have a message you understand,
Rejoice, for your soul is alive.
~Eleanora Duse
Weeds are flowers too, once you get to know them.
~A. A. Milne
…make no mistake: the weeds will win; nature bats last.
~Robert M. Pyle
Wish to Whiteness
Her body is not so white as
anemony petals nor so smooth—nor
so remote a thing. It is a field
of the wild carrot taking
the field by force; the grass
does not raise above it.
Here is no question of whiteness,
white as can be, with a purple mole
at the center of each flower.
Each flower is a hand’s span
of her whiteness. Wherever
his hand has lain there is
a tiny purple blemish. Each part
is a blossom under his touch
to which the fibres of her being
stem one by one, each to its end,
until the whole field is a
white desire, empty, a single stem,
a cluster, flower by flower,
a pious wish to whiteness gone over—
or nothing.
~William Carlos Williams — “Queen Anne’s Lace”
~William Carlos Williams — “Queen Anne’s Lace”
Tarnished
In a patch of baked earth
At the crumbled cliff’s brink,
Where the parching of August
Has cracked a long chink,
Against the blue void
Of still sea and sky
Stands single a thistle,
Tall, tarnished, and dry.
Frayed leaves, spotted brown,
Head hoary and torn,
Was ever a weed
Upon earth so forlorn,
So solemnly gazed on
By the sun in his sheen
That prints in long shadow
Its raggedness lean?
From the sky comes no laughter,
From earth not a moan.
Erect stands the thistle,
Its seeds abroad blown.
~Robert Laurence Binyon –“The Thistle”
Perchance to Dream
I count it as a certainty that in paradise, everyone naps.
~Tom Hodgkinson
I believe the world would be a better place if we could stop in the middle of the day and just rest our eyes for awhile — to look at the inside of our eyelids for a few minutes, to pause, to pray, to purr…
perchance to dream. Aye, there’s the rub.
We just might wake and see things differently.
A slight breeze stirs tree branches
so shadow patterns play on the curtains
like candlelight in a drafty room.
The harvest is over, corn
stubble and weeds in the field. The sky is
soft blue, a few clouds in the distance.
I will close my eyes, nap for
a while. Perhaps when I wake all will seem
the same. Sleep plays tricks in many ways.
~Matthew Spereng – “Late August, Lying Down to Nap at Noon”
Like a graceful vase, a cat, even when motionless, seems to flow.
~George F. Will
Barnstorming 