Subject To the Natural Forces

The theme of this spring, at least for me, is: 

There are powers much larger than yours. Don't think you have control here.

For someone who has great reverence for the many forces of nature, looks to nature for comfort and succor; for everything, really, it's kind of exciting to see her exert her vast power. 

To see spring coming on after a winter that started late and ended hard, to see the trees reddening and blossoming against the greening hills. To know they won't and can't be stopped.

To see storms raking across the land, to be sent to the basement by sirens and a suddenly blatting cellphone. And to realize, as we scurry downstairs, that these are but the pitiful efforts of a colony of ants to tell one another that something evil this way comes.

Flooding has put us on the back roads, taken time out of busy days. Like it or not, we are forced to circumvent swollen creeks and road collapses. You can rail against it or decide it's a gift in disguise. For me, being forced down unknown back roads is nothing but an adventure. I sit forward, hands tight on the wheel, waiting for the next amazement, storing away the route for future use.

 Look at the light, look at the land, live in this hour. You'll be busy 'til you die.

The beauty of a red roof before a curtain of rain, glowing like a ruby dropped in the grass. This, on a back road I would never have taken if the rest weren't flooded.

Looking for the gift in everything: that's the trick to feeling happy and satisfied with your lot, whatever it may be.

I wouldn't have had a visit with this beloved old dame unless my regular route were flooded.

With her windows out
This one won't stand much longer
I treasure her now
knowing that one day
Without fanfare, she'll be gone
and all her trees too

Forces, powers greater than mine are everywhere. The only thing I can count on now is change. And change can be a cleansing, a sweeping away of everything that holds you in place. A flood. 

Off we go now.

And the skies clear and everything is different.

I'm astonished to find myself jumping out of my car and making the exact same image, two days later. The eye and brain, working together, are wonderful things. Light changes everything, doesn't it? But the essential mystery remains.

Someday I hope to work up the courage to peek inside, walk her aching floors, see who is living there now. I'll have to deduce that by their droppings, but I'm good at that. Something in her fortress of evergreens stops me. The cavegirl in me is afraid to be caught in there, behind dark walls.

It's the world's largest bird house now.

I think I love it so because it reminds me of a house on the prairie, with its shelterbelt of great white pines and the open sky all around. One pine took a terrible beating in the last snowstorm. Pines break, that's what they do. Soft wood in hard times.

On this blindingly sunny day, the flood is exciting. I wonder with a kind of electric charge in my brain, a frisson of danger, just how high it will go.

Yes. I can still make it to town across the last bridge that remains to me. Will I make it back home?

Close to the road. Please, no closer. But I can only ask politely. 

The creek isn't listening.

The river wouldn't crest for another four days. Under glorious skies, it crept up and up, even after the creeks had gone down. Here, it's swallowing the levee.

And the tiny ants paint numbers on our bridge abutments, to tell each other what's bad, and then what could be so much worse. It's been here, and don't forget it.

If you're reading this, you're underwater now.

The message to me? Be thankful for what you have. Stop and appreciate at all you've been given. Breathe spring's sweet air and look for her messengers. They're all around you, flying in by night and blossoming by day, singing the song that can't be stopped.

Listen to it!

And The Three Graces dance, each in her own way.

Red maple, sugar maple, black tupelo, boogeyin' down.

Frosty Morn

Well, it's Christmas eve, and Bill and I got up to pre-assemble some of Liam's things at around 6 AM. We got 'r dun, thinking it was much preferable to be rooting around with 8 tiny screws and Allen wrenches on Christmas eve morning than Christmas eve night. I have a few more things to wrap, some beds to wash and make, and a good woods lope with Chet to take before church and family this evening.

I wanted to leave you with some images from a morning after a mass of humid air was replaced by some cold Canadian air, growing hoarfrost on everything. One of the things I love about photography is that it makes you realize how rare and special such events are. It makes you seek out beautiful light and appreciate it in a way you wouldn't, were you not trying to capture it. It makes you see beauty in an entirely different way--as fleeting but palpable. It gives you a way to catch it and keep it.Every weekday morning, weather permitting, we walk the kids out to the end of our driveway. The cow pasture across the road, which becomes a hayfield in spring, has a different mood each day. Shivering in frost, its rainpool frozen solid, it was a moody study in rose and dove-gray this icy morning.

I loved the way the warm morning sunlight played over oak leaves, rimmed with frost.Phoebe called me over to see a pattern she'd found, where ice crystals had etched the mud in the turnaround. Good Phoebe.
More leaves, more frost. Hoarfrost.Baker and I walked slowly back, savoring the changed scene, everything glazed with sugar.A little piney Christmas card for you.The closed baskets of Queen Anne's lace, gone to seed. That plant is really good at seeding itself. I wonder if the seeds shake out of the basket one by one as the wind whips them back and forth. Must see what happens to them as spring approaches. Maybe they're holding their seeds up out of the reach of mice and birds until they're ready to drop them. Knowing plants, I'm sure there's a plan in it somewhere.
Black raspberry on ice.Baker hears a rustle in the grass.I keep looking at raspberry leaves.The meadow beckons. Walk or hot tea inside? I chose tea. Now, I wish I'd walked. Given a choice, I hope you walk. You can make tea any time. Hoarfrost only comes a few times a year.It's always out there, but it's up to us to turn toward it, whether for solitude, reflection, strength, courage, inspiration, exercise, wonder, spiritual fulfillment, joy, or any combination of those.

I love the quote Nina uses to head off her lovely blog, Nature Remains.
So I'll borrow it, because it's at the heart of why I turn to nature again and again.

"After you have exhausted what there is in business, politics, conviviality, and so on-and have found that none of these finally satisfy, or permanently wear...what remains? Nature remains." --Walt Whitman

May you turn toward it at every chance in 2008.