Posts Tagged "nature"

In Blackwater Woods

Look, the trees are turning their own bodies into pillars of light, are giving off the rich fragrance of cinnamon and fulfillment, the long tapers of cattails are bursting and floating away over the blue shoulders of the ponds, and every pond, no matter what its name is, is nameless now. Every year everything I have ever learned in my lifetime leads back to this: the fires and the black river of loss whose other side is salvation,...

Bird Clef

Composing With Nature Over a hundred years ago, F. Schuler Mathews wrote the book, Field Book of Wild Birds and Their Music.  It was a shocking kind of bird book: the author wrote out the notations of the bird songs on sheet music paper. Just like he was copying down a ditty that he had heard at the park and wanted to remember it. There were clef notations, key signatures, tempo indications, and even rhythmic markings.   Birds were to...

A Strange Tail

There is something magical about being somewhere for a period of time.  A long enough period of time to be able to know things about where you are. I once had a job in my biology teacher’s lab.  I measured seaweed.  A certain kind of seaweed. He was studying the effect on its growth by the warm waters being evacuated from the nuclear power plant on the coast. And as the summer drew along, with only the company of the classical...

Living Earth

Mothering Nature I was shown something the other day.  In one way I had the feeling that I knew this already.  But in another way, it shocked me. I mulled it over for an entire day.  And still land on it at times. The Earth as a rational, sentient wholeness that can not only live in harmony with Man, but can understand his needs and respond to them. I spent my childhood sitting in fields of long grass and walking miles through the...

Gratitude by Mary Oliver

What did you notice? The dew-snail; the low-flying sparrow; the bat, on the wind, in the dark; big-chested geese, in the V of sleekest performance; the soft toad, patient in the hot sand; the sweet-hungry ants; the uproar of mice in the empty house; the tin music of the cricket’s body; the blouse of the goldenrod. What did you hear? The thrush greeting the morning; the little bluebirds in their hot box; the salty talk of the...