back door

Columbine, found in the usual place at the usual time of year just a couple of hundred yards from our back door. I love Vermont.

veery

Sound of a turkey & veery during morning meditation at the Zen Center. Memorial day has come and gone. Thunderstorms. Summer has arrived. Listen to the sound of the veery below.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cK1gaTqBRRk

back

wake robin

Back in a few days

asparagus & dandelions

Asparagus & dandelions appearing. The water in the brook looks especially clear this time of year. Really do know why. I wonder if the spring snow-melt process scours the bottoms of the brooks, and makes them cleaner than usual?

continuously

Waking up to the summer sounds of songbirds, cardinal & red-eyed vireo. The vireo has been documented to make up to 20,000 calls in a day, pretty much continuously.

Season

of lilacs and yard sales.

Christmas Eve

For the past couple of weeks the birds have been buzzing around in the back yard as they try to find suitable nesting sites. I have four bluebird houses in the back & they are all currently occupied I think. They are not all with bluebirds. There are two with swallows, and one with sparrows (which I don't like). One pair of bluebirds are firmly established in the house directly in the back per usual, but until recently there was a pair of swallows that thought it should be theirs. I moved a house to a spot fairly close by, and that seemed to solve matters. It was truly amazing to see how quickly the swallows found and occupied that new place. It was just a matter of minutes.

Honestly, it has seemed like the days leading up to Christmas. There has been a lot of rushing around, but now, like on Christmas Eve, all of the activity has diminished. Calm and silence prevail as parents focus on the central family unit.

ephemeral

white trillium

Bright sunny day yesterday, mayflies wafting up and down in the front yard. Usually see them one day a year, talk about ephemeral.

how?

29 degrees in Ira this morning, and the apple trees in full bloom. It's funny living in a place like this. Winter is never far away in the mind's eye. How will the frost affect the apple blossoms? How will it affect the fall crop of apples, and how might that impact the chances of survival for the deer herd next winter? Doug, Kim?

flowers fall

Flowers fall despite our longing. Weeds rise up despite our loathing.
Dogen

blooming

Rhododendrons blooming. Goldfinches blasting around in the back. They are high energy birds, like the chickadees. Driving around on Saturday, prom activity observed. Churches were busy with the start of the wedding season.

puzzlement

Marsh Marigold

One of the primary lessons from writing this blog is that the world is, at the same time, ordinary and miraculous. I often find that I am filled with wonderment by something that most people would consider self-evident or routine. I remember one time on Martha's Vineyard when Dick Crowley said that a conversation I had initiated made his head hurt. I honestly don't know sometimes whether this emphasis on the miraculous within the routine is helpful or not.

The arising and passing away of phenomena in the natural world has often been a cause for wonderment. The marsh marigold, along with thousands of other species, are now showing themselves in my world. A month ago they were nowhere to be found, and I mean nowhere. If you wanted to view a marsh marigold, where in the world could you possibly go to see one? Now they are here. For a few days and weeks they will seemingly be everywhere. Then they will be gone.

This dynamic seems like the movements at a departure gate at a large airport. An area will be empty, then people will start to arrive, it will be full of activity for a short time only to be empty again. This pattern repeats itself over and over. Why do I even care?

painter/creator

shad tree in bloom

This kind of detail is possible in the realm of nature because the painter/creator is inside the art.

John Kahle

dutchman's breeches

Some of the names for wildflowers are terrible, bastard toadflax?! Some are great. These are dutchman's breeches. Don't they look like clothes drying on a line? I learned something this morning. Breeches are actually knee-length trousers. I always thought it was just another way of saying britches.

different

Woke up the other day at 4:45 to sunlight coming through the bedroom windows, and the sounds of birds. Buzzing of bumblebees, and the sound of peepers coming from bogs & other wet places. It's a different world.

flowers

This magnolia tree was planted at the Vermont Zen Center as a memorial to my brother, John Scott Kahle, many years ago. Actually I planted it at a work sesshin. It was only a couple of feet tall at the time. For awhile it didn't look like it would make it. There is a small plaque underneath with his name on it. It is located at the entrance to the Center, and I walk by it a couple hundred times a year, and remember my brother who died young. It is special to see it so beautiful and thriving at this time of the year. Grateful to be attending the work sesshin up there again this year in a couple of weeks.

Such a solemn world of flowers!
Such a spectacle,
this rich world of the flowers!
You , John, are living brightness
on the earth under the heavens...

From nowhere you came. You go nowhere.
You stay nowhere. You are nowhere attached.
You occupy everything, you occupy nothing.
You are the becoming of indescribable change.
You are love. You are the flower.
Flowers

unblemished

Every year on Green-up day, I stop along a certain bridge in Ira, and find the bloodroot blooming. There is something very comforting about going to the same place at the same time, and finding the same thing, year after year. It's amazing to me that something growing wild like this, out in the puckerbrush somewhere, could be so perfect, unblemished.

Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow, they neither toil or spin, yet I tell you that Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these.
Matthew 6:28

ramps!