lilies of the field

trillium

Wildflower season has started. Bloodroot is appearing in the usual places. Yesterday I saw trillium growing under a fallen tree suspended about 6 inches over the forest floor. How it got there I'll never know. There are much blossoming that is occurring now, some cultivated, some not. The wildflowers will always hold a special place in my heart. No one is taking care of them, watering, weeding or fertilizing them. Even so they are perfect, whole and complete, lacking nothing. 1,000 gardeners tending to them every day and in every way could not make them more beautiful.

Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin: yet I say unto you, that even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these.
Matthew 6:28-29

signs of the times

I have felt a lot of kinship with Robert Frost this past week. Like Frost, I was out cutting up a tree that had fallen across a fence during the winter. Say what you will about the weather in Vermont, it is never boring (snooze on Shawn).
In Two Tramps In Mud Time, there are nine stanzas. Three of them are devoted to the natural world during mud season in Vermont. He is essentially chronicling the signs of the times. I can identify with that.

teeth

The water for which we have to look

In summertime with a witching wand,

In every wheelrut's now a brook,

In every print of a hoof a pond.

Be glad of water, but don't forget

The lurking frost in the earth beneath

That will steal forth after the sun is set

And show on the water its crystal teeth.

Two Tramps In Mud Time

Robert Frost

blossom

A bluebird comes tenderly to alight

And turns to the wind to unruffle a plume,

His song so pitched as not to excite

A single flower as yet to bloom.

It is snowing a flake; and he half knew

Winter was only playing possum,

Except in color he isn't blue,

But he wouldn't advise a thing to blossom.

Two Tramps in Mudtime

Robert Frost

April day

The sun was warm but the wind was chill.

You know how it is with an April day

When the sun is out and the wind is still,

You're one month on in the middle of May.

But if you so much as dare to speak, 

A cloud comes over a sunlit arch,

A wind comes off a frozen peak,

And you're two months back in the middle of March.

Two Tramps in Mud Time

Robert Frost

bookends

As the temperatures warm, and as it's sometimes warmer outside than inside the house, opening doors and windows. Ladybugs crawling out of cracks and crevices and heading outside. As I said the other day, Jupiter shines brightly in the east in the evening. The planet Venus blazes in virtually the same spot in the morning sky; book-ending spring nights.

Measure your health by you sympathy with morning and spring.
Henry David Thoreau

ducks

Driving Route 7 north of Brandon the other day as two ducks went barreling through the sky on their way to a pond on the other side of the road. They fly with such energy. They looked like a couple of torpedoes as they headed from east to west.
Buoyancy is the watchword when it comes to ducks in my opinion. They seem to be so buoyant in body and spirit, literally and figuratively. It is wonderful to have ducks and other waterfowl back with us here in the north country.

Jupiter

Forsythia in bloom,. Red fox scampering through the field in the back. The planet Jupiter in opposition, (opposite the sun) blazing in the eastern sky. Baseball practice at St. Peters field in Rutland.

It is a serious thing
just to be alive
on this fresh morning
in the broken world.

Mary Oliver
Zen page-a-day calendar

new

New sights: daffodils, bluets, crocuses. New sounds: house wren, song sparrow, red eyed vireo. Coltsfoot, the first wildflower of the season, is appearing in profusion. You ready, Shawn?

Back from sesshin. Returning to a vivid world.

stilettos

Daffodils, like little green stilettos, emerging through the mud. Wondering if the shape actually helps them as they push up into the sunlight. Robins walking their robin-walk in the back field. They scurry a few steps then stop, scurry and stop. Baseball practice observed at St. Peters field in Rutland. Gone for a week.

The Great Lesson is that the sacred is in the ordinary, that it is to be found in one's daily life, in one's neighbors, friends, and family, in one's backyard.
Abraham Maslow
Zen page-a-day calendar

turquoise

The snow is mostly gone now. The other day I was walking by a pile of snow that had been shoveled out of the walkway at home. Little pockets of turquoise could be observed in the snowpack. This photo doesn't do it justice, but you can see it if you look. It was as if pieces of blue sky had somehow been caught under the snow pile, and was peeking out at me, waiting for warmer weather to be returned to its rightful spot in the celestial realm.

Rain

Rain yesterday, rain again tomorrow. Sump pump working hard in the basement.

Rain
The rain is raining all around,
It falls on field and tree,
It falls on the umbrellas here,
And on the ships at sea.

Robert Louis Stevenson

whiff

By mid-week, most of the snow from the big storm we had a couple of weeks ago was gone. However, we had another snow "event" on Friday which was a little discouraging. Spring is very slow to come to this neck of the woods. Drove by a neighbor's sugarhouse on Friday afternoon. They were boiling, steam escaping through the vents in the roof. The wind was such that I was able to get a good whiff of the vapor as I drove past. If heaven smells like anything, it is the smell of the steam from a Vermont sugarhouse in spring, indescribably wonderful. Such is our life here in the north country.

baseball

A lot of transitions observed over the weekend, the most important one being that the baseball season has arrived!