flowers fall

Spring brings blossoms, but also the end of blossoms. Petals cover sidewalks and roads in pink and white.

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

mystery

Allyn noticed something the other day in the back that I had missed. It is dandelion season, but in many of the areas in the back field there are virtually no dandelions. I don't know why. The area on the other side of the fence that we mow is full of them. The pasture has cows in it in the summer. There are blackberry shoots there as well. Do those things factor in to what we're seeing? It's a mystery.

optimist

Tulips, rhubarb, and rhododendrons blooming. Gardens are being tilled and fields are being plowed. You have to be more of an optimist than I am to be gardening or farming here in the north country.

oh yeah

Say, what's the name of those little blue flowers? Oh yeah, forget-me-nots!

green

A cold and wet April has produced a lush and green May. I'm sure that it was at a time like this that Vermont was named the Green Mountain State. I try to capture the vivid green with in a photo, but it just doesn't translate. I was telling this to a friend the other day and she said, "Yes, isn't it wonderful!"

alive

Woke up at 4:30 this morning. The sun is rising. The birds are singing. Apple trees are blossoming. The world is alive.

Love the animals, love the plants, love everything. If you love everything, you will perceive the divine mystery in things. Once you perceive it, you will begin to comprehend it better every day. And you will come at last to love the whole world with an all-embracing love.

Fyodor Dostoevsky
Zen page-a-day calendar

while mowing

asparagus!

butterflies and bumblebees

wood anemone

Woods Market opening in Brandon for the season. Butterflies and bumblebees buzzing around in the back yard. Wood anemone spotted in a forest in Vergennes. It's also known as "windflower" as it trembles in the wind. 

mayflies

Coming into the house the other day, I looked up and happened to notice a hatch of mayflies. Lucky I didn't miss them. Same thing happened last night when getting out of the car. They are quite graceful and beautiful; up and down, up and down in their flight. I'm lucky to see them once or twice in a year. They come from the order Ephemeroptera, and ephemeral they are, indeed. Many phenomena emerge for only a short time, here on the other side of the creek, but the mayflies are here only very briefly. One adult female species lives for less than five minutes.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mayfly

The worst is not death but being blind, blind to the fact that everything about life is in the nature of the miraculous.

Henry Miller
Zen page-a-day calendar

season of ducks

Season of ducks. One of the high-energy birds, like chickadees and goldfinches. Ducks are the embodiment of buoyancy, I love the way they barrel through the skies. Marsh Marigolds appearing.

thereness

As I start on today's entry, I know that there are some of you out there that will be rolling your eyes. Out of a sense of consideration and decorum, I probably shouldn't mention any names (Shawn).

Anyway, the other morning I was sitting at the kitchen table eating my breakfast and noticed something. It was a sunny day, and the grass outside was covered with dew. I realized with a start that this was the first time I'd seen dew on the grass in a long time. In the winter in Vermont the grass is either covered with snow or frost. There is no dew. I got my phone, and went outside to take this photo.

Got my slippers wet in the process.

There are three or four themes that have emerged in the 10 years I've been doing this. One of them has to do with the re-emergence of phenomena. They are here, they are gone, and then they are here again. Why does this seem significant to me? Like I mentioned the other day, things evolve with the changing of the seasons. What's the big deal?

As I was pondering this, a phrase emerged from the dim past out of this creaky brain of mine,"on little cat feet." I googled it, and found that it's a line from a haiku by that famous Japanese master, Carl Sandburg.

Fog

The fog comes

on little cat feet.

It sits looking

over harbor and city

on silent haunches

and then moves on.

It is that "little cat feet" quality that gets me every time. Things simply appear; quietly, humbly, without fanfare. This is the time of the year when "thereness" is most easily noticed: dew, wildflowers, leaves on trees, magnolia blossoms. Thereness, however is not limited to springtime. Fireflies in summer, scarlet leaves in the fall, icicles in winter, all simply appear in their chosen time.

As I was googling this poem, I came across some notes from the Gale Group of the Literature Resource Center. They wrote that Sandburg's poem was "an innocent expression of finding beauty in an ordinary world." On my best day, that is what sometimes comes out of these musings from here on the other side of the creek.

wildflowers

large-flowered bellwort

dutchman's breeches

Mowing the lawn for the first time yesterday. Observing wildflowers, and stargazing for that matter, is different than bird-watching. They're not going to fly away. You don't have to sneak up on them. 

The world is won by those who let it go.

Lao-Tau

Zen page-a-day calendar

starry

Driving home from the Zen Center through a starry night. Venus setting in the west. Jupiter rising in the east. Ramps greening up on forest floors. They do taste like a cross between leeks, onions, and scallions, but once is enough. Shad bushes blooming. Remember those Weezie?

trillium

Put the wood rack up in the attic. Small birds chasing big birds. Birds flying around with nesting material in their beaks. There are three varieties of trillium. I saw two of them yesterday.

trout lily

Probably the busiest time of the year here on the other side of the creek. Manure trucks on fields and roads. Grass and willows greening. Downy woodpeckers announcing their territory on an old telephone pole. Village Snack Bar opening. Trout lily emerging. They get their name from the speckled nature of their leaves.

The world is its own magic
Shunryu Suzuki

blossoms

I was driving to Tinmouth yesterday morning to change cars with Allyn. As I was heading into Tinmouth, I remembered a spot along the side of the road where in year's past there had been stands of bloodroot. Bloodroot is the first of the spring ephemerals to appear. Its appearance heralds the start of the wildflower season in Vermont.

Sure enough, there they were, in exactly the same spot that I remembered. For me there was something very uplifting about that. At first I couldn't figure out exactly why. After all, that's what you would expect, that events in the natural world would be more or less the same from season to season. I've been doing this blog for over 10 years. When you start to chronicle the changes happening all around you, you start to notice more and more. Your neighborhood begins to expand. If you're lucky, you can start to approach the point where you feel intimately involved and a part of almost everywhere you go. Even when you look up into the blackness of a January evening and notice the constellation Orion right where it's always been, blazing away, right next to the constellation Gemini. The whole universe can feel like it's just a part of your neighborhood. Everywhere at home.

Went up to the Zen Center yesterday. The magnolia trees dedicated to the memory of my mother and brother are blossoming there, just like they do every year at this time. Speaking of blossoms, a granddaughter was born yesterday to one of the readers of this blog. Congratulations to Isabel, Ingrid, and Lee!

bloodroot

82 degrees yesterday. Allyn and I were outside all day long yesterday burning a huge brush pile. Opening the doors and windows. Bloodroot appearing along an old stone wall in the back.

spring

Yesterday was the first day of May. Temperatures in the 60's. Today it's supposed to be near 80. Daffodils and forsythia blooming. Cleaned up the last of the wood pile. Frantic call of a house wren.

The first sparrow of spring! The year beginning with younger hope than ever! The faint silvery warbling heard over the partially bare and moist fields from the bluebird, the song sparrow, and the red-wing, as if the last flakes of winter tinkled as they fell! What at such a time are histories, chronologies, traditions, and all written revelations? The brooks sing carols and glees to the spring. The marsh hawk sailing low over the meadow is already seeking the first slimy life that awakes. The sinking sound of melting snow is heard in all dells, and the ice dissolves apace in the ponds. The grass flames up on the hillsides like a spring fire as if the earth sent forth an inward heat to greet the returning sun; not yellow but green is the color of its flame,-- the symbol of perpetual youth, the grass blade, like a long green ribbon, streams from the sod into the summer checked indeed by the frost, but anon pushing on again, lifting its spear of last year's hay with the fresh life below. It grows as steadily as the rill oozes out of the ground. It is almost identical with that, for in the growing days of June, when the rills are dry, the grass blades are their channels, and from year to year the herds drink at this perennial green stream, and the mower draws from it betimes their winter supply. So our human life but dies down to its root, and still puts forth its green blade to eternity.

Spring
Walden
Henry David Thoreau

skunk cabbage

This post would have been more timely about a month ago, but here goes. The first actual growing plant in Vermont is skunk cabbage. It's listed in my Wildflowers of Vermont book, but that's a stretch, even for me. It is a remarkable plant, however. It starts to emerge out of the snow in March. It produces it's own heat from the hooded object in this photo (spathe). It is an honest to goodness, organic solar panel which melts the snow around it, and induces the flowers inside it to grow.