…Be joyful Though you have considered all the facts. ~ Wendell Berry ~ Given the losses, both personal and communal, of 2020, and the fact that we were in pre-vaccination pandemic, I knew from the beginning that this year would be a quiet time of recovery. It was also, though I didn’t guess it then, […]
Songlines 2021: a year of quiet wonder Read More »
The Confederacy of the Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, and Seneca nations in what is now upstate New York has been meeting for 1,000 years. United by a common goal to live in harmony, each meeting, large and small, is opened with the beautiful and incantatory Haudenosaunee Thanksgiving Address. This enfolds each gathering in a culture of
The Haudenosaunee Thanksgiving Address Read More »
Blue is light seen through a veil. ~ Henry David Thoreau ~ I have tens of thousands of photos in my files, the vast majority flowers. They are often of the same flowers, taken in different years and at different places. So the numbers don’t reflect the number of species. But still, in all those
The mystery of blue flowers Read More »
It is such a foundational act, to give name to. But not all naming is good naming. Naming can be an appropriative act of conquest and overwriting.~ Robert Macfarlane ~ Before Carl Linnaeus, if a European botanist wanted to specify the plant we know as a tomato, he would write, in Latin: Solanum caule inerme
A rose by any other name is complicated Read More »
I don’t know exactly what a prayer is. I do know how to pay attention…~ Mary Oliver, The Summer Day ~ Attention is the gateway to love and awe. There is no wonder without it. It can be an attending that stops us in our tracks or the kind we carefully make time for and nurture.
Attention is reverence: celebrating the Season of Creation Read More »
When I started my landscape design business in the 1980s, the staff at plant nurseries nicknamed me ‘the weed lady’. I kept asking for plants that most people were removing. As much as I could, I wanted to plant the grasses and wildflowers, trees and shrubs native to the glacial moraine known as Long Island,
One early May day some years ago I was walking with a friend in a preserve near her home. I had discovered the trail the day before and was so delighted with the abundance of wildflowers I wanted to share them with her. She was equally delighted. And then, as we finished the trail, said,
I am a star that has grown out of the earth, created from the gifts of my celestial sisters and the rich ground at my roots. I hover above the soil I grow from, luminous in constellations of white and rare, palest yellow in quiet, dappled forests. A vibrant sea of purple, royal in exuberant,
A wild iris at the Council of All Beings Read More »
Vision is an art, and nature an old master painter teaching us how to see the underlying reality of things to be — before they actually are.~ Monica Gagliano ~ In 1977, the Museum of Modern Art in New York City had a major exhibit of Paul Cezanne’s paintings. On my first visit, I took
Cezanne, shamans, and the intelligence of plants Read More »
The first year I saw nothing but handsome corrugated leaves with irregular brown markings. They reminded me of the trout lilies in my native northeast forests, so I looked forward to the flowers. But they never came. Though the leaves looked like the type that would accompany flowers, forests have lots of plants that leaf but don’t bloom, so I wondered if that was the case. Or was it an off-year for that plant? Were they biennials, which bloom every other year? Or had I missed them?
Stalking the elusive adder’s tongue Read More »