Pipevine Swallowtail Caterpillars
I placed a drop of liquid brown sugar on the counter. Word spread quickly, pheromone trails were forged. In no time the sisters had circled around like wildebeest at a watering hole. Each ant has two stomachs: an individual stomach for her own survival, and a social stomach for collective survival. Life is sweet.
Stumbling over beauty as if Mother Nature tied my shoelaces together before rushing me outside.
When the peregrine falcon hunts starlings on the wing, tens of thousands — perhaps hundreds of thousands — of starlings cooperate like schooling fish to confuse the sky shark. During these murmurations, the group functions like a superorganism, like a hive of bees or a city of humans operating collectively as one organism with larger emergent properties. Here the birds seem to form one larger bird, intimidating to a predator (and thrilling to us congregants at Bird Church). I do think Darwin was mistaken in over-emphasizing competition and under-emphasizing cooperation as the driving force of evolution, as Lynn Margulis has explained. What could we humans achieve if we recognized that cooperation is more valuable than competition? It’s written in the sky: cooperation is a beautiful way to survive.
Dragonfly has been here for 300 million years, which is 280 million years longer than humans. I don't mind saying that I look up to Dragonfly the way a child looks up to a great grandparent. Our ancestors are flitting about in the reeds! Grampa looks beautiful today.
The beauty of the world stubbornly persists. Some flowers only bloom in the dead of night.
A grandmother who passed before I was born raised roses competitively. She coaxed perfumes out of manure and alchemized dirt into forms that I imagine would make Georgia O’Keefe blush, for which she was rewarded with ribbons and prizes and the admiration of a granddaughter she would never meet who inherited her love for roses. Although I never set eyes on my grandmother, I see her glow in every rose I meet. Although I own nothing her hands touched, I walk the world wearing her hand-me-down pair of rose-colored glasses.
The underbrush is giving a leafy lecture on the evolutionary advantages of radial symmetry and other mathematically efficient beauty. Classes are ongoing.
When you are sheltering in place due to climate-change-induced fires, it is a good time to break out the emergency tulips and photograph them through a glass of bubbly water.
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/44212/the-love-song-of-j-alfred-prufrock
"Listen, are you breathing just a little and calling it a life?" - Mary Oliver
“There is no knowing for a fact. The only dependable things are humility and looking.”
― Richard Powers, The Overstory
Inside the unfolding: more unfolding.
I took this photograph for my patron saint, Imogen Cunningham. I think she would find this undulating form highly caressable.
https://www.imogencunningham.com/plants/
“walking with the river
the water does my thinking”
- Boldman
I woke up this morning intending to do Responsible Purposeful Things, but I got sidetracked and accidentally fell in love with a pine cone playing with a beam of light.
Meet me under the pine tree at fishrise.
The humility of the buckwheat gives me pause as I stride importantly along. There are lessons blooming in the underbrush.
Petrified wood. We’re all a little petrified.
Can anyone use a bit of beauty today? Here are some aquatic plants that are submerged but not drowning, bending but not breaking in the flux and flow.
Ours is a scrappy planet. We must be rugged creatures for such terrain.
There is the heaven we enter
through institutional grace
and there are the yellow finches bathing and singing
in the lowly puddle.
- from Yellow by Mary Oliver
(This is a yellow warbler, not a finch, but the sentiment stands.)
My aunt brings me the first persimmons of the season, still on the branch. She arranges them in a blue ceramic bowl and leaves them on my kitchen table, a sweet reminder: we are fruits of the same tree.
“The humming is always there, even at rest.” - The Mincing Mockingbird
I felt these birds before I saw them, a rustle of wind and a presence over my shoulder. When I looked up, I didn't have a name for them, so I broke out into a full-body sweat, as if my every pore were calling out to them. I dubbed them the Goosebumps Birds, but later I learned that their real name is the Magnificent Frigatebirds, a worthy title for a beast whose very Is-ness can make an otherwise solid human go liquid.
Several of nature's people
I know, and they know me;
I feel for them a transport
Of cordiality
- Emily Dickinson
A fun thing to do is to watch how spider webs turn raindrops into fireworks.
Do trees have consciousness? I don’t know, but I suspect their root system is the original internet. Here’s a profile pic I took for Cedar to post on Forest Facebook.
The source of all energy on our planet, our Sun deserves a standing ovation. The stellar members of Women’s Wellness 2018 rise to the occasion.
"I cannot pretend I am without fear. But my predominant feeling is one of gratitude. I have loved and been loved; I have been given much, and I have given something in return; I have read and traveled and thought and written. I have had an intercourse with the world, the special intercourse of writers and readers. Above all, I have been a sentient being, a thinking animal, on this beautiful planet, and that in itself has been an enormous privilege and adventure." - Oliver Sacks