Come walk with me in the peak Autumn beauty of the Northwoods. To say that I love this time of year is an understatement. Most everyone can appreciate the colorful falling leaves---it reveals the 'true self' of a tree when its leaves are no longer producing chlorophyll. Their true colors are revealed, and there is something simple … [Read More...]
Archives for March 2017
It’s Kind of a Big Deal
What is a Big Deal in your life right now? I remember when the kids were much younger, birthdays were a Big Deal—even half-birthdays were big! My brother- and sister-in-laws will be celebrating their 50th wedding anniversary this summer—that’s a really Big Deal! Grandchildren are a Big Deal to our friends who have welcomed another generation into their families. A health crisis is an all-consuming, scary Big Deal in one’s life. Graduating from college, starting a new job, getting married, having a baby—all are Big Deals in the lives of the people involved and to concentric circles of loved ones and friends who care for them.
I know that nearly everyone loves Spring, but here in Minnesota, Spring is a pretty Big Deal! We’ve had another fairly ‘easy’ winter in terms of snow and cold, but there is a collective ‘Hallelujah’ being raised up nonetheless, even if it is in a Minnesota nice and stoically quiet way!
The Past
This is the third year in a row that we have been snow free on the Spring Equinox—the two years before that we still had snow up to our knees. So in those terms, we are way ahead of the game. But besides a few green blades of grass (and wild strawberries) and some swollen tree buds, it doesn’t look very much like spring out there yet.
The Present
It doesn’t really matter though—we know it’s coming—the calendar told us so! The thing that makes Spring so sweet is going through the ‘hardship’ or work of winter. Snow shoveling, walking and driving on snow and ice, the daily chore of bundling up in boots, heavy coats, hats, and mittens, keeping the house at a cozy temperature, and daily walks with the frigid north wind are the realities of Winter—neither good nor bad. But Spring, as it unfolds, is a relief from all those things. On Friday, even though I was still bundled against the cold and wind, I saw and heard a choir of Robins flitting joyfully about in the neighbor’s yard! That’s a Big Deal!
The Future
Big Deals is people’s lives are often milestones of time and effort put into an event that is dear to someone’s heart. Other Big Deals—like birthdays and babies—are celebrations of absolute gifts we are blessed to experience. Yet others are heart-breaking moments that threaten our lives, livelihoods, and purpose. The common denominator seems to be the heart—what we hold dear, what we work hard to preserve, what means the most to us, what gives us joy.
My Big Deal today is celebrating three years of taking photographs and writing messages for my NorthStarNature blog. I have published 206 posts with thousands of photographs in those three years! It has been an experience of the heart : to showcase the incredible beauty of Nature, to share parts of my life story in an attempt to connect us with our world and with one another, to examine how Nature can teach us about Life, and a way for me to contribute in some way to the greater Good. Every time I go out into Nature with the camera, looking for the Beauties and the Gifts, I become just another one of Her creations in that whole Circle of Life. My body is calmed, and my spirit is lifted. Writing this blog has unmuted my voice. It has gotten this shy wallflower out into the dance of the world a bit—the cyber-world, no less! I want to thank you for joining me on this journey—I appreciate you reading and sharing my words and photographs. Blessings and Goodness to you all!
The Wall That I Built
Perhaps I shouldn’t be so disgusted with Trump’s billions-dollar wall—it is an act of self (country) preservation, albeit in a grandiose, extremely expensive way. And we all do it. We all build walls of one sort or another—literally and figuratively—in order to keep something out or in and to protect ourselves. It’s not that boundaries aren’t important—they are imperative to the working order and preservation of a person, family, company, or country.
We live across the road from an inactive quarry whose perimeter is lined with a six-foot chain-link fence with three strands of barbed wire above that—a daunting barrier to anyone who is looking to lift a piece of granite. (Actually ‘lifting’ a piece of granite is the hard part.) As daunting a barrier as it is, there are many breeches of that secure fencing in just the short area I walk by each day. Last Sunday’s snow made under-the-fence trails evident. This trail is used by a fox, as I have seen her cross the road from quarry to woods on the other side. It must be a daily route, because the snow and grass have a path worn into them. Rabbits also use this path which is probably just fine with the fox!
Other frequent visitors to our yard and to the places along our road are deer. I have seen deer jump over three strands of barbed wire that surround cow pastures, but the tall chain-link and barbed wire fence is another story—especially when the doe has fawns. So they made another way.
They go under the fence, too!
I have never actually seen them do it—it must be a limbo sort of maneuver since the fence is pushed up only mid-thigh high on a short woman, but the tracks tell the story. Wild turkeys also use this trail when making their feeding rounds.
The inactive quarry is like a refuge for the deer and other creatures. Occasionally trucks and humans rumble through, but for the most part, it is quiet and unoccupied.
It is a safe nursery for fawns—I saw a young spotted one curled in a ball under the brush one spring.
A fence surrounds our garden, mainly to keep out the rabbits. It helps to keep the deer out, but they have been known to jump the fence and taste the maturing vegetables.
Pallet wood compost bins keep most of the leaves, food scraps, and lawn clippings in while letting rain, air, and chipmunks in, too, but it keeps the dog out.
Even decorative fencing makes a person walk around, if legs aren’t long enough to go over.
Burlap and landscape fencing protects young evergreens from munching deer and drying winter winds.
Sometimes walls just mark a border and are low enough to slow us down, lift our feet, or cause us to stumble if we aren’t paying attention.
Walls, fences, borders, boundaries, and barriers are necessary for the smooth operation of gardens, lives, quarries, companies and countries. But can we go too far? And what is the price we may have to pay for that fortified fortress?
The black and white heart
Closing down–it’s easy.
It comes from years of practice.
I won’t let myself get hurt.
Walls are built–stone is best:
Cold and hard–impenetrable.
But just as hurt cannot invade,
No warmth penetrates the fortress.
Love is deflected; it lay
useless on the cold earth at my feet.
If only it would follow the rules
then maybe I would let it in.
But it doesn’t–I can’t predict the road ahead.
But the road and years teach–have I learned….
to see where sight loses its power,
to hear the heart instead of words,
to smell the freshness of old life,
to touch the touch of God and love?
I wrote this poem years ago when I realized that I had lost love and joy and laughter and goodness and power in my life in order to protect myself and try to keep myself safe. The problem was compounded in that I built that wall when I was a child, and it was a reaction and not a well-thought-out plan with pros, cons, strategies, ramifications, and budget considerations—love and/or money. The ‘mortar’ that kept the wall tight and upright was the lies I told myself about why I needed the wall—and when you repeat a lie over and over again, it becomes your truth….until I realized that the wall didn’t really protect me at all. I still got hurt, rejected, ignored, and abandoned. My benefit to cost ratio was abysmal. The fear and hurt that built my wall didn’t go away—in fact, it reverberated back to me a thousand fold. It didn’t protect me from the wounds of life—it probably made me more vulnerable. And the costs in love, joy, peace, fun, and happiness were more than I care to compute. Looking back, there were times when the wall was ascended, the fence was pushed up, the burlap ripped down—by the animals in my life. There are reasons why a horse is a girl’s best friend, why a dog is man’s best friend. Which gets us back to Love. Fear builds walls, and Love finds a way to scale them and tear them down. Wounded hearts and childish ways do whatever they can for self-preservation, but as we put our childish ways behind us, what are we if we have not Love? *
*1 Corinthians 13
A Great Wind is Blowing
A great wind is blowing, and that gives you either imagination or a headache. –Catherine the Great
March weather, already, has been erratic with record high and below zero temperatures, with balmy sunshine and rain, hail, and snow, and with calm quietness and fierce, unrelenting winds. The crash of warm and cold fronts caused tornadoes that touched down just miles from where we lived in Missouri during the first half of our wedded life. The winds tore the shingles off the roof of First United Methodist Church in Odessa where we used to attend. It seemed like the whole Midwest felt the fury of Mother Nature before it blew off to the East in a devil-may-care huff.
The up and down temperatures had the sap running in the maple trees with sapsicles forming on the frigid days.
On the warm days, sap dripped from the branches, and a little red squirrel lapped up the sweet goodness as he grasped onto the underside.
Then he would run over to the bird feeder and chow down on black oil sunflower seeds. I thought he must be the best-fed squirrel in the land.
South winds blew in balmy warm weather last Sunday and Monday with highs near 60 degrees. A storm approached from the west on Monday afternoon bringing rain, hail, and then a quiet calmness.
Late that evening we suddenly heard the wind crashing through the trees, this time from the WNW. By morning we had snow.
The great wind blew like a madman for two nights and two days. The barometer was close to the lowest I had ever recorded. Tree branches thudded on the roof and tumbled to the ground. It was unnerving in its demeanor and relentlessness—‘an ill wind that blows no good.’ It gave me a headache and frazzled my nerves.
The relentless wind made me feel like other times in my life when I had felt beat up just for existing. Lyme disease made me feel that way. The end years of my graduate school career made me feel that way. I was just trying to do the best that I could, taking punches that had no sense of fair play, and ending up just barely keeping my head above water. Imagination is defined as the ability to face and resolve difficulties. We form mental images, most often without conscious knowing, of our life without the difficulty. We problem-solve, we question, we wrestle with whatever madman is trying to take over our life, and we move in a different direction. We are more resourceful than we know. I think the headache has to come first. Those thudding branches and frazzled nerves prime our imaginations in order for us to see our way to a different, better way. The way to sweet Goodness.
Gleanings from February—Sky Gazing
Look up at the sky and contemplate how amazing life is.*
When I was a kid, I remember lying down in the wide expanse of an alfalfa field looking up at an even wider, wilder expanse of blue sky. There were so many things to contemplate at that time in my life—many of them amazing and life-affirming. But I also remember having lots of questions about life that didn’t come with tidy answers and good feelings.
February’s cache of photos included a vast array of sky pictures—moons, sunrises, clouds, and spectacular sunsets. I’m always amazed at the colors that can appear in the evening sky, how the orange sunlight can produce purple clouds…
and how orange clouds with tinges of pink look against the blue sky.
February’s full moon rose in a mottling of clouds, casting an almost-rainbow halo around itself.
Later in the evening, the clouds cleared, and I was finally able to see The Lady in the Moon as described to me by Muriel in the comments of my post Gleanings from September–One Way then Another.
Another amazing thing about sunsets is how they can change in just a matter of minutes. The clouds move, the colors morph as the sun sets and the sky darkens. This is how the sky changed in just eight minutes, all the while maintaining that white streak….
We didn’t have much snow in February, but on the last day, gray skies and tumbling snowflakes shrouded the bare trees.
This is one of my favorite sunset pictures. The white zigzag seems like a portal to another world, an enticing glimpse of something beyond ourselves, even while the present, visible world is magnificent!
A blue sunset sky and quarter moon soothes the senses like a bedtime story.
One likes to think that after decades of living that answers come easy and it is no longer necessary to gaze up at the sky and contemplate life, but I know that is not true. My childhood contemplation, my sky gazing, were rudimentary endeavors at living a conscientious life, of being in prayer with the great Creator. I know that continues throughout our lives. As we live, we experience heightened life-affirming events but also crushing despair, beyond which we could ever imagine as a child. There are still questions, albeit different ones, without tidy answers and good feelings. But as our lives are changing, all the while, a white streak of Goodness maintains us, soothes our senses, shrouds us with Love, and lets us catch a glimpse through a portal to What Is.
*Some had this quote from Rhonda Byrne, others had Unknown.