I can't sleep…
I am going to try to pay attention to the spring.
I am going to look around at all the flowers, and look up at the hectic trees.
I am going to close my eyes and listen.
~ Anne Lamott, Plan B: Further Thoughts on Faith
Notes: Quote via risky wiver. Photo: By our very own Kiki! Taken on 10 years ago on this day on May 4th, 2009. What a coincidence!
Spring has finally arrived, and it makes me smile every time I step outside. New green leaves are pushing themselves into the sunlight as plants build the solar panels that will fuel them throughout the year. The first spring flowers are already in bloom, and a bright showcase of cheerful rainbow color is rapidly replacing the gray-brown palette of late winter.
I love the constant small surprises as new flowers appear. But each new sighting makes me wish for a superpower: the sort of expanded vision that could show me all the colors these flowers have to offer. Human beings can see some of them, and birds and bees can see a little more. But the potential range of invisible colors is mind-boggling, and science is only just starting to get a grip on it.
Our color vision is neatly summed up in our perception of a rainbow, sweeping from red, the longest wavelength of light that our eyes can detect, to violet, the shortest. But we can’t detect each shade individually; in order to make sense of this continuous spectrum of colors, we use a clever shortcut. Our eyes have three types of cone cell that respond to different colors—red, green and blue. Our brain figures out how much of the light that we see falls into each category, and it recombines that information to construct the myriad colors that we register. It is both beautifully efficient and frustratingly crude…
~Helen Czerski, from Colors That Only Bees and Birds Can See
Notes:
I have found myself thinking of summer fields. Fields full of flowers— poppies or lupines. Or, here, fields where the roses hook into the dunes, and their increase is manyfold. All summer they are red and pink and white tents of softness and nectar, which wafts and hangs everywhere— a sweetness so palpable and excessive that, before it, I’m struck, I’m taken, I’m conquered; I’m washed into it, as though it was a river, full of dreaming and idleness— I drop to the sand, I can’t move; I am restless no more; I am replete, supine, finished, filled to the last edges with an immobilizing happiness.
~ Mary Oliver, from “Owls” in Upstream: Selected Essays
Photo: Bart Ceuppens (Belgium) with Poppies (via drxgonfly)
One tree is like another tree, but not too much. One tulip is like the next tulip, but not altogether. More or less like people – a general outline, then the stunning individual strokes. Hello Tom, hello Andy. Hello Archibald Violet, and Clarissa Bluebell. Hello Lillian Willow, and Noah, the oak tree I have hugged and kissed every first day of spring for the last thirty years. And in reply its thousands of leaves tremble! What a life is ours! Doesn’t anybody in the world anymore want to get up in the
middle of the night and
sing?
~ Mary Oliver, from “Upstream” in Upstream, Selected Essays
Notes:
“About once every 10 years, Death Valley is coated in millions of flowers, becoming the valley of life. The conditions have to be just so, in order for the flowers to bloom, including the perfect amount of rain combined with conducive temperatures. About 20 species of wildflowers are currently blooming in the desert, northeast of Los Angeles. Those interested in seeing the super bloom should go sooner rather than later because if temperatures reach above 100 degrees, the flowers will wilt and die. Strong winds can also dry out the flowers, nipping the super bloom in the bud. If the temperatures stay under 100 and no strong winds come, the flowers will likely stick around until April.
The last time the blooms exploded on the desert floor was in 2005.”
Inspired by Emily Dickinson’s poem “To Make a Prairie” (1755):
To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee,
One clover, and a bee,
And revery.
The revery alone will do,
If bees are few.
Video & quote source: Grindtv