hello friends, wally here. beautiful day in connecticut today. like almost the first day of spring, 61 °F and toasty warm. sunshiny day with exception of dad (a large dark cloud) who started his ‘eliminate all sugar from his diet” day after his doctor visit…he mumbled something about total bullsh*t, and don’t eat margarine, don’t eat salt, wrong, wrong, and now no sugar. to distract him, we decided to haul the outdoor furniture from the basement to the backyard. i helped a lot, dad said, by staying the h*ll out of the way. i’ve never had a spring day in my short puppy life, but if this is what’s to come, wow, wally is pumped. have a great sunday. Wally.
No Argentine. No Mountains. No Cows. But May. And oh, so Green.
May 19, 2022 by 18 Comments
Later, when I was in the Argentine, I used to tell myself that I could not die until I had seen another month of May, here in the mountains. The grass grows knee-high in the meadows and down the centre of the roads between the wheel ruts. If you are with a friend, you walk down the road with the grass between you. In the forest the late beech leaves come out, the greenest leaves in the world. The cows are let out of the stable for the first time. They leap, kick with their hind legs, turn in circles, jump like goats. The month itself is like a homecoming.
- John Berger, from “Pig Earth” in (Bloomsbury Pub Ltd, January 31, 1999)
Notes:
- Photos: Green @ Daybreak. 5:15 to 5:35 am, May 18, 2022. 53° F. Cove Island Park, Stamford, CT. See more pictures from my walk here.
- Quote: Thank you Whiskey River
Sunday Morning
April 3, 2022 by 21 Comments
DK @ Daybreak. 6:44 am, April 3, 2022. 38° F. Cove Island Park, Stamford, CT. More photos from this morning here.
March Madness. What fresh hell is this?
March 29, 2022 by 31 Comments
Image: From Dark Sky app. Post title: Thank you Yvonne for March Madness. And Fresh Hell via Marion Meade
Without spring who knows what would happen. A lot of nothing, I suppose.
March 22, 2022 by 17 Comments
Notes:
- Grace (and George) building their nest. (Grace being named by my good friend LouAnn.)
- My Swan(s) @ Cove Island Park, Stamford, CT. 6:57 a.m. yesterday morning. 42° F. Other photos from yesterday morning here. Backstories on swans here.
- Post Title: Mary Oliver, from “Late Spring,” Felicity: Poems (via Alive on All Channels)
Cue the World
March 13, 2022 by 28 Comments
Cue the waking insects stirring in the leaf litter. Cue the flashing bluebirds swooping from the bare maple branches to glean the insects stirring in the leaf litter. Cue the fox in his magnificent coat shining in the moonlight, his ears pricked, his tail curled perfectly around his beautiful fox feet. Cue the hard brown buds, waiting, waiting, all through winter but just beginning to quiver. Any day now — any day! — they will warm into blossom…
The world is burning, and there is no time to put down the water buckets. For just an hour, put down the water buckets anyway. Take your cue from the bluebirds, who have no faith in the future but who build the future nevertheless, leaf by leaf and straw by straw, shaping them and turning them into a sheltering roundness perfectly fitted to the contours of the future they are making.
Turn your face up to the sky. Listen. The world is shivering into possibility. The world is reminding us that this is what the world does best. New life. Rebirth. The greenness that rises out of ashes.
— Margaret Renkl, from “What to Do With Spring’s Wild Joy in a Burning World” (NY Times, March 12, 2022)
22° F, feels like 7° F. Cue your World anytime up here Margaret. (Photo: DK @ Cove Island Park, May 4, 2021.)
Walking. Tilting towards Spring.
February 12, 2022 by 31 Comments
5:50 a.m.
Dark Sky read out: 40° F. 82% cloud cover.
40° F? Come again? I close app, and re-open.
40° F? This is after two days of high’s in the 50’s. This being Feb 12. Not even mid-Feb.
I sit on the stoop, and lace up my boots.
“Something ineffable has tilted toward spring. There’s a promise of warmth beneath the cold, a releasing of winter’s grip on the land. You can feel it.” (Katrina Kenison)
Sun rises, temperature warms rapidly.
The park begins to fill. [Read more…]
What is that weird, tingling feeling? Could it possibly be … hope?
April 1, 2021 by 15 Comments
But then the sun came out where I live this week, and I was alive again. Dunno if you’ve noticed this, but it’s been the longest year since records began, and the timing of lockdown restrictions easing this week coinciding with warm weather in parts of England – which the press was more than happy to call a “heatwave” – has me feeling quite hopeful. I can hear a bird tweeting as I type this sentence! The sun is in the sky! Life begins anew! …
There is a tingling, bright feeling in the air that feels alien to a lot of us – anticipation, maybe, the idea that lido visits will soon lead to pub visits that will one day lead to music festivals and cheap summer holidays. I have a haircut booked in for 12 April and, after a full year without anything to anticipate, it might be the most excited about anything I’ve ever been in my life. Spring is a season of green shoots. Being able to go to someone’s garden and interact with five other people who have spent a year forgetting how to make small talk finally feels like one of them.
— Joel Golby, from “What is that weird, tingling feeling? Could it possibly be … hope?” in “The Guardian” March 30, 2021
Photo: DK @ Daybreak, March 30, 2021, Norwalk, CT. 6:38 am.
Spring Night
March 28, 2021 by 21 Comments
The few minutes of a Spring night are worth ten thousand pieces of gold.
The perfume of the flowers is so pure.
The shadows of the moon are so black.
— Su Dongpo, (1037-1101) from “Spring Night” in “One Hundred Poems from the Chinese.” Trans. Kenneth Rexroth.
Notes:
- Photo by DK: Mar 28 2020. 2:34 A.M. 46° F. Backyard.
- Poem: Thank you Beth @ (via Alive on All Channels)
Sunday Morning
May 2, 2020 by 48 Comments
First blossoms.
Seeing them extends my life seventy-five more years.
~Matsuo Bashō, “haiku 96”, from “Reading Basho with My Ten Year Old” in Paris Review, April 29, 2020
Notes:
- Photo: DK on Run This morning. 6:11 am.
-
Matsuo Bashō, born 松尾 金作, was the most famous poet of the Edo period in Japan. He is recognized as the greatest master of haiku. He was born in 1644 and died in 1694
Spring
April 21, 2020 by 22 Comments
And the scent of mock orange
drifts through the window.
How can I rest?
How can I be content
when there is still
that odor in the world?
— Louise Glück, from “Mock Orange” in The Triumph of Achilles
Notes:
- Inspired by: “Here’s my advice, hold. Hold beauty.” by Anne Carson, The Beauty of the Husband.
- Poem via Memory’s Landscape; Photo: Jane Statham of White Flowers, Mock Orange Blossom. More on Mock Orange.
One Tiny Beautiful Thing
February 25, 2020 by 36 Comments
Paying attention to what is happening in Washington is a form of self-torment so reality altering that it should be regulated as a Schedule IV drug. I pay attention because that’s what responsible people do, but I sometimes wonder how much longer I can continue to follow the national news and not descend into a kind of despair that might as well be called madness. Already there are days when I’m one click away from becoming Lear on the heath, raging into the storm. There are days when it feels like the apocalypse is already here.
Except it isn’t, not really. Not yet. One day when the relentless rains let up for a bit, I went to the park an hour before sunset to walk on the muddy trails and take a break from the bad news. The woods were as lovely as they ever are after a rain: the creeks full of rushing water, the gray bark of the fallen trees slick with moss. Above the trail, the limbs of the living trees creaked in the rising wind, the kind of sound that makes your heart ache for reasons too far beyond words to explain. Though the forest understory is already beginning to green up, weeks too soon, the towhees scratching for insects stirring in what’s left of last fall’s leaves were not in any way sorry about the early arrival of spring.
A few hundred yards on, my eyes caught on a tree I hadn’t noticed when I was walking in the other direction. About seven feet up the trunk was a knothole, a place where a limb had long ago broken off and let water in to rot the wood. Perhaps a woodpecker had helped to deepen it, too, and given the water more purchase over time. The hole was small, a dark grotto in the thickly grooved bark of the stalwart oak, a hiding place that reached far into the mass of that old tree, and the failing light deepened its darkness. Who knows how many miniature woodland creatures have crept into its crevice over the years to nest, to shelter from the wind and rain, to hide from predators — or to wait for prey.
But a creature lurking inside it is not what singled this knothole out among the hundreds, even thousands, I had passed on the path as night came on. What caught my eye was a cluster of tiny seedlings colored the bright new green of springtime, so bright it seemed to glow in the gloaming. The tender plants were growing in the loam inside the knothole. Far above the ground, a hole made by decay in a living tree had become a cold frame, a natural greenhouse that lets in light and keeps out frost. Life in death in life…
Instead of giving up something for Lent, I’m planning to make a heartfelt offering. In times like these, it makes more sense to seek out daily causes for praise than daily reminders of lack. So here is my resolution: to find as many ordinary miracles as a waterlogged winter can put forth, as many resurrections as an eerily early springtime will allow. Tiny beautiful things are bursting forth in the darkest places, in the smallest nooks and deepest cracks of the hidden world, and I am going to keep looking every single day until I find one.
~ Margaret Renkl, from “One Tiny Beautiful Thing” (NY Times, Feb 23, 2020)
Photo: Mohan Bhat
Monday Morning Wake-Up Call
February 24, 2020 by 16 Comments
Outside I could hear a spring robin, a melancholy sound more searching than song to me.
~ Jessica Francis Kane, Rules for Visiting
Photo: Robin singing
Truth
February 2, 2020 by 21 Comments
This is the blessing for the first garden tomato:
Those green boxes of tasteless acid the store
sells in January, those red things with the savor
of wet chalk, they mock your fragrant name.
How fat and sweet you are weighing down my palm,
warm as the flank of a cow in the sun.
You are the savor of summer in a thin red skin.
~ Marge Piercy, from “The Art of Blessing the Day” in The Art of Blessing the Day: Poems with a Jewish Theme. © Knopf, 1999.
Notes: Photo – Katharine Hanna with Organic vine-ripened tomatoes. Poem – A Year of Being Here
If it rains, carry an umbrella, if it’s cold, wear a jacket.
May 14, 2019 by 31 Comments
As soon as the snow melts the grass begins to grow. Even
though the daytime high is barely above freezing, even
though May is very like November, marsh marigolds bloom
in the swamp and the popple trees produce a faint green
that hangs under the low clouds like a haze over the valley.
This is the way the saints live, no complaints, no suspicion,
no surprise. If it rains, carry an umbrella, if it’s cold, wear
a jacket.
~ Louis Jenkins, “Saints” from “Just Above Water: Prose Poems“
Notes: Poem: Thank you Beth @ Alive on all Channels. Photo: Marsh Marigold in Swamp via nature preserves
Saturday Morning
May 4, 2019 by 27 Comments
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!
Miracle. All of it.
April 7, 2019 by 34 Comments
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:
- Photo: Spring Flowers by Paul.
- Related Posts: Miracle. All of it.
- Inspiration: Inspired by Albert Einstein’s quote: “There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.”
Spring
March 22, 2019 by 21 Comments
Spring is like a perhaps hand
(which comes carefully
out of Nowhere) arranging
a window, into which people look (while
people stare
arranging and changing placing
carefully there a strange
thing and a known thing here) and
changing everything carefully
– E. E. Cummings, from “Spring is like a perhaps hand” in The Complete Poems: 1904-1962
Notes: Poem – Thank you Whiskey River. Photo: Floating by Chris A (Ain, Rhone-Alpes, France)
Saturday Morning
May 19, 2018 by 10 Comments
Many an hour I spent there lying in the grass; it was so quiet and mysterious—the only voices were those of the leaves and the birds. But I never saw the place clothed in such beauty as I did that spring. Like me, the bees had already gone out into the meadow, and now they wove and hummed in and out of the myriad violet flowers which burst open in a blue lustre from grass and moss. I gathered them and filled my pocket handkerchief; it was as if I was enchanted, in the midst of the fragrance and sunlight.
– Theodor Storm, (1817-1888) from A Quiet Musician, The Lake of the Bees
Notes: Quote via a-quiet-green-agreement. Photo: Chris A with Field.Always ( Ain, Rhone-Alpes, France)
Live & Learn 