Chauncy is my large, neutered male who patrols my garden warding off any and all critters who might cause damage.
He lounges on the old garden swing in the shade of the pear tree sleeping with one eye open ready to act as bouncer.
All winter he spends his time on a pile of cushions basking in the winter sunlight. But on the first warm day he’s back on his swing or patrolling the fence line daring any onward critter to just try and wreck havoc in his kingdom.
On occasion he submits to a scratch behind his ears or an occasioned snuggle, but for the most part he’s content to lead a rather solitary life unlike his two sisters are definitely lap cats and would rather simply observe the antics of a mouse than do anything with it least of all kill it. They seem to have the attitude of live and let live rather than exerting themselves to actually enter into physical contact with anything other then their food dish.
So Chauncy is left to hunt and to patrol in between his frequent naps on the old garden swing.
]]>I am one of the eager beavers who come early to these meccas of floral profusions and like my fellow early birds I more often than not end up covering everything with sheets. To the uninitiated upon seeing all these sheet covered plants, it might appear I’m decorating for a ghostly halloween display.
But once it warms up the garden bursts forth in a celebration of floral profusion that is quite breath taking.
The motto by which I approach life in general is based on the advice of an ancient Persian poet that encourages his readers to always buy hyacinths for the soul. I’m convinced that nourishing the soul with all the beauty to be accessed is at least as vital to our overall health as food for the body.
I’m equally convinced that you can never have to many flowers.
I’ve had this passionate attraction from my earliest memory and often had to be physically restraint by my Mother from dashing up to the alter reaching out for the bouquets that decorated the church on Sunday.
Vegetables I can afford to buy at the farmers market. But flowers I must surround myself with for the whole season from April to November. If one has an obsession this is a great one to have.
]]>Slowly, an inch at a time, the sun dispersal over the rim of the world and all the brilliant colors fade leaving behind a grey twi-light. The trees that were turned to flaming torches by the dying sun are now only bleak shadows, dark silhouettes that smudge the endless sky. And yet long after the sun has disappeared there remains a band of ghostly green light, the suggestion of a glimmer that is slow to succumb to the invading darkness. Always it has seemed to me that this brief precious time is not only ineffably beautiful, but sacred making as it does a solemn farewell to a day that will not come again.
And yet so few of us take the time to acknowledge this vesper hour. The greatest symbol of how detached we have become from a sense of the sacred is surely our failure to pause and recognize the quiet beauty of a winter sunset.
As I watch the colors fade into the night I believe I’ve been privilege to have beheld this divine production, this symphony of color this holy hour of the closing day and for this I am deeply grateful.
]]>Modern day architecture doesn’t include any where near as many doors as it did once. Homes are built around the open space concept now. But here in this house that was built well over a hundred years ago there is evidence it once had many more doors than it does now. Remodeling projects by various owners over time has been instrumental in the elimination of all but a few doors. But there are still doorways that hint on where doors once existed.
Closed doors always have a way of engaging my curiosity. When I was six I spent a summer with relatives who had a door that was always closed and that I was told was off limits to me. My fertile imagination worked overtime trying to picture what was behind that door.
One day when no one was watching I opened that door. To my disappointment it was just an extra room where they stored winter clothing and shoes. There were ladies shoes in lots of colors and styles that held no attraction for me since I preferred to go barefoot. I still have very little interest in shoes.
Nevertheless doors have a way of concealing and endless litany of possibilities that can provide endless fodder for our imagination. Who does not wonder what a closed door may conceal. Even cats are fascinated by closed doors.
]]>At seventeen I thought the idea of being a beach comber sounded like the perfect career. Never mind I had never seen the ocean and the nearest beach was seventy miles away on the shores of Lake Michigan. Needless to say none of those aspirations even became reality. They existed only in my imagination.
I am again at it and it is one of the most remarkable characteristic of the human species. With out it civilization would never have come into existence.
Even though science claims to be fact based we still had to imagine possibilities before we could formulate the concepts that gave them a tangible reality.
How impoverished and sterile life would be were it not for the gift of imagination. I don’t utilize this gift the way I did in childhood. And, yet as I write this column I’m looking out at a winter landscape and imagining how it will look in June.
If I try hard enough I can almost smell the lilacs and hear the birds singing like they do in spring. I can imagine myself as I was at seventeen and know just how the ocean must look on a stormy day.
When I listen closely I can hear the voices of the ancestors carried through time and space on the wings of the wind.
Its all fine and good to be programmatic, but give me someone whose imagination allows them to shape shift into a butterfly or who can see fairies where others see only a flock of sparrows.
]]>The days are growing steadily longer and night does not really draw its curtain around the world until well past six in the evening. It is the elongated hours of daylight that alert us to the advent of spring.
When I go out to greet the dawn as I do each day, I’m greeted not by the deathly sound of winter silence, but rather by the mating whistles of the cardinal. High above me in the branches of the cotton wood the cardinal perches to greet the arrival of the new day.
This is indeed the month of the spring equinox celebrating the first day of spring. No matter how deep is the blanket of snow that covers the garden, the south wind proclaims victory over winter.
And far beneath the snow the roots of vegetation senses something has changed. Slowly they uncurl their roots and stretch out and feel the sap begin to rise. They hear the cardinal whistling its heart out in the cold dawn and they hear the rush of the south wind bringing a new day having vanquished the icy grip of winter as a new season begins. By the end of March there will be any number of plants emerging from dormancy. The waters of rivers and lakes will once again be ice free and the geese will begin their long journey north.
]]>Life is comprised of paradox and irony, of contradiction and dichotomy but also of synchronicity. Fate and chance are entwined in a manner that often makes it difficult to discern which is which or are they actually one and the same?
The deeper you search for an answer one quickly discovered there are multiple answers for every question and a hundred more questions for every answer. Nothing is ever what it seems. It is always more and the simpler a thing may be the greater is the mystery of which it is a small part.
The only absolute is change itself and the greatest of all mysteries is the nature of time.
And yet in the stillness the midnight hour, even in the depth of the darkest night, there is a paint of light that pierces the darkness, that calls to us across the vastness of the darkest night, resonating within us like the echo of a half remembered dream.
In the midst of chaos a pattern emerges and we know ourselves not to be alone but to be part of something greater than the sum of its parts.
Ultimately the way through the maze is revealed and all paths converge at that single point of light out of which they first emanated.
]]>Its time to read thru the year’s dairy one more time before filing it away. With out that diary i’m not sure if I would remember much about the year that is coming to a close.
That is the result of learning to live fully in the present moment and letting go of all my yesterdays.
Remembering the past is primarily a function of the human brain. Of course animals have memories but for the most part then don’t dwell on them. It is enough to know we have lived it, reaped its lessons and then moved on.
It is better to look forward to what is yet to come, to not fear it but to fill our thoughts with hope and positive anticipation that the best is not past but awaits us in every new tomorrow. I remind myself often that only my good can come to me and in the final tally its all good.
The stars are at their brightest in the darkest hour just before the dawn.
]]>At night I walk the streets of my hometown admiring the houses that are decorated for Christmas and wondering about the ones that have no decorations at all.
I’m one of those folks who tends to go a bit overboard for this season. I spend hours hauling out from storage my collections of angels, of santa's, of small artificial trees wound with Christmas lights. I bring out the dolls and the teddy bears. I do all of this the day after Thanksgiving and I do it to please nobody but myself. Sometimes I get visitors and sometimes I don’t. Sometimes I spend the holidays alone but I don’t mind at all.
Christmas music alone is enough to banish any twinge of loneliness. Its not the job of others to make me happy. Happiness is the gift I give myself and the quickest and surest path to happiness is the constant practice of gratitude. When we make the practice of gratitude a consistent element of our every day lives it becomes quickly apparent that we have far more to be grateful for than we do things to complain about.
And so I celebrate the season with an abiding sense of gratitude and a string of colored lights to banish the darkness.
These royal travelers usually fly in huge flocks and under the cloak of night this one must have missed the last call and thus has been left behind.
Once many years ago in one of my vagabond moments I came across a solitary tree standing in the center of a field of wild grass so covered by monarch butterflies was the trunk and the branches of this tree there was nothing else to be seen, Just thousands of orange monarchs clustered all together. Perhaps this was the place agreed upon to gather before embarking on their long flight south.
Now that the butterflies have undertaken their migration the garden seems somehow less colorful. It too seems resigned to the coming of the frost king’s touch of death.
This garden has become an extension of myself. Were it not so entwined with my very heart and soul, I would be much diminished and so I promise it that I will be here to great the first evidence of its resurrection come spring and, God willing, it will be so.
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