Fey Steeds and Tiny Riders

Dryad's Saddle or Pheasant's Back Mushroom
(Polyporus squamosus)

One goes off to the forest in May in search of early orchids and encounters these fetching fungi instead.  It's always a treat to find such arty structures, and they pop out of the woodwork around the same time as morels do, sometimes growing quite large - well over a foot across.  This one was growing out of an elm stump along the trail into the deep woods, and it could be seen from quite a distance because of its tawny ochre coloring.

The mushrooms are a species of bracket fungus, and their common name derives from European mythological tradition which held that the fey woodland beings called dryads found the growths comfortable and liked to ride them.  Do the saddles develop legs and canter off with their tiny riders when nobody is looking?  As for the second name, they do look rather like the mottled feathering on a pheasant's back.

Tough in their maturity (rather like me, I suppose), the "saddles" are deliciously edible when young and tender, and they smell somewhat like watermelons, apparently taste like them too when raw.  I haven't done it, but apparently one can make a lovely stiff creamy thick paper out of the fibres.  Since all the specimens I have located so far are old and stringy, I haven't tried eating them - simply like them for their shape (kind of like the starship Enterprise), their vivid earthy hues, and the fact that they show up like technicolor balloons on stumps and among fallen trees.

In the Pink of Life

Apple Blossoms

 

Plum Blossoms

 

Late Tulip

Friday Ramble - River

To trace the history of a river, or a raindrop, as John Muir would have done, is also to trace the history of the soul, the history of the mind descending and arising in the body. In both we constantly seek and stumble on divinity, which, like the cornice feeding the lake and the spring becoming a waterfall, feeds, spills, falls, and feeds itself over and over again.
Gretel Ehrlich, Sisters of the Earth

The ancient Irish bards knew the Salmon of Knowledge as the giver of all life's wisdom. In the salmon's leap of understanding like a leap of faith, we can see ourselves "in our element," immersed in the river of life. The cycle of the salmon's journey reminds us that all rivers flow to the same sea.
Lynn Noel, Voyages: Canada's Heritage Rivers

I would love to live like a river flows, carried by the surprise of its own unfolding.
John O'Donohoe

The word river comes to us through the good offices of the Middle English and Anglo-Norman rivere and the Vulgar Latin riparia, thence the proper Latin riparius and ripa all meaning "of a bank" or simply "bank". The word's closest kin is the adjective riparian, and we use it to describe the verdant lands along natural waterways and those who live there too. To be a riparian is a fine thing.

How can one not think of rivers on a day in springtime when the sky is blue overhead, and the rivers of the Lanark Highlands are running free and singing again?  In their remote cedared coves and the quiet fields of their beginning places, a thousand and one northern waterways have been liberated from the long white season and are lifting their wild voices in the sunlight.

The awakened waters sparkle like sapphires in the cool morning light, reflections of blue sky and golden clouds filling every pool and eddy; lambent moons round and perfect as they pour their light across quiet rivers in hidden highland places after dark. Lone voices and choirs, ballads, symphonies and oratorios, there is greening and rebirth in every note being sung, and what a metaphor for life and journeying! If I had been given the privilege of granting my own name, that name would probably have been "River".

Think of life and the cosmos as a great river flowing on and on: clouds and stars streaming over our heads on winter nights, concealed waters flowing along right underneath our feet, rain, ice and snow in season, the tides and currents of the oceans, the salty life-giving rivers of blood singing through our veins, Mother Earth in her perfect effortless ebb and flow.

No matter where we land up living out our days, we are never far from rivers, and they are the perfect motif for this earthbound journey we are all on together. They run right through our lives, and if we are fortunate, we will come to know many in a single lifetime: to understand their ancient language and cadence, sense their ebb and flow, plumb the mysteries of their currents and eddies and learn their rumbling chants and fluid harmonies — when we are so blessed, the canticles of the great rivers become the music of our journey.

Thursday Poem - Like Wind

Like wind - In it, with it, of it. 

Of it just like a sail, so light and strong

that, even when it is bent flat,

it gathers all the power of the wind 

without hampering its course.

Like light - In light, lit through by light,

transformed into light. 

Like the lens which disappears 

into the light it focuses.
   

Like wind. Like light.

Just this - on these expanses,
on these heights.

Dag Hammarskjöld,

from Vägmärken (Markings)

Wordless Wednesday - Waiting for Twilight in the Green

A Lesson in Transience

You can see the old crabapple in full frowsy bloom from the kitchen window as you are sipping your morning Darjeeling, and you resolve to capture it with the Pentax when breakfast is over and the dishes have been washed up and put away.

Along comes a cold north wind while you are turned away from the window and intent on completing your chores.

When you trot out to the garden and stand by the fence looking up, only a few minutes later, there are just a few flowers left on a single dancing branch, but oh how artfully the grass is spattered with fragrant fallen crabapple petals. 

Another Fine and Foggy Morning

Zen Rakes, Bicycles and Blooms

Something happens to my eyes around this time every year.  After a winter spent tracing the artfully scalloped nautilus curves of ice and snow and drinking in the plethora of blues on offer during the long white season, I get hung up on all sorts of colors and shapes in May.  If past experience is any indication at all, I will probably be this way for weeks, wandering around with an expression dazed and intoxicated, finding profound pleasure in throngs of prosaic and unlikely things.

It doesn't have to be a flower or a leaf or a stem.  It could be almost anything, a tantalizing (and occasionally mundane) structure of some sort with patterns or shapes or flowing curves built into the equation and calling out for rapt and thoughtful attention.

Pottering off to the market on foot yesterday under a leaden sky with rain falling and more rain in the cards for days to come (it's raining now, in fact), there were soggy tulips and daffodils everywhere I looked.  It was the rake leaning casually against a tree with a stucco wall nearby and a bit of bicycle in the background that followed me home and stayed with me as I opened the front door of the little blue house in the village.

The posture of the unhanded garden implement might have been forlorn, but it was serene, and it pleased this elderly eccentric eye as much as a whole bed of dancing blooms in sizzling shades.  Does a simple garden rake have Buddha mind?  This one seemed to be the very essence of Zen, and the question as I sat down to write this morning was simple, paradoxical and something of a koan.  Was the leaning rake not complete within itself, and did it really need any words from me at all?

Foggy, foggy morning...