Rapt Attention in the Green

Friday Ramble - Radical

This Friday's word is radical, and a natural choice for this madcap greening season when we are all planting packets of seeds and transplanting flats of flowers, herbs and veggies - it comes to us through the late Latin rādīcālis meaning having roots, and the Old English wrotan meaning to root, gnaw or dig up, both entities originating in the early Indo-European wrad meaning branch or root.

Synonyms include: fundamental, basic, basal, bottom, cardinal, constitutional, deep-seated, essential, foundational, inherent, innate, intrinsic, meat-and-potatoes, native, natural, organic, original, primal, primary, primitive, profound, thoroughgoing, underlying, vital. They also include pejorative words such as anarchistic, chaotic, excessive, extremist, fanatical, far-out, freethinking, iconoclastic, immoderate, insubordinate, insurgent, insurrectionary, intransigent, lawless, left wing, militant, mutinous, nihilistic, rabid, rebellious, recalcitrant, recusant, refractory, restive, revolutionary, riotous, seditious, severe, sweeping, uncompromising and violent.

We use the word radical to describe someone who dwells outside the mainstream, someone who has departed from accepted norms, traditions and social conventions and does their own thing. The word has been in common usage since the sixties, and being called radical may or may not be a compliment. I am always astonished and vastly tickled on some level to think that a word used to connote the rebellious, unconventional,, confrontational and downright peculiar actually means something as lovely and organic and simple as "rooted. Now how did that happen?

In the original sense, being radical simply means being connected and part of things, and that makes the word one of my all time favorites.  It signifies (for me anyway) a bone deep connection with everything that matters, with the Old Wild Mother and all her creations, the earth under my feet, the moon and stars over my head - with timeless notions of rebirth, transformation and non-duality. Pots off, roots down, branches up and away we go...

Thursday Poem - Becoming

Wait for evening.
Then you'll be alone.

Wait for the playground to empty.
Then call out those companions from childhood:

The one who closed his eyes
and pretended to be invisible.
The one to whom you told every secret.
The one who made a world of any hiding place.

And don't forget the one who listened in silence
while you wondered out loud:

Is the universe an empty mirror? A flowering tree?
Is the universe the sleep of a woman?

Wait for the sky's last blue
(the color of your homesickness).

Then you'll know the answer.

Wait for the air's first gold (that color of Amen).
Then you'll spy the wind's barefoot steps.

Then you'll recall that story beginning
with a child who strays in the woods.

The search for him goes on in the growing
shadow of the clock.

And the face behind the clock's face
is not his father's face.

And the hands behind the clock's hands
are not his mother's hands.

All of Time began when you first answered
to the names your mother and father gave you.

Soon, those names will travel with the leaves.
Then, you can trade places with the wind.

Then you'll remember your life
as a book of candles,
each page read by the light of its own burning.

Li-Young Lee

(from Behind My Eyes)

Wordless Wednesday - May's Wild Orchid

Larger Yellow Lady-slipper

(Cypripedium furcatum or Cypripedium pubescens)

For the Dragons of the Air

 Four-spotted Skimmer

 (Libellula quadrimaculata)

 Another lovely summer spent chasing airborne dragons beckons...

The air over the Two Hundred Acre Wood was filled with dragonflies this past long weekend, buzzing erratically to and fro as they dined on gnats, deerflies and mosquitoes with gusto. As is usually the case here near the end of May, many of the happy fliers were skimmers with a light sprinkling of baskettails, darners, dashers and pondhawks.

This specimen was probably female, but the male and female genders of this lovely flier are similar and difficult to sort out. The sole differences seem to be the presence of a flange on the S8 segment (female) and a slight grayish bloom on the abdomen of an adult male.

For all the rain, the clouds, the thunder and the lightening, the presence of so many winged and merry dragons is a harbinger of high summer, long blue days, technicolor sunrises and early mornings spent in the garden, purple summer evenings spent on the deck with a good book and a tall glass of iced tea.  Let it be, please - may it be so and soon.

Jack in the Shadows

Jack-in-the-pulpit, also called Bog onion, Brown dragon,

Indian turnip, Wake robin or Wild turnip

(Arisaema triphyllum)

Wild Wonders All a-Maying

 

How astonishing the wild encounters of May: the first stained glass swallowtails fluttering in the western field, ferns, wild leeks and jacks-in-the-pulpit swaying in the deep rich soil near the creek, jeweled dragonflies swooping and circling in the air over the hill, columbines along the trail in red and gold.

After a winter that seemed as if it would last forever, here are trees and songbirds, leafings and buddings and a thousand and one other wonders painting the air with glorious color and fragrance and song.

Setting off down the trail with a camera around my neck, a bag of weighty peripherals slung over my shoulder and the pockets of my photographer's vest crammed with an assortment of other bits and pieces, I cover only a few feet before I find myself sitting down on a sun warmed rock and just drinking in the light and the season like wine - no, better make that champagne. The world dances and sparkles like the best bubbly,  all golden and fizzy and madcap and too wonderful for words. Even the grosbeaks high in the overstory seem intoxicated.

It seems this is to be another one of those years when I never make it all the way to the back of the Two Hundred Acre Wood. There is just too much to see along the way.