Trees of Gladness

Friday Ramble - Seeing Red

Beyond the window is an ocean of white that goes on forever and ever. Weary of ice and snow, I have been longing to have my morning cuppa out on the deck, but I will not be doing that for quite a while. The best I can do is stand inside the doors with my mug and look out wistfully. At the rate we are going, we may not even see the garden before the end of April, and there won't be any greenery showing until the long weekend in May. A little bright color is a fine thing right about now, and it is welcomed with open arms when it turns up out of the blue.

While pottering in a local market a few weeks ago, a tin bucket of tulips caught my eye, and I scooped up a bunch in assorted colors, carrying them home as tenderly as if they were fledgling birds. The whites, pinks, purples, oranges and yellows were fine stuff, but the scarlets were nothing short of amazing - attention grabbers of the first order. My find was a bucket full of gladness and then some.

In an old cut glass vase (a flea market find), the velvety petals and bright green leaves didn't merely light up the day - they lighted up everything else around here too. One tulip would have been enough, but a whole bouquet was almost indecently sumptuous, a way to invoke spring, even if the only blooming was indoors and in my thoughts. My tulips were a small magic that conjured gladness and made the gnarly bringer of blooms (me) feel like doing the tango with a tulip in her teeth. 

From now until spring, there has to be a pot, a crock, a bucket, a vase or a tankard of something flowering near the south facing window. I think about how beautiful a single garden rose will look there when summer comes, and it seems to me that such thoughts are not just about a vase of tulips or a single rose, but about all the boundless gardens of the earth coming into riotous, intoxicating bloom.

Sunday, Saying Yes to the World

. . . I don't know what gladness is or where it comes from, this splitting open of the self. It takes me by surprise. Not an awareness of beauty and mystery, but beauty and mystery themselves, flooding into a mind suddenly without boundaries. Can this be gladness, to be lifted by that flood?

This is something that needs explaining, how light emerges from darkness, how comfort wells up from sorrow. The Earth holds every possibility inside it, and the mystery of transformation, one thing into another. This is the wildest comfort.

Kathleen Dean Moore, Wild Comfort: The Solace of Nature

Bunch of Gladness

Just a Little Rain

Sunday, Saying Yes to the World

By telling the holy, we acknowledge that life is a gift. In fact, the whole universe is a gift. From where or what, and why, we cannot know. All we do know is that it issues forth, moment by moment, eon by eon, ever fresh, astounding in its richness and beauty. None of this is to gainsay the pain, the suffering, the eventual death that awaits all created things. But we measure that pain and suffering, we mourn that death against the sheer exuberant flow of things.

Scott Russell Sanders

Sunday, Saying Yes to the World

. . . I don't know what gladness is or where it comes from, this splitting open of the self. It takes me by surprise. Not an awareness of beauty and mystery, but beauty and mystery themselves, flooding into a mind suddenly without boundaries. Can this be gladness, to be lifted by that flood?

This is something that needs explaining, how light emerges from darkness, how comfort wells up from sorrow. The Earth holds every possibility inside it, and the mystery of transformation, one thing into another. This is the wildest comfort.

Kathleen Dean Moore, Wild Comfort: The Solace of Nature

October Creepers

Days are sunny and very cool here, nights around the freezing mark, occasionally well below. Most mornings there is frost on the grass when we go out. On our walks, Beau wears his blue tartan jacket with its fleecy liner, and he is happy to be doing it.

I put on my old green jacket with a cotton turtle neck sweater and cardigan underneath. Lacking much of a lining, the garment does not convey warmth, but its deep hood and waxed surface shut out the north wind and keep me dry in sudden icy showers. The garment has several deep pockets for items like glasses, keys, facial tissues, cell phone and poo bags, so taking something along to carry such things is not necessary. Of course, a woolly hat, scarf and warm gloves are also needed these days.

Wonder of wonders, here it is at last, the splendid performance put on every year by a cluster of Virginia creepers a few blocks from home. Most of the creepers in the area turn red and burgundy in October, but this specimen always dazzles in bright orange and vivid teal, and we wait hopefully for it to turn.

Nudged into action by sunny days and cold nights, village trees have gotten the word and thrown themselves joyously into what we (Beau and I) like to call hallelujah mode. Local maples cavort in flaming scarlet, birches and poplars wear buttery gold, and the beech sisters in the park delight our eyes in shimmering copper and bronze, all together a splendid seasonal coinage. On walks, Beau and I stop to look at the riches all around us, and it is a wonder we ever make it home again.

Bunch of Gladness

Sunday, Saying Yes to the World

I build a platform, and live upon it, and think my thoughts, and aim high. To rise, I must have a field to rise from. To deepen, I must have bedrock from which to descend. The constancy of the physical world, under its green and blue dyes, draws me toward a better, richer self, call it elevation (there is hardly an adequate word), where I might ascend a little -- where a gloss of spirit would mirror itself in worldly action. I don't mean just mild goodness. I mean feistiness too, the fires of human energy stoked; I mean a gladness vivacious enough to disarrange the sorrows of the world into something better.

It is one of the great perils of our so-called civilized age that we do not acknowledge enough, or cherish enough, this connection between soul and landscape—between our own best possibilities, and the view from our own windows. We need the world as much as it needs us, and we need it in privacy, intimacy, and surety.

Mary Oliver, Long Life: Essays and Other Writings 

Tree of Gladdening

Tree of Gladness

Wordless Wednesday - Pot of Gladness

Sunday - Saying Yes to the World

By telling the holy, we acknowledge that life is a gift. In fact, the whole universe is a gift. From where or what, and why, we cannot know. All we do know is that it issues forth, moment by moment, eon by eon, ever fresh, astounding in its richness and beauty. None of this is to gainsay the pain, the suffering, the eventual death that awaits all created things. But we measure that pain and suffering, we mourn that death against the sheer exuberant flow of things.

Scott Russell Sanders

Bunch of Gladness

Sunday - Saying Yes to the World

Grace is the celebration of life, relentlessly hounding all the non-celebrants in the world. It is a floating, cosmic bash shouting its way through the streets of the universe, flinging the sweetness of its cassations to every window, pounding at every door in a hilarity beyond all liking and happening, until the prodigals come out at last and dance, and the elder brothers finally take their fingers out of their ears.

Robert Farrar Capon, from Between Noon & Three:
Romance, Law & the Outrage of Grace

Sunday - Saying Yes to the World

. . . I don't know what gladness is or where it comes from, this splitting open of the self. It takes me by surprise. Not an awareness of beauty and mystery, but beauty and mystery themselves, flooding into a mind suddenly without boundaries. Can this be gladness, to be lifted by that flood?

This is something that needs explaining, how light emerges from darkness, how comfort wells up from sorrow. The Earth holds every possibility inside it, and the mystery of transformation, one thing into another. This is the wildest comfort.

Kathleen Dean Moore, Wild Comfort: The Solace of Nature