On these frigid, snowy days, house plants add a welcome spot of color. They also bring surprises. I looked down beside a tray of succulents one day in December and thought a big bug had met its demise. I looked again and realized it was a leaf from one of the succulents, already putting out tentative roots and a pair of tiny leaves. So I tucked it into the dirt alongside the other succulents. It took hold and has been merrily growing. After two months, it is about an inch and a half high and has three sets of leaves. Hurrah for new growth, despite blizzards and an occasional polar vortex just a few feet away! 
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More images from Camp Friedenswald. Later Saturday morning, I walked the Fen Frolic trail and found flowers and ferns, mushrooms and mosses. Fens, for those of you wondering, are rare prairie wetlands. They occur in glaciated regions of the upper Midwest and are fed by groundwater from underground springs, rather than through precipitation.They are less acidic than bogs and richer in biological diversity. 
 More from Tuesday's stroll through the Shoup-Parsons Woods, with spring flowers flourishing. The may apples are spreading green umbrellas, jack-in-the-pulpits proclaim spring, a fallen "caterpillar" blossom curves gracefully on a piece of bark. I bent to take a photo of trillium ready to open, and was amazed by an eight inch lacy leaf skeleton wrapping the fallen log beside them. And a little further along the path, I discovered a whole congregation of jack-in-the-pulpits. They were a pale green in comparison with the first two I saw -- a different variety or different growing conditions or just further along in their growth? By the way, the bronze-colored trees nearing blossom that I posted last week turn out to be buckeyes and native to Indiana. Thanks, Aaron Sawatsky-Kingsley for the identification!       
It's the seedy season -- buckeyes and acorns and parachutes of seed-carrying fluff. All sorts of shapes and shades of brown and tan -- and one last morning glory blooming on our vine, when I thought it was all dried and gone to seed. No seeds in the last photo though, just Yertle the Turtle and friends. 
I discovered a secret conclave of preachers out in the woods yesterday -- a crowd of jack-in-the-pulpits. The names seems to fit best with an ornate pulpit style, complete with canopy, and a tripartite leaf to go with it. Dark red trillium continues the trinitarian theme, but wild ginger goes with a heart shape. 
And the feathers below, each about an inch or two long, came floating down out of a clear blue sky this afternoon, along with twenty or so others, gently wafting on the breeze. I couldn't spot a source. 
Reading in Steven Chase's Nature as Spiritual Practice, in a chapter touching on the mystery, wonder and praise to be discovered in nature's face, I came across a paragraph that made me wish it were summer, so that I could find a stand of Queen Anne's lace and take a closer look. Then I remembered that I had other ways of doing that, even in midwinter. I looked back through my photo archives, and found several images from last summer. In open dry fields, prairies, and along roadways -- often growing in friendly gatherings from mid-July through early September -- is a wildflower that I invite you to bend down and look at carefully. It has very small cream-white, lacy petals that are collectively formed in the shape of an inverted umbrella (called an umbel). The umbel is rounded at the bottom and nearly flat at the top with a slightly bluish-green stem; the green leaves are very finely cut, almost fern-like, and they smell of carrot when crushed. Beneath the umbel of petals is a parachute pattern of stems that together support hundreds of these tiny floweret-petals, each one no more than one-eighth of an inch across. This wildflower is commonly called Queen Anne's lace (Daucus carota), named for the lace-like patterns formed by the formal, intricate arrangement of these hundreds of small flowerets. But besides the beauty of the lacy patterns, Queen Anne's lace is a flower with a secret. Within the shared umbel, in the very center of the hundreds and hundreds of flowerets, is one -- and only one -- reddish to wine-purple floweret, also one-eighth inch across. Just one -- no sisters. Facing Queen Anne's lace -- letting it be as attentive to and astonished by you as you are by it -- you share with its wine-colored eye something only the flower and the prairie know. . . .(p 48-49) 
Chase writes that creation teaches us to pray -- to find a balance between being what we are created to be and doing what we are created to do, and within that balance, to abide in God's delight. "Know whenever you face nature with attention and wonder that you are praising God, just as creation does the same." (p.50) Chase suggests a practice of taking a moment to closely observe something in nature, whether the grandeur of the ocean or the wine-purple floweret in the midst of the white Queen Anne's lace, and to join in that praise. 
With afternoon sunlight, February 17
I found a dandelion boldly blooming in my front yard this week, about two months before I normally expect to see them. As I said in my last post, I began pondering why my reaction to the early snowdrops was delight while my reaction to the dandelion was "oh, a weed." Look at the warm colors in the golden flower and the ruddy leaves. These are a cheerful contrast with gray Indiana skies, something to be enjoyed. Yet I find myself framing this plant in that category of weed and unwanted. I receive a daily email reflection from Inward/Outward, and yesterday's quote from Anthony de Mello seemed quite apropos. Everywhere in the world people are in search of love, for everyone is convinced that love alone can save the world; love alone can make life meaningful and worth living. But how very few understand what love really is and how it arises in the human heart. It is so frequently equated with good feelings for others, with benevolence or nonviolence or service. But these things in themselves are not love. Love springs from awareness. It is only inasmuch as you see someone as he or she really is here and now and not as they are in your memory or your desire or in your imagination or projection that you can truly love them; otherwise, it is not the person that you love but the idea that you have formed of this person. With the dandelion, as long as I see it through the lens of weed, I can't receive it with delight. If I can set that aside, and look at it as it really is here and now -- the burst of color in a winter landscape, an amazingly hardy bloom that held up despite the night's dusting of snow, a flower that is highly unlikely to go to seed since at this moment it is under an inch of snow -- perhaps, then I can truly see it, and delight in it. And what else am I looking at through a lens (a memory, a desire, an imagination, a projection), without awareness, unable to love? 
New growth on a geranium
This week's lectionary psalm, Psalm 36, includes these verses: How precious is your steadfast love, O God! All people may take refuge in the shadow of your wings. They feast on the abundance of your house, and you give them drink from the river of your delights. For with you is the fountain of life; in your light we see light. One of my delights this week has been seeing my houseplants illumined by these days of sunshine. Seen from the right angle, even their cells seem full of light. Look closely at the Christmas cactus blossom or the geranium leaf below. I'm not surprised by the icy sparkles of the geode -- the green light of the geranium leaf catches me with wonder. 
A glistening African violet, about to bloom
A spider plant offshoot with the geode
Christmas cactus blossom
Geranium leaf
The seasons keep on turning. We're entering late fall, with most but not all of the leaves down. Branches may be bare, but the grass is still green, a few flowers are still dancing in the prairie plantings, and the red leaves on the viburnum and Japanese maple are still hanging on. Plenty of plants have turned brown, though, setting seed or going dormant. On a gray November day it can get depressing, even though those seeds are a promise that spring will come again and many plants need that dormancy period, their sabbath rest. And when I walk past the prairie plantings in the early morning, or at dusk, a frolic of finches darts about, delighting in the feast of seeds spread out before them. They are a soft, warm brown, having set aside their golden summer coats for their traditional winter garb. Earth too is gradually shedding her vibrant summer dress, snuggling into the browns and grays of late fall, getting ready for winter. And on days like today, the sun and clouds take turns, highlighting the intriguing patterns of dried seedheads. 
It was a rainy weekend for the annual Assembly retreat at Camp Friedenswald, but a group of us were able to explore the woods with Carol Good-Elliott Saturday morning, before the showers started. We ambled along, stopping to examine the diversity of shapes on sassafras trees (oval, Michigan shaped, and two thumbed), the rich purple of squashed pokeweed berries, the golden eyes of a tiny spring peeper. Carol had us using all our senses, tasting anise-y sweet cicely, listening for woodpeckers and warblers, rubbing our fingers over the raised ridges of papery beech leaves,.and sniffing spicebush and sassafras leaves (which, according to the grade school children who visit Merrylea where Carol works, smell like Lucky Charms. We went with "lemony, " or to at least one person, "Lemon Pledge"). And even with a gray damp day, and lots of brown leaves around, there were plenty of colorful leaves to admire. 
 We had our first frost the night before last, so yesterday we woke to a frost covered yard. The rest of the day was clear and sunny, so mid-afternoon I wandered over to the prairie plantings on campus to see how things were doing. There is quite a mix of flowers gone to seed and flowers still opening blooms.  I was examining some seed heads when two grade school children from a nearby house waded through the plantings to see what I was doing. They were friendly and curious, so we talked about the prairie plants for awhile before the brother headed back to their swing set. His sister stayed and watched. I was trying to get a photo of a big brown grasshopper, but it kept leaping away. She tried to catch it for me and told me about finding little green grasshoppers in the field earlier. I told her that this one might be one of those -- that they get bigger and browner as they get older. She nodded and thought about the way things change color as they get older. "Like grandmas!" she said, looking at my white hair with a big smile. "Like grandmas," I agreed, though I'm not one yet. Grandmas and grasshoppers and all things grow and change. This past week we slipped from summer into autumn, and the trees are beginning to turn vibrant colors, and the smaller plants are turning brown. Or white, like grandmas. Either way, there is an abundance of seeds, so the cycle of growth and change will continue. To everything .....turn, turn, turn...... There is a season.....turn, turn, turn.... And a time to every purpose, under heaven.   The new and the old -- more purple coneflowers 
This past week John and I flew north to spend a week with his parents in Edmonton. As usual, our time included a trip outside the city, traveling across rolling prairie under the big sky, to the acreage where Ike and Millie have a small cabin, a garden, and a forest of shimmering poplar trees. We harvested potatoes and beets, ate a picnic lunch in the fall sunshine and enjoyed golden poplars, blue sky, and red-orange virginia creeper -- and the sight and sound of what was probably several hundred sandhill cranes gathering for their migration south. 
Beet harvest
Sock monkey potato
Enjoying a picnic stew
Watching the fire
As we were getting ready for lunch, we heard a noisy clattering, and it wasn't Santa and his reindeer. Looking up, we spotted a large flock high in the sky, circling in an updraft. Millie says that both geese and sandhill cranes are about ready to migrate. Going by the height and the noise, we assume that these were cranes. If you look closely above, you can see two of the three flocks that eventually came together.
I didn't have the right video equipment to do this justice, but below is a short clip to give you a glimpse and a bit of the sound. Unfortunately the website is not letting me change the orientation to match the vertical way I recorded it, and the focus isn't as sharp as I'd like. So you may have to squint a bit to see the specks of birds circling, listen hard to hear the clatter, and turn your computer sideways to get the right orientation. But perhaps you'll be able to imagine a bit of how amazing it was. In one of her essays in Dewdrops on Spiderwebs, Susan Classen tells of visiting two siblings in their mid-fifties, Charles and Molly. Charles and Molly are both learning disabled and living in a rural location, in a house with no running water or plumbing, and surrounded by junk.  But their flower garden caught my eye. I like flowers, so I asked about their garden. Pointing out one of their special flowers, they invited me to touch the soft bristles. "It's like a powder puff," Charlie said grinning. "I like the light purplish color," Molly added. I stood in amazement, humbled by their appreciation of beauty. The flower was a thistle. "We saw these growing last year in a ditch," Molly continued. "So we waited until the flowers dried, then we gathered the seeds and planted them here." She offered to send me seeds when this year's blossoms dried. My amazement grew. Surely God "chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise...God chose what is low and despised" (1 Cor 1:27-28). Who says thistles are weeds? p. 29-30 Classen goes on to reflect about personal characteristics that she has defined as weeds to be uprooted rather than flowers to be enjoyed and begins to explore ways these traits can also be seen as something to be appreciated. She ends with this thought: I know I'm not alone in sometimes feeling dissatisfied with myself. Perhaps you will find it helpful, as I have, to look for beauty in what you've defined as thistles. How do those characteristics reflect your gifts? p 31. 
Yesterday I was at Maple Tree Meadows, near Three Rivers, Michigan, for another in this year's monthly series of retreats on Soul and Soil. Karla Kauffman led us in a rhythm of an hour of study and conversation, an hour of labor, an hour of solitude and contemplation, and an hour gathered at table, eating and talking. It was a cool and rainy day, for which the soil was grateful, as were we. Nothing like a little drought to change your perspective on gray, rainy days! Though I generally have a positive attitude toward days of gentle rain like this one -- it reminds me of the year I lived in Belgium, and brings back warm memories. We studied two more chapters from Ellen Davis' book, Scripture, Culture and Agriculture, and talked of the gift of manna, and eating as the most basic of all cultural and economic acts. And we talked of Leviticus and the way it portrays the acquisition and consumption of food as the definitive cultural and religious act, an occasion for Israel to practice covenantal faithfulness. And then we went out and stacked wood in the barn, observing the Benedictine practice of stopping when the bell rang for prayer, even though another ten minutes or so would have seen the whole pile neatly stacked. Instead when our "bell" rang -- when Karla looked at her watch and said it was time for our hour of quiet -- we stopped, took off our work gloves, and moved in to a time of contemplative prayer. 
My prayer took the form of wandering with my camera, slowing down enough to see the beauty hidden around me, focusing on the gifts of this gray day. They were subtle, but there. Most of the photos that follow I found in the pasture pictured in the first photo above. 
And then Karla rang her kitchen chimes and we gathered around the table for that cultural, economic, and religious act of eating together -- a salad of mixed green and lemony lentils, corn on the cob, and applesauce, with fresh peaches to end with. Thanks, Karla, for the space, the reflections, the fellowship, and the lunch! 
Karla, with last minute meal preparations, and her home-canned applesauce.
A second cloudy, rainy morning. What a delight! And what a delight to find this delightful -- a month of no rain creates a completely different receptive spirit than, say, what we are likely to experience come November. (Cloudy wet day after cloudy wet day, for those who are not familiar with Northern Indiana weather). After yesterday's rain, Judy and I walked along the race. There was a familiar late summer mix of Queen Anne's Lace and cornflowers, bejeweled by raindrops. Familiar -- and yet how amazing and unusual when you start focusing in for a close view. 
A different perspective
Trees grab our attention, but there were also many intriguing tiny scenes on the floor of the forest around our campsite in Colorado -- flowers, rocks, mosses, ferns, decaying logs serving as hosts to a myriad of small plants and animals. Here are a few. 
Tickseed in sunshine and shadow
Dew -- what a concept! And a welcome one after several weeks with hardly any rain. Yesterday afternoon there was a brief, heavy downpour, a lovely sight in itself. And then this morning, when I went out to get a few leaves of Swiss chard to have with my poached egg, the grass was wet with dew, and all the plants were sparkling. 
Dewy cucumber leaves
Sugar snap peas
An onion seedhead in bloom
An exuberance of bee balm
 I've had milkweed on my mind this week, as I keep looking for monarch caterpillars. Morning sunlight created vivid sun and shadow combinations on this patch of milkweed along the millrace. I thought it would be great fun to discover a caterpillar by first seeing it silhouetted through one of the leaves -- either while we were there, or after as I looked through the photos. But no such luck. The closest I came was this winged flying thing -- and on closer inspection I discovered that it was the actual insect, not just the shadow.  Searching milkweed has led to a number of other familiar and not so familiar insect sightings -- even one of a monarch butterfly, though every time I tried to photograph it, it fluttered away.      This afternoon my spiritual direction peer group met at Pathways Retreat Center, combining retreat time with our monthly meeting. We spent time with the theme of fire, beginning with lectio divina on Moses and the burning bush. Janie read the passage from The Message, and the phrase that stood out for me was "blazing out." I think I normally picture the burning bush as a compact, rather cozy little fire. This time I pictured pointy flames blazing out, which reminded me of the icon above, of Mary and the burning bush. Later I had time for a meditative walk in the woods and found the bushes full of green blazes, appropriately for St Patrick's Day (and not a snake in sight). Our temperatures have been running about 35 degrees above normal this week, and the plants think it's spring.    I like the way walking with my camera in hand slows me down, as I take time to look more closely and to notice things I would normally rush past. I've heard of someone else who accomplishes the same thing by going for walks with a magnifying glass. I like the close up feature of my camera -- especially with these tiny plants in the moss. I included my finger in one to give a better sense of the size.   
Some memories of sunlight and the warm wind from yesterday afternoon at Witmer Woods. . . a flock of red-wing blackbirds was feasting on the berries, but they didn't stay around for the photo op. 
 Back at home the sunshine was streaming in... . . .making for interesting mixtures of light and shadow. 
March may come in like a lion, but February decided to celebrate Leap Day with a glimpse of spring. Compare these blooms with yesterday's photo of the same flowers. Take a sheltered window well, add a day in the 60's and presto -- instant spring. I went over to Witmer Woods and wandered the woods of my childhood, when we lived on Carter Road, just south of the College Cabin, on the other side of the drainage ditch. All woods were mostly brown and barren, but the moss was looking lush. 
Think of the tooth work it took to reach the nutmeats in this one. 
I spent a restful time sitting by the river, listening to the water lapping against the shore, the wind roaring in the branches overhead, and red-wing blackbirds calling in the bushes. 
Joy -- my schedule was finally such, and the weather warm enough, that I was able to go out for a walk with my camera this afternoon, to see what I could see. Granted, it was a gray day, as you can see above, but it was a gentle gray, a soft, peaceful gray. What caught my eye today was the cycle of change-- the delicate calligraphy of a dead and dried weed against the gray sky, and the range of decay on these orange berries, with new buds showing tight and plump on a side shoot. 
Everywhere I looked there were broken and decaying plants, and a few lines from Henry Lyte's hymn Abide with me started running through my head: Abide with me, fast falls the eventide. The darkness deepens; Lord, with me abide. . . . Change and decay in all around I see, O thou who changest not, abide with me. Which sounds like it could have been really depressing, but it wasn't. The old, broken, dried up stuff will make way for new growth soon. In fact, when I got up close and looked carefully, I kept seeing signs of that new growth already present, like the pale buds on the stem in the photo above. I saw this old log from a ways down the bike path, and it looked from that angle like the epitome of death and decay. But close up, it was full of all sorts of amazing moss and lichens. Life is full of surprises -- and, apparently, so is death. 
I took this photo of a mullein back in early November. I was trying to catch the way the light shone through some of the leaves and sparkled off the down on other leaves. Spurts of wind kept tossing the larger leaves up and in the way, blurring the picture. Finally, on the third attempt, I got this picture. It wasn't until later, as I was looking over the day's images, that I noticed the spider. He crept into a quieter refuge, or I shifted my angle, sometime between the first and second photo, and by this third photo, he was lit by sunshine. There are multiple levels of discovery with this practice of contemplative photography -- what I notice as I wander with my camera, what I find as I look over the photos on the larger computer screen, what becomes visible as I crop photos, or as I look over photos at a later date. There is seeing and noticing, and then there's what we notice with a second look, or as we ponder an image that speaks to us in some way. I'm pondering this trio. 
I took this photo of St Ignatius as The Pilgrim at the Jesuit Retreat Center in Wernersville, PA, with the early morning sun on his back. Later when the shadows had shifted, I took this second photo, where it is easier to see that he carries a book and a staff. 
And then just as we were leaving, I saw the same statue from another angle, and took the following photo. It was only after I was home and going through the images from the week,looking at this one in the larger Picasa format, that I noticed the staff propped invitingly in the corner. I'm not Catholic or Jesuit, so I'm not picking up his staff in that sense, but I hear the verse of a familiar song: We are pilgrims on a journey, we are travelers on the road. We are here to help each other walk the mile and bear the load. May we also be taking up our walking staffs, moving out in pilgrimage, following Christ, in our own time and place. 
I've been enjoying the sunshine streaming down the last couple days, though due to other commitments and the challenges of taking photos when the temperature is below freezing, I haven't been able to explore sun on snow as much as I would have liked. 
At least my spirits can be lifted by the sight of sun and snow from inside the house -- though the snow has been melting since this photo, as the temperatures climb into the 40's. Given that we are still in Christmastime, this 11th day of Christmas, I've been enjoying the way the sunshine brought out these traditional Christmas-y colors. 
And a different sort of spark of light --
On JRR Tolkien's birthday, January 3rd, Garrison Keillor included this story about him on his daily Writers' Almanac. Tolkien was a professor of English Literature at Oxford, and one day when he was grading exams, he found that a student had left blank an entire page of the exam booklet. In that empty space, Tolkien scribbled the sentence "In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit." He went on to develop that into a story he told his children and, eventually, his book The Hobbit. I'm enchanted by this snippet. What if there hadn't been a blank page just then? What if Tolkien hadn't let his diligent prof-grading-exam identity drift away? What unsuspected delights might come popping out for us, if we find a little time and space in the midst of our everyday duties, and let our creative selves playfully scribble a mysterious sentence, a joyful doodle, a half-heard tune? |
My approach to contemplative photography --
"Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it." Mary Oliver in "Sometimes" Categories
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