Being a Wild Thing

Inside all of us is... hope. Inside all of us is... fear. Inside all of us is... adventure. Inside all of us is a wild thing.

Maurice Sendak

Being wild

Overhead

a hawk screams

Fierce and free,

and I think how strong,

how like him

I would like to be –

Untethered by gravity,

flying into the wind -

Fearless-

until one morning

I see the young one

Just leaving the nest,

Eating scraps of meat

On the ground

while owls watch him

from the trees.

A young hawk eating some scraps of meat on the edge of the woods.

My neighbors called me when he came, so I could practice with my new lens

If he lives to be a year, his tail will turn brick red, and then he could live as long as 20 years, sometimes more.

Later that week - A mother deer and her fawn are in my yard almost every day - it breaks my heart when I see them. The mother has a broken leg (hidden behind her head in the picture), and it makes her and the fawn so impossibly vulnerable. She can’t run, and the fawn doesn’t stray far from her.

(The photos have a weird, dreamy quality because I took them through a screened window).

The fawn eating my un-mowed grass.

In the morning, before anyone else comes, it’s just me and the rabbit. While it’s still pretty dark, he eats seeds from under the bird feeder and I drink coffee. I doubt he feels the same sense of camaraderie, but I’m always glad to see him there. As soon as the first squirrels come - he’s gone.

I have need of the sky,

I have business with the grass;

I will up and get me away where the hawk is wheeling

Lone and high,

And the slow clouds go by.

Richard Hovey

In a lifetime where I have never even seen a single hawk on the ground in the wild - within one week - I saw two - in two different towns. Maybe there is a message there. Maybe the message is that I haven’t been paying attention and hawks are everywhere. The two in my pictures are red-tailed hawks, the first one, at the beginning, was a young fledgling who just left its nest and was hanging around in a neighbor’s yard. The second one (at the end) I saw while walking back to my car from the farm market in Saugatuck. (If you’re interested in knowing more about red-tailed hawks, click here.)

The other theme flitting around in my head this week is the vulnerability of life in the wild. All animals, but particularly the ones pictured in this post, are so close to the edge of survival. An inexperienced young hawk in an open area beneath the trees where owls live, a mother deer with a broken leg, and the fawn who needs her protection, a little rabbit who is preyed on by so many animals. I feel for them all, even as I realize that it’s just the way the natural world is. Dangerous and messy, and poignantly beautiful.

Thank you for letting me muse. See you next week.

Up Close

Every particle of the world is a mirror. In each atom blazes forth the light of a thousand suns. Open the heart of a raindrop and you will find a hundred oceans. In a grain of sand lies the seed of a thousand beings.

Mahmud Shabistari

The Pine

A storm

blew through, leaving

its tiny tears twinkling

like jewels along the narrow

needles.

In a drop of rain, the entire tree reflects

Delicate beads of rain glisten on a tiny white flower

When trying to grasp the idea of infinity, consider the many tiny veins reaching across one small blossom in a single hydrangea cluster among a mass of hydrangea clusters on large hydrangea bush in a garden with many hydrangea bushes, in a neighborhood with many gardens, in a town with many neighborhoods…and you start to get the idea …

How does the velvety blossom feel beneath the feet of a flying ant?

Nature’s symmetry

The tip of a purple loosestrife blossom

Every little thing wants to be loved.

Sue Monk Kidd

When I feel anxious, I walk around with a macro lens exploring the world of insects, flowers, pine needles and raindrops. Intentional noticing of so-called little things feels like reverence and respect for something greater. It’s hard not to love a world that is so rich with color and life, and pretty soon I get caught up in it, forgetting my worries, even if it’s only temporary.

Thank you for allowing me to share these pictures and thoughts with you. I really appreciate you being here.

What Lies beneath

Nature alone is antique, and the oldest art a mushroom.

Thomas Carlyle

An Array of Mushrooms

I looked for mushrooms in the woods behind my house one day after listening to a Hidden Brain podcast about slowing down. They were everywhere - and then I learned some things I didn’t know.

They seem to appear overnight, but the mushrooms we see are only part of much bigger, much older structures. They are the reproductive fruit of a network of mycelia living underneath the earth, a system of branches and threads spanning far beyond the part we see.

They feed on wood and leaf, living and dead. (Here it’s like a forest within a forest, of mushroom and moss)

They are abundant (Shelves on a dead log)

They can be Seemingly Solitary.

They can step into a tale (Amanita Muscaria - the mushroom from Alice in Wonderland)

They can be delicate and beautiful ( Crown-tipped Corral Mushroom among leaves, shelves and moss)

They can be shy

“Nobody sees us,
Stops us, betrays us;
The small grains make room.

Soft fists insist on
Heaving the needles,
The leafy bedding…”

From Sylvia Plath’s “Mushrooms” poem

They can stand together like a tiny army

“We shall by morning
Inherit the earth.
Our foot's in the door.”

from Sylvia Plath’s “Mushrooms” poem

My curiosity has been piqued by the reading I’ve done this week about mushrooms. I think I will be returning to this again in the future. I used some lines from my favorite poem about mushrooms by Sylvia Plath. To read the whole poem, and a great article about how it relates to the scientific truth about mushrooms, click here.

Thank you so much for being here! I will see you next week!