I captured the final glimpse of the sunset with my son still out there surfing. Can life get any better? I think not. #grateful
And, one day
We shall look back and see
It was always those little moments
That mattered the most
(A little poem written by Athey Thompson)
This is such a great word!
Nemophilist: One who is fond of forest or forest scenery; a haunter of the woods.
Oh yes, I’d love to haunt some woods right about now, with the stars above and the full moon to guide a late night hike…
There is a pleasure in the pathless woods,
There is a rapture on the lonely shore,
There is society, where none intrudes,
By the deep sea, and music in its roar:
I love not man the less, but Nature more,
From these our interviews, in which I steal
From all I may be, or have been before,
To mingle with the Universe, and feel
What I can ne'er express, yet cannot all conceal.
George Gordon Byron
(George Gordon was an English romantic poet and peer. He was one of the leading figures of the Romantic movement, and has been regarded as among the greatest of English poets. Wiki)
Be the wild one, my friends.
And, she
Be the wild one
That wanders the woods
Wanting for silence
But for, the song of the birds
Photo credit to Enchanted Seashells
A little poem by Athey Thompson
Taken from A Little Pocket Book of Poems by Athey Thompson
A few years ago UC Berkeley hosted an Eco-Poetics Conference. My son was invited to participate and while there he was honored to meet the poet, Robert Hass.
Hass served as Poet Laureate of the United States from 1995 to 1997. He won the 2007 National Book Award and shared the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for the collection Time and Materials: Poems 1997-2005. In 2014 he was awarded the Wallace Stevens Award from the Academy of American Poets.
I love the way his mind works, it’s as simple as that.
From Hass: “This poem is called measure – I think it belongs to my learning as a young writer as to where I felt poems were coming from.”
Recurrences.
Coppery light hesitates
again in the small-leaved
Japanese plum. Summer
and sunset, the peace
of the writing desk
and the habitual peace
of writing, these things
form an order I only
belong to in the idleness
of attention. Last light
rims the blue mountain
and I almost glimpse
what I was born to,
not so much in the sunlight
or the plum tree
as in the pulse
that forms these lines.
FYI: Enjambment…From the French meaning “a striding over,” a poetic term for the continuation of a sentence or phrase from one line of poetry to the next. An enjambed line typically lacks punctuation at its line break, so the reader is carried smoothly and swiftly—without interruption—to the next line of the poem.
“It doesn’t matter how old you are, there is a little child within who needs love and acceptance.”- Louise Hay
Do you still wish upon a star? I do, because my own inner child is blissfully naive and unsophisticated.
Star light, star bright,
First star I see tonight,
I wish I may, I wish I might,
Have this wish I wish tonight.⭐
I wrote a letter
To my inner child
And, I told her
How loved she was by me
And, if no one else
Ever told her so
She knew
How loved she was, by me
⭐
And when
We grow up
We must never forget
That hidden, down deep
Within us
Is our forever inner child
Resting, silently within us
Forever waiting
Forever hoping
That one day
We shall
Remember it
⭐
And, if a star shall fall
Down upon the ground
Why, I shall pick her up
For she longed to be found
I shall hold her forever
Forever in my heart
Knowing that we shall never
Ever again, be apart
By Athey Thompson from A little Pocket Book of Poems
Happy first day of summer and the longest day of the year!
Until recently, I hadn’t known about the practice of celebrating Litha during Midsummer. Litha is a pagan holiday, a time of light, purification, and healing; to reflect on the light and dark within us and the world.
It’s time to appreciate everything we have in our lives and to be grateful for nature and all that she provides.
Pick some flowers to honor the season or build a fire or light a candle. A fire lit on Litha is said to be very powerful and magical.
“Write down your hopes and dreams and burn them in the fire, to do this on Litha night will bring you your desire.”
The Sun
Have you ever seen
anything
in your life
more wonderful
than the way the sun,
every evening,
relaxed and easy,
floats toward the horizon
and into the clouds or the hills,
or the rumpled sea,
and is gone–
and how it slides again
out of the blackness,
every morning,
on the other side of the world,
like a red flower
streaming upward on its heavenly oils,
say, on a morning in early summer,
at its perfect imperial distance–
and have you ever felt for anything
such wild love–
do you think there is anywhere, in any language,
a word billowing enough
for the pleasure
that fills you,
as the sun
reaches out,
as it warms you
as you stand there,
empty-handed–
or have you too
turned from this world–
or have you too
gone crazy
for power,
for things?
– Mary Oliver
| Penumbra: a shadowy, indefinite, or marginal area |
I sent you a present last night you know
Though it didn’t address you by name
It was all of those meteors showering, dancing
And falling to earth like the rain
I wrote you a letter last week you know
But it won’t have arrived in the post
I wrote on the bright coloured curves of a rainbow
The reasons I missed you the most
I sent you a message just yesterday
But it wasn’t a message in words
For I spoke to the wind and I taught her our song
And I asked her to make sure you heard
I drew you a picture last Tuesday
But you may not have noticed it there
For I drew round the clouds with the rays of the sun
So they glowed as they hung in the air
No, you may not get gifts like you used to
Or get messages stored on your phone
But I’ll make sure I’m sending something each day
So you know that you’re never alone
And tomorrow I’ll paint something wonderful
I don’t know quite yet what it will be
But I promise you’ll know when you see it
That it’s sent just to you
Love from me
Xxx
From When I Am Gone – Becky Hemsley
This intense cosmic energy is not only messing with my sleep, but I was having strange battery issues with my laptop computer so I went back to the Apple store where I had once met Al Gore (yes, VICE PRESIDENT Al Gore) and asked the Genius Bar tech to perform a diagnostic check. The tech didn’t do much but it’s all better, so who really knew what caused the problem, whether it was a hardware glitch or a solar flare, or other planetary influences. The good thing is that it’s back to working perfectly.
There were lots of traffic accidents and horrible drivers everywhere yesterday. The freeway was completely shut down for hours because of an insane situation with a woman who allegedly vandalized a vehicle and carjacked a Lyft. She led the police on a short chase but finally, peacefully, surrendered to police after a prolonged standoff on Interstate 5. It looked like WW3 with all of the military-like Special Weapons and Tactics Team surrounding the vehicle. The woman was taken into custody on suspicion of felony vandalism, brandishing a weapon in a threatening manner, assault with a deadly weapon, carjacking, resisting arrest, and felony evasion of police.
That’s way too much negative energy for ME to deal with and I’m so glad I wasn’t stuck for hours on the freeway. I felt lucky that I had made a spontaneous last minute decision to take an alternate route home. I heard all the sirens though, but had assumed it was simply another accident.
Time to take a deep breath, stay home, work in the garden, listen to the birds, and read a poem or two while cultivating some zen as well as my veggies.
How I Go To The Woods by Mary Oliver
Ordinarily, I go to the woods alone, with not a single
friend, for they are all smilers and talkers and therefore
unsuitable.
I don’t really want to be witnessed talking to the catbirds
or hugging the old black oak tree. I have my way of
praying, as you no doubt have yours.
Besides, when I am alone I can become invisible. I can sit
on the top of a dune as motionless as an uprise of weeds,
until the foxes run by unconcerned. I can hear the almost
unhearable sound of the roses singing.
If you have ever gone to the woods with me, I must love
you very much.
(I know that one is not really supposed to end a sentence with “in”, but the proper way sounded stilted and phony, so I made a decision based on this information: “never ending a sentence with a preposition is a myth. It’s something wrongly attributed to English that is actually a real rule in Latin.”)
So…on a walk a couple years ago, I found this chair with its turquoise-painted partner tossed out on the street. They looked lonely and sad, so I went home to get my car and rescued them both.
I placed the chairs on the side of the house with every intention of brightening them up with a new coat of paint but their weary and worn character grew on me. I’ve left them to naturally weather every storm just as they are — honest and true — with nothing to camouflage their straightforward authenticity.
I like them just the way they are.
Funny enough, I get a lot of compliments from neighbors who walk by and comment about how they love the artful way the flowers seem to embrace this simple old chair.
The Chair That No One Sits In
You see them on porches and on lawns
down by the lakeside,
usually arranged in pairs implying a couple
who might sit there and look out|
at the water or the big shade trees.
The trouble is you never see anyone
sitting in these forlorn chairs
though at one time it must have seemed
a good place to stop and do nothing for a while.
Sometimes there is a little table
between the chairs where no one
is resting a glass or placing a book facedown.
It might be none of my business,
but it might be a good idea one day
for everyone who placed those vacant chairs
on a veranda or a dock to sit down in them
for the sake of remembering
whatever it was they thought deserved
to be viewed from two chairs
side by side with a table in between.
The clouds are high and massive that day.
The woman looks up from her book.
The man takes a sip of his drink.
Then there is nothing but the sound of their looking,
the lapping of lake water, and a call of one bird
then another, cries of joy or warning—
it passes the time to wonder which.
William James Collins, Poet Laureate of the United States from 2001 to 2003.
(Photo credit to Enchanted Seashells)
I love butterflies. I’ll stop whatever I’m doing to point and say, “Look at the butterfly!”
Enchanted Seashells | Princess Rosebud 