The Spiders’ Secret
A chill wind blows the yellowing leaves off the trees. They drift down to the ground like giant snowflakes. The air is pregnant with the feel of the coming holidays. Fall has truly come, with the sudden drop in temperatures, a full 10-20 degrees cooler than a few weeks ago. This is the real Fall, no faltering Fall, but a Fall that will guide us appropriately into winter. November appears as a mirror image of March with its vibrant color of decay, while March is the decaying color of about-to-burst-forth Spring.
The birds are at the bird feeder all the time now. They are not stopped by our presence when we come to fill the feeder or blow leaves under it. Nothing stops them. They swoop around the feeder and the surrounding trees like Kamikaze pilots, darting here and there recklessly. The squirrels are in a frenzy as well, stock piling acorns and walnuts which they will retrieve without fail in a month or so in a snow-covered land.
To me, the trees are most beautiful at this time of year, when many of them are bare and a scattering of leaves remain on dark brown branches. The leaves that remain quiver daintily in their precarious positions on the tree limbs. Yet these are the survivors. The other leaves have fallen and gone the way all living things eventually go. Most trees have lost all their leaves and they stand in stark contrast against the blue sky, the stormy sky, the grey sky. But I find them most beautiful against the night sky, with arms reaching up to the darkness, trying to touch the stars twinkling between the branches, as moonlight dances on their limbs.
November holds the last glimmer of color. A carpet of yellow lines the woods now– and one can see inside the woods that are so dark and impenetrable in summer. Some forests have carpets of oak leaves– dark brown tan in color. Others are paved with variegated colors– vibrant crimsons against yellows and faded greens and tawny tans. The un-mown lawns are now taken over by the spiders covering the fields. At precious moments, one can see a world of webs that only appears in a certain slant of sunlight and reveal a silent take-over by the spiders in webs that sparkle secretly, mirroring the infinite web of creation.
The yellow, brown, and crimson leaves are complemented by the ubiquitous yellow, brown and crimson mums that appear on the roadside near mail boxes, on porches or along driveways. These tough little flowers withstand frosty chills and stand tall throughout most of November– hearty, generous souls, so giving in their colorful, velvety splendor.
Halloween pumpkins begin to sag a bit or shine with wetness as if encased in glass. They will soon be tossed– pine combs, wreaths and fir swags to take their places, and the season of lights will begin. Anticipation hangs in the air. Autumn seems the fastest season to come and go. I try treasuring each moment, but the minute/hours/days just sift through my fingers like so many grains of sand. Then Christmas/Hanukkah comes and fades in a flash and we are into the Nor’Easter blizzards of January. Another year is gone and a new one has come. Would that we could be in forever in the season of love, but it is also a season of loneliness and loss and darkness. It is good we are defenseless against time.
Now, at Thanksgiving, it is our time to give thanks. Inspired by the Native Americans, let us thank the earth. Let us give thanks to the trees for their constantly changing beauty, to the stars for their piercing presence in the night sky, to the leaves for their inspiring colors, to the sun for its life-giving power. Let us thank the Spring for its awakening hope, the Summer for its warm, thriving growth, the Fall for its beauteous bounty, to the Winter for a time of renewal. Let us thank the soon-to-come snow for its hushed, white silence that transforms our world, to all the animals for their pure souls, to our families and friends for their precious love, and, lastly, but mostly, to the Higher Power of our belief for the macrocosm of creation.
Happy Thanksgiving and may you each be blessed with the all-embracing, pervasive, pulsating Love in Nature.
Veterans Day Tribute
A humble tribute and thank you to all those of you who served or are serving now.
No words adequately THANK YOU for the ultimate sacrifice.
Can not convey my deep admiration for your courage.
(One of our finest, a serviceman, shared his poem about being in the service with me in commenting on this post and I want to share it with you. It is as beautiful as its author. Please read and have tissues in hand.)
http://www.jasonbladd.com/2013/11/07/while-hes-away-a-poem-about-being-gone
Dark Clouds Overhead
Things have spiraled out of control. I am following far too many blogs and comments and finding it hard to keep up with all the new posts I want to read. I am on too many animal rights, environmental and political lists. Right now I have had a few weeks of migraines nearly everyday and am finding it hard to get myself to Physical Therapy to treat some problems that need addressing. I am losing my temper at my loving husband and he, in turn, is under so much pressure at his clinical social worker job that he is losing his as well. Clearly something has to be done. I cannot stand the person I have become.
This means I will not be posting for awhile and I am not sure how long, or, if this is turning into a bad thing altogether. I will not give up the animal activism and environmental lists because this is one of the few ways I can give to the world. There is a reason I have been on disability for the last 13 years. I have a major mental illness, Bipolar Disorder, and Asperger’s and these take their toll on my life and those around me. So please forgive me if I don’t read all your posts, or read them and don’t respond. I love some of you, and care for many of you, but now have to get my life back. This means more meditation, more Reiki, possibly learning Qi Gong and lots of prayer. It feels too bad right now to stay on the road I am on.
Good-bye for awhile and my warmest regards,
Ellen
For the Love of a Horse
Oh to be one with you,
White-marked Third Eye,
to mount you
and ride you into forever
to nuzzle my nose
in your silky mane
to smell your hot breath
upon my face
and feel your tongue
upon my cheek
to smell the sweetness
of your leavings
and
hear your hoofs
against the road
and your snorts
as you run
*
my love for you
is from a distance
though once
we danced together
and
you nuzzled
me out of depression
and into bliss
oh how I miss
those magic moments
when we were one.
An Insecure Security
Gemutlichkeit* of
a rainy October morning
dry chilly warmth
in our little barn
*
downstairs
you perusing the paper
upstairs
me pumping poetry
*
rain tip-toeing
on the metal roof
a tymphanic symphony
outside the window
a masterpiece of color
yellow walnut leaves
and red sugar maple
the steady drip-drop of water
*
what bliss is this
precious moments of Now
a heavenly haven
from a frightening, tipsy-turvy world
*
I wish to always be
in your aura of calm
and the beauteous bounty of Nature
but
for sure
death will come
*
please take us together
and
find us in each other’s arms
*
blessed bliss
pure peace
and
true security
the everlasting Now
only exist
in the presence of God.
*German word meaning “coziness”.
Whirling October
Fleet-footed October
with
leaves floating down
swirling
in
whirlwinds
while days dance away
as the last leaf-colored
butterflies
flutter by
before you know
turtles
will bury deep
for a long winter’s sleep
Stages of Being
Beauty in Life
September 1
In denial
Death in Life
October 1
Forboding
Beauty in Death
November 1
Acceptance
Afterlife
December 1
SILENCE
Supposed Indifference in Asperger’s
I climbed down
from the tangled branches
of my thoughts
to greet you
but it was too late
you were gone.
Don’t give up on me
I love you can’t you see
but there is such difficulty
all because I am Aspie.
(Click http://www.independentauthornetwork.com/ellen-stockdale-wolfe.html for information on, and to purchase my Bipolar/Asperger’s memoir.)
Just Renters
The house that we think of as “our” house does not belong to us. Not because we are still paying the mortgage on it. Not because it, like so many others, is in foreclosure. No, though it is still “our” house, we are just renters.
This becomes evident one morning while sitting in a moment of calm before the day has begun, watching the bird feeder which my husband is lovingly filling. He has dumped out the seeds too big to fit through the wire mesh of the feeder. About 10 little birds, sparrows and juncos and sometimes a dashing male cardinal, are feeding on the seeds on the leaf-covered ground. They are not scared off by the lone squirrel who comes to eat the peanuts from the mix. Larger birds flock to the now-full feeder. The largest birds, too big to land on the feeder, sometime take over the small bird territory, eating seeds on the ground.
Rain is falling as we prepare to go to work, cleaning up the kitchen and locking up the house. The birds fly around in my mind. So vulnerable they seem yet so brave, so tiny yet enormous in their freedom to take to the air. I want to hold them in my hand and stroke their soft, downy feathers, give them love. But truth is, this is purely a selfish wish on my part for they don’t need my love. They don’t really even need the bird seed my husband religiously puts in the feeder. There are bushes out back with berries which they love. It is we who need them, to make us feel happy, to make us feel loving, to make us feel alive and connected to something larger than ourselves.
As we pull out of the driveway I take another lingering look at the birds in the brightening light. And then it hits me. They get to stay there all day as we drive off through the rain to our respective jobs in the cement jungle of a nearby city. We drive past horses, grazing in a neighboring meadow. They get to stay home, too. Often I make an effort to remember the birds and the squirrels and the horses to bring calm to a fraught work day. Yet I usually get so caught up in my frenetic, little life that I forget to think of them. Or if I manage to conjure them up, the image of them in my mind is thin, pale and lacking in substance.
I imagine the animals laughing at us as we have to drive off to go to work. Our house belongs to THEM. Sometimes they even invade our living quarters. When we first bought the house, it had 50 or so little brown bats in the attic who would occasionally fly around the bedroom at night. One year we had a pair of squirrels. We even had the company of a milk snake one afternoon. And every fall as the weather turns frigid, the field mice run in.
A little more thought on the subject reveals to me that in actuality we own nothing. Not our house, our spouse, our children, our pets, nor even the body we inhabit. All of these things are on loan to us, rented to us if you will, by the Maker of the sun and the moon and the stars. Such a wealth of beauteous bounty is there for us, ours to enjoy for the mere act of attention. The trees, the summer breeze, the blanket of snow in winter, the flowers of summer, the butterflies, the deer who eat our lilies, the possums and ground-hogs, the ever-changing species of birds, the occasional coyote and the thousands, if not millions, of insects underfoot in a terrestrial universe. And the universe above our heads with the planets, the sun, the moon and its trillions, gazillions of stars and whispers of other universes beyond what we can see. And yet we are so caught up in the dramas of our mundane lives that we fail to duly honor the ever-present gifts except in periodic snatches, when we turn our attention outside ourselves and our little lives. We may pay a sum to rent a piece of the earth but that piece contains a seemingly infinite multitude of gifts given just for the taking. Or rather, I should say, for the renting.
My Mind is Broken
It is 3 A.M. and it is another night I cannot sleep. I have taken two sleeping pills to no avail. When I am manic sleep does not come easily. I write. I eat. I check email. I pace the rooms back and forth, in and out of bed. Luckily my husband does not wake during my perambulations. The mania is not of the inflated ego variety, though I have had that at an earlier time in my life. Years ago I remember going by Harlem on a bus route home one night when I was flagrantly psychotic and proclaiming, “These are my people!” Why I said this I couldn’t tell you now– sparked most likely from some manic feeling of camaraderie. But, of course, it was beyond grandiosity and just plain crazy (yes, that is a psychiatric term). Perhaps the roots arose out of the closeness I had with my Sicilian grandfather who was not exactly white and who had much spirit– what an African-American might call “soul.” And from my father, a jazz trombonist, who spent his youth sleeping in bathtubs in Harlem when he would come to the city from white suburbia for jam sessions. He, too, like my grandfather, had “soul” hidden under white skin.
In any case, thanks to the anti-psychotic family of medicines I am not grandiose tonight. I did forget to take my meds the other night and, like Karma, that affects everything about my life. I am just raring for the day to start, for the morning to come. I see a drunk sitting outside on a stoop smoking. I want to see, not the people of the night, but the purposeful people of the morning, going to school, going to work, walking their dogs. Two hours and forty-five minutes to go. And then time to wake up, have coffee, pray, make plans for the work of the day. How can fifteen minutes seem like an hour? How can the cool night breeze masquerade as a morning zephyr? I will make one last attempt to go to bed and sleep. First, I will post a video of Jusuf’s, formerly known as Cat Stevens, of a beautiful hymn he sang, “Morning Has Broken.” I am also posting a photo I took of a marsh in the morning light. Enjoy! And Good morning!
This was written a year ago in a mild manic episode. Right now I am fighting depression triggered by Lyme disease and antibiotics. I have zero creativity so resort to rewrites. Hope to be back writing soon and commenting on fellow bloggers’ posts. Please excuse the silence but that is how it is being Bipolar. (Click http://www.independentauthornetwork.com/ellen-stockdale-wolfe.html for information on, and to purchase, my Bipolar/Asperger’s memoir.)
September Transitions
Lazy, hazy, daze
of
fleeting flashes of summer
Creeping dashes of Fall
among the splashes of departing green.
Instinct vs. Love
(Click on photo for video)
“Instinct”
they say condescendingly
but it is not.
“Anthroprophism”
they argue
but it is not.
Science now knows
animals show altruism,
animals show love,
elephants, dogs, dolphins…
“Love” they say reverently for man
but it is and is not
Science now knows
hormones course through our bodies,
Oxytocin they say,
I say how clinical,
a dissection of love
for man
and
animals.
No Trespassing
You don’t belong here
this is my home
and you are intruding
this twig my perfect camouflage
for my stick-like appendages
I searched high and low
to find my home
and although nothing is truly ours
these are my digs
so “Bugger off!”
The Shower of Yellow
The horses are in the home stretch with the school-imposed end of summer approaching, Labor Day weekend, a weekend I look forward to all summer long for love of Fall. It is not a good way to think– the way I do. Religious leaders preach living in the present. This very moment in time is all we have. Literally. I have yet to overcome my hyperactive mind and many bad ways of thinking. And this year for some reason I am feeling melancholic about the summer ending. Perhaps it is because I am sick with a fever and not sure where the hazy heat of the sun ends and the lazy heat of the fever begins. Perhaps it is because it is a perfect day. A breeze whispers through what I call (in my ignorance of its real name) the “penny tree.” When the wind blows, the pale green leaves look like so many pennies shimmering down from Heaven. The sun is so hot it tingles on the skin– yet it is not the strong sun of July that burns quickly. It is a far gentler sun. The angle of its diurnal slant is different. Summer is definitely slipping away.
The bees, wasps and yellow jackets are having a heyday in the Goldenrod, Joe Pye Weed and Purple Loosestrife. The marsh is thick with flying insects. My eyes capture swallow-tails. Happily the monarchs are still here. A turkey vulture circles overhead. He must have spotted death nearby. Earlier I saw two golden hawks fly, sunlit, into the back field. A wisp of a cloud floats by in an otherwise perfectly blue sky. This summer has flown by in the blink of an eye like a fritillary flits by the flowers in the marsh.
The smell of fresh-cut lawn is intoxicating to my raw senses. Soon the grass will cease to grow and the lush green will look washed out. All of its inhabitants in the metropolis beneath our feet will dig deep underground or turn off their bodily systems to “overwinter”– an amazing concept to a mammal. Some fill their bodies with a type of antifreeze. Nature never ceases to astound. This summer I have made my peace with the insects. Terrified of them as a child, I have come to love and respect them, indeed hold them in great awe for the feats they accomplish. Our accomplishments pale as humans, supposedly so superior.
No longer do I see turtles sunning on rocks, nor snakes coming out to bask in the heat of the road. Some species of birds have already left– unbeknownst to me. I just know that some I used to see are gone. The sweet bird song of the spring mating season is a fleeting memory. One lone humming-bird flies around the marsh intermittently, causing great excitement in the viewing audience.
It is the time to dead head the flowers of summer. It is the time of Black-Eyed Susans and Peonies and Sedum. And soon it will be the time of the Mums.
With each gust of wind yellow finger-like walnut leaves shower down on our heads– like large, oddly-shaped, yellow snowflakes– a foretaste of snowfalls to come. The sun’s shadows grow long as twilight nears. Soon the white cloud “lions and tigers and bears” will retire into the black cave of night. And the summer will die, and in dying, give birth to fall. The comfortable rhythm of the changing season beats in our sometimes unhearing hearts.
(Click http://www.independentauthornetwork.com/ellen-stockdale-wolfe.html for information on, and to purchase my Bipolar/Asperger’s memoir.)
The Consciousness Stream
Look carefully below
to see the stream flowing
in between the tangle of greens
and the landscape of rocks
*
Look carefully within
to hear the whispers of God
in between the jangle of loud thoughts
and the overgrowth of emotions
*
Heaven lies in the quiet
trickling like a stream
through the spaces of the silence
Amphibian Night
It is a summer night, late in August. September and autumn are knocking at the door. The day was hot– the last gasp of a 3H summer day. And then, at night, come the thunderstorms. Downpours of rain hit hot asphalt and steam rises in the moonlit roads. The air cools down by 10, maybe 15 degrees.
We are going out to pick up a pizza for dinner and we hit the road in the middle of what must be called “Frog Frenzy.” Frogs are everywhere, every kind and every size. Hopping here and there. We drive in a hopscotch pattern to avoid running them over. We are hoping no one is watching our car stop and start and swerve left and right. The frogs look silvery in the headlights. Perhaps it is the last mating call of the season. Perhaps the frogs know something we don’t– perhaps this is the last warm day and thunderstorm of a dying summer.
There are long-legged frogs leaping across the road, teeny frogs skimming the asphalt, and giant frogs that cross the road in two to three jumps. Mating can be the only incentive for this frenzy of activity. Driven by desire, they are mating without concern for their welfare. More likely they are not aware of the danger that lurks in the road. Like all animals, we assume frogs live in the present moment, perhaps as we humans do in our twenties, driven by biology to seek a mate in a frantic orgy of activity.
My husband and I on our pizza run, which is no run but a crawl, are uplifted by this affirmation of life. We, who in our 20s, did not think we could die, are afraid of taking what would seem like even moderate risks now. We take delight in the frenetic frog activity as we get our pizza.
But it is a different landscape we drive through on the way home only a quarter of an hour later. The frogs are gone– completely vanished having hopped to wherever they were seeking to go. We only see some frogs who did not make it. A large truck pulled out from the road just as we turned in. Not the type to play hopscotch while driving.
We feel privileged to have witnessed this “Frog Frenzy,” this affirmation of life– this ten minute window of activity that shut down as abruptly as it opened. But the next morning, walking the road, we see mangled frogs everywhere. We can’t blame the one truck we saw for this massacre.
This is not an isolated incident. In the Summer 2008 Defenders, the Conservation Magazine of Defenders of Wildlife, a study by Purdue University is cited in which the number of road kill in a suburb of Indiana were counted over a 17 month period. The number was an astounding 10,500 dead animals and 95 percent of those were frogs and other amphibians. Many of the other amphibians were eastern tiger salamanders making their way to breeding grounds to lay 500 to 1,200 eggs. Obviously this could affect future populations. Sy Montgomery, in her “The Wild Out Your Window: Exploring Nature Near at Hand,” tells us that during the “salamander rains,” as she calls them, so many salamanders are killed by cars, that in Amherst they built special tunnels so the salamanders would be safe from the road, and in Lenox and Framingham they close the roads during the migration. Are a few towns in Massachusetts the only enlightened guardians of this amphibian ritual? Why are there not more precautions taken on our roads all across the country’s wetlands? Why aren’t the fading wetlands being preserved with the reverence they deserve as they serve earth?
We don’t know how long the “Frog Frenzy” lasted but, judging from the number of bodies in the road the next day, we caught only the tail end of it. The unlucky ones, who did not make it, lie in waiting for crows and other carrion-eating birds to come feast in this other, inevitable aspect of nature, the dead frog banquet. This time our hearts are heavy. We mourn the frogs who jumped so wildly to their death in their state of excitation. The “Night of the Frogs– just another sampling of man’s abject inhumanity to those he deems inferior, and, with whom he shares this mystery called “earth.”
(Click http://www.independentauthornetwork.com/ellen-stockdale-wolfe.html for information on, and to purchase my Bipolar/Asperger’s memoir.)
Abandonata
Abandoned by life
choked by overgrowth of unkempt green
once upon a time
breathing, seething with energy
steaming with the hot breath of cattle
teaming with the tenuous tenure of life
*
Your body long gone
your loving heart now ashes
your caring now a memory
which nothing can erase
and time cannot erode.
*
How I long for thee
though a mere thin veil
separates your spirit from me
small comfort
when I miss thee mightily.
Twinkling Twilight
As twilight falls, as we approach August, the little sparks of light appear nightly– fireflies, lightning bugs, glow worms, whatever one chooses to call them. They start early in July– one sees a few sparks here and there but as July draws to a close, twilights dawn with a display of tiny fireworks. Why do they hold such fascination for young and old alike? Why do they bring us such a sense of wonder as they flicker on and off in some rhythm unknown to us but titillating in their communication with each other?
Of course I remember, like everyone else, catching fireflies. It was a ritual my Sicilian grandfather reenacted with me every summer. Grandma would save me a peanut butter jar, nicely washed with little holes in the top she made with an old-fashioned can opener. Grandpa and I would go out for an after-dinner walk, a treat in itself. It was an excursion with a purpose, a hunt to catch those bugs whose tail ends light up, on and off, I learned later, to signal mates.
Grandpa always managed to catch one and we would walk home victorious, with me clutching my precious jar with my favorite kind of bug residing within. There was the exciting story we would tell Grandma and she would give me a lettuce leaf in case the bug should be hungry in the night. Then to bed. And then the real waiting began– lying in the dark with the jar on the bedside table waiting for my captive bug to alight. I would wait and wait but no flickering light appeared and before long I would fall asleep in the arms of disappointment.
It was even worse in the morning. The lightning bug did not look well. His antennae would be damp and sticking to the jar in a bad way. He was not eating the lettuce leaf. And this was my first lesson in the perils of capturing and imprisoning a wild creature. They did not behave like they did when free. Finally in a child’s form of despair, I would let him go and he would leave so much the worse for wear. What is this human quest to capture animals for our own pleasure at their peril? Think zoos, circuses, the exotic pet trade. It is awe gone rancid, becoming greed, selfishness, a fetid form of supremacy.
Years later, on my husband’s great aunt’s farm in Ohio, the trees would be filled with lightning bugs mating. It was a sight I had never seen. Whole trees would light up at once and upon close examination one would find hundreds of fireflies. It was a cathedral of flickering lights that inspired reverence for God as we beheld the mystery with our hearts.
And now, living in a converted barn which allows many bugs to enter despite window screens, I no longer want to capture fireflies and put them in a jar. I am happy to see them fly freely inside and outside the house. They bring sheer delight as they light up in the darkness. I am a child again with my grandfather, as I stay awake as long as possible, watching the little flickering lights inside the room and outside in the trees. I think of simpler days and after dinner walks with Grandpa. I think a lot of my grandparents with nostalgia, and the magic of this tiny bug amazes still. But wild creatures belong in the wild. A lesson to be learned from this Midsummer Night’s dream.
The Backyard Circus
Did you ever stop to think
what it is like
to hang mid-air from a leaf’s edge
or to glide along a leaf
blowing in the breeze–
or crawl upside down
upon veined slopes of green?
or to give’s one’s all
to a loved one
stories high from the ground
hanging onto her for love
and dear life?
*
Such feats go on all day long,
ignored by you–
our talents unacknowledged–
because we are lowly creatures in your eyes
and yet we can do
acrobatic feats
you cannot even approximate.
*
Did you ever stop to think?
The Night Light Show
Tiny, twinkling stars
suffering loneliness,
fall from the sky
and become fireflies,
flickering on and off
among the trees
calling for a mate,
lighting the night sky
and exciting vision
with twinkling
and flashing lights
and one is not sure
which is which
so bewitched are we
by the show of Light.
Flutterbies
Tread lightly
for the wings of angels
flutter by our souls
as we plod on
in our own worlds
often unawares
of the Heaven inside us
because of the Hell of our thoughts.
Barn Window Reflections
We live in a dream world the Hindus call “Maya”
All is illusory–
a cosmic dream from which we will awaken
when we die.
Just as a baby may think
it is the “end”
of life as he knew it
when he is being shuttled through the birth canal
while being born,
so, too, we may think it is the end
when we are dying
to this world of delusion.
But we will be born to something real,
something just beyond the veil of illusion
in which we are so enmeshed during this “life” as we know it.
“When we awaken in God we shall realize that mortal life is only a picture made of shadows and light, cast on a cosmic movie screen” ~ Paramahansa Yogananda
A Hug Without Arms
Do they think because
we have no arms
we do not hug?
Do they think because
we have smaller brains
we do not love?
*
We hug
neck to neck,
chest to chest,
coat to coat,
in a warm embrace
of pure love,
a love as pure
as theirs,
perhaps more so.
*
They think
we do not love
because it makes it easier
for them to drug us
for so-called sports,
for their so-called fun,
and race us past injury,
and, yes, they even kill us
for their gustatory pleasure.
*
All we want to do
is love our families
and run free.
But we are willing
to serve them
if they treat us right.
*
Now I ask you:
who here is superior?
MOONSIDE 
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