Lazy, hazy, daze
of
fleeting flashes of summer
Creeping dashes of Fall
among the splashes of departing green.
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Great Tranquility Of Heart
He has great tranquility of heart who cares neither for the praises nor the fault-finding of men. He will easily be content and pacified, whose conscience is pure. You are not holier if you are praised, nor the more worthless if you are found fault with.
Thomas Kempis
Starbursts
Starlike
explosions of blue
with an
out of season
dusting of snow
a foretaste
of the approach of winter
a sugary confection
one is tempted to ingest
a similar temptation
(I suppose)
as those tempted by coca.
Video
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.
A Wee Life
Oh wee one
how I envy thee
trudging up and down
the raindrop slopes
of rain and nectar
safe within the confines
of radiant yellow
succulent pink
in a self-contained
world of beauty
however short-lived thy life.
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.)
MOONSIDE 
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