butterfly season
Monarch visits rocker
Category Archives: wildlife & nature
‘That’s no cat’
vulpes vulpes
While carrying five gallon buckets of water out to the pasture a visitor crossed from the Brahma Sonny’s space, traversed the horses’ wide open area and exited through the pine trees. (With stormy weather predicted the horses, Jack and Bebe, had been moved for the night to a place adjoining the farmhouse.)
Mel now 10 months old
At first the visitor’s color—yellow with reddish highlights—looked like it could have been Mel’s papa. (As you may recall Mel is one of three kittens rescued with Gray Momma last autumn.)
On second glance the stride was longer, more deliberate and the tail bushy. In fact that bush extended from the hindquarter in a perfect diagonal to the ground.
With all the rodents around the barn the farm is an ideal hunting ground for some critters. And we often have deer, yearlings mostly with flitting tails, grazing in the pasture beside bovines or jumping fences going to and coming from the pond.
At 6:00 a.m. this morning after sighting the stranger I said to myself: “That’s no cat. That’s a fox!”
From this perch
Keeping a vigilant eye and unlike the cardinal or bluejay she is not splashy
Sorrow, deep sorrow
in every sinew
Through the news updates on BP’s month-long attempts and failure to stop the mile deep oil well from flooding the ocean with crude south of the United States, I am reminded of a school lesson taught to me half a century ago warning of the need to develop alternative energy sources using wind, solar and geothermal technologies.
If resources had been allocated 50 years ago, would we now be facing this monumental environmental disaster? I think not. Tears well up in me at the sight of oil soaked pelicans and word of the deaths of dolphins and other sea life, and there is the heavy feeling in my chest while holding my breath bracing for information that has yet to be revealed.
We, the world inhabitants in the developed world, have fallen far short of being good stewards of this earth with its delicate ecosystem. We must do better. We must.
As a rose opens
A rose in bloom
it draws,
then reflects light
Given a long stemmed red rose Sunday I placed it in a vase on the stove. Each morning when I pour a cup of coffee my friend the rose greets me. So thirsty when first placed in water, one petal that drooped returned to hug the bud.
Throughout each day I have watched how the rose changes. Yesterday morning it was beginning to open and did so fully by evening. Glancing now at the rose which is rich and full, I am reminded of how fleeting and precious life is.
In my youth there was no time, or so I thought, to relax, open and be. Then I read Barry Stevens’ Don’t Push the River and others. Living in the present happened as flashes of light like a frog jumping from one lily pad to the next. Each landing brought a glimmer, another realization.
Only now do I savor each moment, each breath, all the joy, all the challenges and the mystery unfolding before me like the rose.
The Brahma and me 