Flowers Again, Prodigal, Extravagant Flowers

Over the years I've watched the banks of this creek, the red flowers of the buckeye trees show up in greater numbers. Some in clusters, some on their own, maybe to start new clusters.

Here against a fence on the bank of the creek, we see young trees in the foreground, very probably the offspring of the modest-sized tree to the right on the other side of the fence.

One sees new trees, a foot high or less, in a lot of forest understory. Few of the new trees will have the room and sunlight to grow large, but nature sows them extravagantly. In my April 10 post that came just before this one, I reflected on Loren Eiseley's observation that, over (roughly, of course) the past hundred million years or so, the wildly prolific and prodigal flowering plants provided the biomass needed to feed warm-blooded mammals and birds, thus providing the nutrition for all the species in these biological classes to flourish.

 

The trees seem to compete for ground. Within a hundred yards of these stand sycamores, red maples, oaks, hickories, sweet gums, river birches, hornbeams, and a few more I don't know the names of. They put their fruits out too, after flowering. The buckeyes put forth, well, buckeyes, also known in some places as conkers. There's a very tasty chocolate and peanut-butter candy named after them. Acorns from the oaks, nuts from the hickories.

Some of these fruits try to protect themselves from being eaten. The gum balls from sweet gums that grow widely in the American southeast are prickly, which keeps some would-be diners away from the nutritious seeds inside these fruit-balls. Here they lie among leaves which, when more decomposed, might nourish a tree that grew from one of the fruits.

In spring, the rains come with the warming air and lengthening days, filling the streams that help feed all this new life.

It's not hard to see why trees grow thickly around streams, even those that go dry for a few weeks or months during the year.

And other life is nourished by the spring water flows. Last week I crouched by the side of this stream, and saw, side by side, a very young bullfrog, no bigger than a small toad, and a large bullfrog tadpole, no doubt not far away from its movement into the final cycle of his form. I wondered where they would be, if they survived, when the creek is dry in a couple of months. It occurred to me that they probably just follow the receding water downstream, where the flows from the intermittent streams merge into one large enough to hold water all year. Downstream from that are small ponds in wet bottomlands, and eventually, a river. Prodigious numbers of eggs, like flowers and fruit, are deposited into water somewhere. Some of the frogs will make it.

A Moment In Springtime

A beautiful spring day--one of those than which no more beautiful is possible. Everything green and cool . . . . Bright sun, clear sky, almost everything now fully in leaf except that some of the oaks are still silver rather than green.
--Thomas Merton, from When the Trees Say Nothing


Here and now, most of the trees aren't fully in leaf, but they will be soon. This is the time we find trees of different species at different stages of sending forth their flowers and leaves. Most of them are just getting started, and look like the ones below, changing every day as the time of full foliage draws closer.

The sky behind these trees at this moment will be mostly obscured in a week or two.

My oaks are gold rather than Merton's silver. Gold is the color of the flowers--reproductive organs--on these red oaks.

These river birches also hold flowers.

Trees with small, briefly-appearing flowers aren't known for those tiny, ephemeral flowers, but deciduous trees are flowering plants, plants that hold their seeds in protective case-like structures, from which all the flowering plants take the name angiosperms. Their flowers are overwhelmingly prolific, as anyone who has tried to keep what we call "weeds" out of a garden knows.

The writer and naturalist Loren Eiseley wrote a wonderful essay called "How Flowers Changed the World," a part of his book The Immense Journey. Eiseley writes of

. . . fantastic little seeds skipping and hopping and flying about the woods and valleys [bringing] with them an amazing adaptability. If our whole lives had not been spent in the midst of it, it would astound us. [The new plants] glowed here and there with strange colors, put out queer, unheard-of fruits and little intricately carved seed cases, and, most important of all, produced concentrated foods in a way that the land had never seen before . . ."

The foods, Eiseley continues, came in three forms--pollen and nectar, fruits, and the food encased along with the seed itself. Until these food sources were available, nourishment for the high caloric needs of warm-blooded animals like ourselves was very limited. We're connected in our evolutionary history to these plants and owe them a great deal for the fact of our existence.

Animals that aren't warm-blooded don't have the metabolic horsepower to keep them active in cold weather. This eastern box turtle seems to have just awakened. I don't believe he's been up long, because dried mud on his shell looks like leavings of what he may have slept under through the cold months. His torpor is still evident, too. When I picked him up, he seemed unable to retract his head completely into his shell. In summer, these guys do that very swiftly.

Some of the trees are in different stages. This buckeye, or horse chestnut, has its leaves in summer form. The red flowers growing along the racemes will blossom in the coming weeks.

And finally, did A. E. Houseman see something like the image below when he wrote these lines?

Loveliest of trees, the cherry now

Is hung with blossom on the bow . . .

This liminal time of spring, a moment of transition in the year like dawn to a day, exhilarates. The phrase "promise of spring" means something, if only another year of growth, another year of fruits, pollen, grain, livestock, whatever becomes food for something else.

But it's not just a promise. It's a moment. One to be appreciated because of its beauty, and because it won't be around long.

Beauty in the Moods of a Creek

"The world did not have to be beautiful to work. But it is."
--Mary Oliver

I liked Mary Oliver's statement about beauty not being exactly necessary when I first heard it on NPR, and I still do. But what she's also saying is that human beings find the world beautiful. We may find it beautiful because we're created by it and embedded in it. So it resonates through us strongly enough to strike us with awe. And the more we realize we aren't really separate from it, the more we appreciate it.  

To find beauty, pay attention. It's all around, in your backyard, in the eyes of a friend, in the passing clouds. Look into a wild place, even a small one. You can see there what billions of years of evolution have prepared you to see. 

It's safe to say that at any time, somewhere in the world, rain is falling on the surface of a stream. And rain makes life possible, makes our blue-green home a living thing. We're don't just live in that home. We're part of it. 

My much-watched creek has moods. It doesn't fall into the emotional states we call moods, but it evokes them in those who watch it. The moods are affected by the light, the extent and color of surrounding vegetation, water levels that run from dry to flood. Changing seasons influence all of these elements. The tilt of the earth in relation to sunlight, then, shapes the sensations that enter my mind and body when I look on this tiny patch of earth. And the sensations shape my mood. A late-evening mood, a springtime mood, a winter mood. A mood very similar to those of others, but in the last analysis, one all my own.

I am not separate from all these mood-molding elements. My existence takes its shape and form from them. Why would I not find them beautiful? 

The ivy in the foreground above hints at something unseen, whatever supported its climb to the level it holds here. The picture is partial, but suggests something beyond it--everything else it's connected to. 

Beauty enters awareness, too, when we see these interconnections in the world, the links that tell us we aren't isolated, that we're part of a great unity. It often takes years of reflection to realize this. We are, after all, " . . . only ourselves, and that promise." But the promise is so very rich. 

A Corner of My Neighborhood Park

The park has a busy playground, a paved walking trail around a lake stocked with fish and frequented by geese. But it's been a park for just a little while. The neighborhood the park was built for has only been around for 20 years or so. This ground had a different look before that, having been part of a plantation begun early in the 19th century, with much of it farmed until sometime in the mid- to late 20th century.

A weathered old gate stands where wagons and cattle passed in other times.

An old fence post stands near the gate. No one needs it, but it's not in the way. The three strands of rusted barbed wire have cut deeply into the post, still a live tree when the wire was fastened to it, a tree that lived a few years as it grew over the wire. Now it sits out of place in time, unnoticed by any but the few who might pass it on foot. But it says something about how people once used the land.

Beyond the gate and the post, a copse of trees remains in a low-lying area drained by a small intermittent creek. All my life I've wandered to spots like this, more curious about nature's arrangements than the useful but somewhat sterile human constructions nearby.

An Osage Orange tree growing by the stream holds its ground with large, powerful roots, though the roots are eroded, as some I pointed out recently on the bank of another stream.

Nearby, a still winter-bare honeylocust tree reveals its long thorns. In a few weeks, white flowers among the green leaves will obscure the thorns that grow up and down the tree-trunk.

In the distance, the playground's brightly painted equipment marks another, more prominent, and undoubtedly, more attractive place for young children.  

But for now, I'm keeping it in the distance.

Boy By the Water

The boy, three years old, is my grandson. He might be me, as well, sixty years ago. Or any child exploring some available nook of a world that abounds in wonder. In the long course of human history, play is ancient, as it is with other animals. Toys, by comparison, are a novelty.

   
Here, the boy just needs a stick. It could as easily be a tool as a toy.

The stick serves to stir the waters, propagating watery patterns as rippling waves overlap and interfere in each others' progress. The child watches what happens, knowing he's causing an effect in the world. The doing and the watching are inseparable, and absorb him completely.

A moment before the stirring of the waters, he dug in the sandy soil, and excitedly called my attention to his discovery of an earthworm. A moment later, he will use the stick to dig out a rock embedded too deeply in the sand for him to pull out without moving some of the sand with the stick, then levering out the chunk of gravel. Another moment, and he'll enjoy throwing the gravel in the water and watching the splash.

He sees water respond quickly to the thrown rock, picks up another rock, repeats. Watches the surface of the water as it quickly returns to stillness.

Like most boys his age, he moves around energetically, constantly seeking novelty and stimulation. Inside, among his toys, he's at or near a frenetic pace much of the time. Out here, he seems more absorbed by his surroundings, by his explorations, pushing against the objects around him to see what they feel like, how they act, how they respond to his interventions. The pace moves with a rhythm that's natural and pure. He breathes, his heart beats, his acute senses show him a little more of the world. And in the joy of his own vital body, he plays.

The Way of One Small Watercourse

But who can straighten out water?

Water follows gravity, and if trapped, rises to find a new outlet . . .

--Alan Watts, The Watercourse Way


Fallen leaves sometimes form barriers in small streams. In times of low water flow, the streams simply go around the barriers, since natural forces guide them in that way.

On the right side of the image above is a line of leaves that fell from trees months ago. But trees are ample on stream-banks, if they're allowed to stand where they grew naturally. So, a lot of leaves fall into streams in forested areas. They're one of many elements that guide the meandering course of creeks and rivers. The leaves seen above seem to be partly anchored in the gravel, and folded over slightly toward the flow of water, which, after passing the barrier of fallen foliage, widens a bit.

The leaf-dam above, just a few yards downstream from the earlier image, redirects the flow where the leaves happened to become lodged in the stream bed. The flowing water, forcefully squeezed into a narrower mini-channel on the left, drops a few inches and stirs up some foam on the pool below.

If the water were higher, it would surge over the top of the leaves, taking a few of them downstream with the weight and speed of the current. But now, the balance in forces allows the trees' leavings to guide the water around them.

Water doesn't fight that. As noted by Alan Watts in the epigraph, it simply finds a way around obstacles, going with nature's course. The straight lines in the minds of people are nonsense in nature.

When I was a small boy, my family lived in a house in a newly-developed post-WWII subdivision. The land was drained by a network of straight-line ditches, their banks reinforced with concrete to prevent any deviations. After all, the space was carefully planned, the lots sized with storm-water flow needs in mind. It never occurred to me then to wonder what was there before the concrete ditches. Now, I wonder what it might have looked like a few decades, or centuries, earlier.

Raining Down the Backyard Watercourse

What a thing it is to sit absolutely alone . . . cherished by this wonderful, unintelligible, perfectly innocent speech, the most comforting speech in the world, the talk that rain makes by itself all over the ridges, and the talk of the watercourses everywhere in the hollows!
--Thomas Merton, from When the Trees Say Nothing

The life-giving rain has fallen for much of the past two days. So, my little backyard creek--dry much of the year, slow-moving except for days of hard rain--swells for a short while. I watch the relatively high water carrying soil downstream, to be dumped in the Loosahatchie River, then on to the Mississippi River, and on to the Gulf of Mexico, where ocean currents, those rivers in the sea, move all the waters of the world.

I want to know the watershed I live in, so I think about where the water may be going as I watch it flow, listening to the gurgling of its swift passage over the stream bed--the "talk of the watercourses," as Merton names it. The rain speaks steadily while water accumulates here, and when the rain slows, the immemorial tones and rhythms in the music of the watercourse demand more of the ear's attention.

The creek flows through my suburban neighborhood, but it was here first. It's drained this land for hundreds of years, at least. I get a sense of being in a less artificial place every time I walk down to it, and notice how integral to the landscape it is.

The soil, over many years, has been displaced from the much of the stream-side roots of the tree in the foreground. The one behind it is leaning toward the stream, having lost too much of its earthy foundation. Trees like this eventually fall across the streams when their roots can no longer hold them. Everything here, as in all places, changes slowly by our human sense of time, but change is continual. Water changes the land when it falls in the form of rain or passes in the form of a stream, or the shore of a lake, or the edge of a continent.

Here's another border, closer to the water flow than the bank where trees stand. The current in the water has tossed the gravel around for a very long time. So the individual rocks become smooth-surfaced, though their shapes and colors vary. The speech of rain and watercourse shapes the earth's rocky crust. Eventually, the rocks here will be sand below, and new rocks will lie on top of those grains of sand.

The occupation of watching these forces captivates me.

Grey Winter Day

Sunless winter days are seldom thought of as beautiful. They more typically feel dreary, and evoke a longing for spring, or at least a blue sky and sunshine. Yet the grey days have their own aesthetic distinctions. Trees laid bare offer their shapes and forms without foliage, and what you see there depends on the quality of attention you bring to the moment--your ability to see the thingness of what you gaze on.

The oak above spreads widely, its crown uncommonly broad. Its branches are loaded with galls, ball-like formations common to oaks. The limbs are large and strong. Below, a row of graceful cypress trees stands by a pond, their younger and more vertical crowns offering another natural architecture to the observer.

Some wintertime trees make you wonder where the shapes came from. Those in the image below look windswept, and one can almost imagine the two of them being swept in different directions. Still, the trunks and branches bend in a way that to me feels and appears agile, harmonious. They could be dancers, holding their arrays of fanlike twigs at the end of their limbs. But in fact they are trees, and I appreciate them most for their tree-natures.

A few clumps of broomsedge, which move from green in summer to gold and orange in fall and winter, stand in the foreground of the photo below. They gain a kind of prominence against the less-colorful though serene background. (They look good against a blue sky, too, especially when whole fields of them are on display.) But they only get their standout color in contrast to what's around them when most of the green things are dormant.

When I left the house, moving out into the day at first seemed chilly and damp, cheerless and somber. After I'd been walking for a while, I found myself more and more interested in what was there, and discovered I'd become more present, more part of the place I moved through. The walking warmed me, as it always does. Looking at what was actually there, wanting to see the place as it distinctively was at that moment, focused my seeing, my attention, on what was in fact there, rather than on some "ideal" day I might have wished for. I often sense that wishing for ideal forms (sorry, Plato) is not only futile, but a failure to draw the blessedness from an already-offered abundance.

It was a good day, and a good walk.

Fast-Moving Clouds

I watch the sky's appearance change from moment to moment. It's late January, southeastern United States, the kind of windy day that keeps gathering clouds in continuous motion. It's not one of those times when you can study clouds long enough to imagine they look like something that matches something else, where one billowy cumulus looks like a reclining woman, propped on an elbow, and another looks like a unicorn.

These clouds are dark and thick, with a lot of water in them. They almost cover the sun, yet the sun is insistent, illuminating a spot behind the flow of vapor in the stream of clouds.

So the sky isn't all black. The sun penetrates, and colors different shades where the cloud thicker or thinner, adding texture along with changing hues and brightness.

A small patch of blue shines briefly in the photo above, allowing the light to offer a barely visible but discernible rainbow in the top of the image.

In the picture above, even more than the others, the clouds appear as a tunnel. All clouds like these, dense, and near-bursting with the rain they're about to release, have moments of vivid three-dimensionality.

You can imagine a journey through the nebulous passage leading to a brilliant light at the other end, where the cold sky shines blue in thinning air.

Instincts

This morning, I followed my dog outside in a light rain. While he explored with his nose, I looked around, and noticed something no less lovely for being a common sight in times of winter rain--drops of water holding together and hanging from the bare twigs of small trees.

Thanks to my dog Marlowe, I followed his curious, exploratory instinct, and got one of my own instincts--the one for opening my eyes, for seeing what's all around--awakened. It's so easy for the clamorous world to shout down the natural affinity for immemorial beauty.

I stood still, watching Marlowe walk an erratic pattern following his nose. Then I looked around, and noticed the water drops formed on the trees. I thought of how many times I've stood in the same spot with nothing in my surroundings ever looking quite the same. Yet in stillness and quiet, with a focus like these drops of water, I can, for a while, lose awareness of time.