Flowering Baneberry

White Baneberry or Doll's Eyes
(Actaea pachypoda)

I discovered this in the woods yesterday and couldn't resist capturing it on my memory card, the delightfully ornate and frilly white version of this wickedly poisonous deep woodland cousin which also occurs in a red berried form.

Later in the season, the white baneberry bears large waxy white berries, each with a large black dot on its end - the berries dance on red stalks which resemble the jacks used in that fine old children's game sometimes called fivestones and onesies. Just a few of the odd looking berries consumed can make one very sick indeed, and more than a few ingested can be fatal. They are (however) fetching creatures when they are in bloom in the woods in May.

Do children still play jacks on their playgrounds at recess, I wonder?

In Greening Heart

It's strange how these common images catch the eyes and tug one's imagination and heartstrings inward. This is just a frond of the great white pine which stands on the edge of the eastern hill, a simple but attractive arrangement in which a mandala of intense blue-green (and very fragrant) needles radiate outward from a heart in which there nestles a pair of tiny infant pine cones.

This morning, the whole tree was in motion over my head, and I loved the effortlessly flowing symmetry of so many pine scented mandalas cradling little cones. For some reason, I found myself thinking of vast oceans and tall ships under sail with creaking wooden masts. I also thought of wheels, of great turnings and webs, particularly Indra's diamond web.

The Friday Ramble - Patience

Given that I am suffering through the full scale "no holds barred" onset of a whole raft of seasonal allergies, the word for this week had to be either patient or stoic. I am feeling rather woolly minded at the moment, but patient seems a good choice.

Where does the word come from? The origins say it all - the word comes to us from the Middle English pacient and the Middle French patient, thence from the Latin word pati, meaning to undergo something, to suffer through or put up with something. Patient is a good word for one who aspires to authenticity or enlightenment, but it is definitely NOT a word for sissies.

When we act in patience, we are coping with provocation, annoyance, misfortune, hardship and pain (or seasonal allergies) with serenity and fortitude, and we are doing so without irritation, whining or complaint. When we cultivate patience, we are acting from a place of grace, forbearance, acceptance and quiet confidence that "this too shall pass".

In the general scheme of things, allergies are no big deal, but patience is no small task when one has a blistering headache, her eyes are swelled shut, her ears are not functioning, her epidermis longs for a gentle going over with steel wool, and she looks like something out of a horror movie.

We can blame my sorry state on springtime and the manic fertility mechanisms of the native trees and grasses - the statuesque maples in the village, the cottonwood trees with their drifting puffs of proliferating thistledown, the cherry trees and their artfully blowing petals, the great oaks with their fine arty tassels blowing in the wind - all are doing a randy number on my aged and rather crotchety person. This is one of those times when I long for something like Karina's magnificent New Mexico desert.

Grumble, grumble, I am supposed to stay indoors, take my medication and be quiet. The joke of it is, that if I were out in the woods with Cassie and my camera right now, I would probably not be going through this to such a degree because the winds of the highlands would blow all this stuff away. Unfortunately, I would probably tumble into the gorge for want of balance and eyesight.

What am I doing as I repine here with tissues, tea, fruit juice, Claritin and Benadryl? Since I can't read anything at the moment, I am thinking about trees and their natural grandeur, their shapes and their colors and their songs. Please pardon my whining and my lack of patience, but this too shall pass.

Thursday Poem - Lost

Stand still. The trees ahead and bushes beside you
Are not lost. Wherever you are is called Here,
And you must treat it as a powerful stranger,
Must ask permission to know it and be known.
The forest breathes. Listen. It answers,
I have made this place around you,
If you leave it you may come back again, saying Here.
No two trees are the same to Raven.
No two branches are the same to Wren.
If what a tree or a bush does is lost on you,
You are surely lost. Stand still. The forest knows
Where you are. You must let it find you.

David Wagoner
(Lost from Travelling Light: Collected and New Poems)

WordlessWednesday - Blooming

Viola

Wild Violet

(viola papilionacea)

Sakura Evening

Gazing up at
The cherry blossoms in spring
My mind is refreshed.
I can even forget
The ups and downs of life.
Otaki Rengetsu

There was a beautiful quarter moon riding the skies last evening, and as is my custom, I went outside into the garden with a mug of tea after nightfall to greet that luminous orb and bow to its glowing springtime magnificence.

It was a magical evening, and if I had closed my eyes for just a moment as I stood there in the darkness under the trees, I would have thought I was in Kyoto again. The air in the village was filled with the fragrance of blooming cherry, plum, crabapple and almond trees and the hum of a hundred thousand bees, the gentle sighing of a puckish wind that went dancing through the branches and sent drifts of snowy petals floating like confetti into the garden and along the street.

On such evenings, one feels young again and ready for adventures, ready to tackle anything at all that comes her way.

Greening

White Empress

Greater White Trillium
(Trillium grandiflorum)

She appears in the woods a little later than her more vibrantly coloured red cousin, and she is just as grand with her three lush white petals, golden heart and three supporting bracts. Her petals are velvety, a little wider than those of the red trillium and opulently curving, as if she is trying to compensate for her lack of scarlet pigmentation with a paler but equally sumptuous grandeur.

No compensation is needed, for she is gorgeous on her own, and she is another of the northern wildflowers which Georgia O'Keefe would have loved to paint.

Yesterday, the woodland was carpeted with white trilliums, and the whole community was nodding vigorously in the brisk wind and early sunlight. There were late blooming red trilliums tucked in here and there, the first elegantly scalloped columbine leaves starting to appear among the rocks and I discovered ladyslipper leaves coming up near the trail which leads deep into the woods. Somewhere down that winding trail, a whole choir of grosbeaks were singing their pleasure.

Alas, there were also multitudes of black flies.