Blog #10: Reflection

Sitting on the stone steps surrounding the pond at Schenley for the last blog, I can't help but be affected the book we've just finished for class, "The Forest Unseen", by David George Haskell.  His miniature scrutinization, dedication, and focus on every small aspect of a tiny piece of forest is inspiring.  What has occurred and transformed here by my pond that I was unaware? What small lives were affected and changed while I sat among them, inattentive to their well being and perspective?  I could spend years upon years studying the activity and life forms that populate this pond and the surrounding land and probably never fully understand them.  There's so much we take advantage of that makes up our lives and scenery, such little aspects that affect us, brightening and enhancing our experience on the earth, that go unappreciated at times.  Drawing from the tradition and practice of meditation, says Haskell, is a way of truly engaging with these less obvious details.  It takes a stillness, a quiet mind, an observation careful and undisturbed, and definitely a lot of control. Nature, for me, always has a reflective effect, but reading such an extensive, in depth text makes me aware of my own difficulties at being still.

Thinking about the particulars around the pond that I've neglected makes me think about my own existence, too.  What things have occurred and transformed within myself this semester, through reflections on this small space around me and in my life in general?  What was affected and changed within me that I've been so busy in my daily activities that I was unaware of?

I think I will return to the pond weekly, at least for a little while.  Now that the semester is coming to a  close and I'll have a little more leisure time for reading and writing other than what is required from classes, I want to delve into those unknowns.  These questions that I want to ask of myself can only be found through the type of persistent, still meditation that Haskell mentioned, and now that they've arisen in my mind, the anticipation of the answers are great. The space around the pond has become mine, regardless of what it was to me before, what it is to others, what it is to itself.  It's released an inner peace and contemplative atmosphere that I want to take advantage of.  Knowing the incredible thoughts and awarenesses I've expanded on during my blogging time for class, I'm excited to see what will come of actually having the time and relaxation to let my mind be still and unburdened. At the same time, because I have been able to grasp so much from this natural space around me, and through many of the readings we've explored this semester, I feel a need to return what I have gained.  Maybe not specifically in this area; I'm not sure how much attention it needs really since it's pretty well cared for. But admiration alone is not enough, I've learned.  I want to actively become an advocate for these beautiful places and even the not so beautiful ones- the simple, everyday bits of nature around us that need focus, too.  I've gained so much from this experience of familiarity with a place, through these activist readings from the Nature Writing course, and now I want to give back.

It's good to take time out of each day for yourself I've learned. Keeping sane, keeping healthy in your mental and emotional state, keeping a vigil in your heart for your own well being is the only thing that can help you be what you need to be for others- friend, lover, daughter, confidante, activist. Through conversation with a good friend of mine, I've grown to see that without your own stability, how can you be a whole person that is able to give of yourselves to those who need you?  I find this balance and calmness within myself in this place, most specifically at the tree that I connected with on the path around the pond.  Some sort of renewal of spirit, a transference of energy maybe, occurs when I spend time in front of it.  I feel recharged and assertive, confident in my abilities and person by appreciating the world in front of me.  Something about the energy from my magical tree gives back exactly the attention and appreciation I put into it, like my own reflection is mirrored back to me through this external entity that I love.

What a beautiful thing it is to give and to receive.

Blog #9: Bottling the world

The act of smelling something, anything, is remarkably like the act of thinking. Immediately at the moment of perception, you can feel the mind going to work, sending the odor around from place to place, setting off complex repertories through the brain, polling one center after another for signs of recognition, for old memories and old connection.

– Lewis Thomas

The subtleties of nature are so vast, so easy to overlook if you're not wide-eyed and aware.

Air is one that has always caught my attention, no matter what else my mind is revolving around.  The scents it carries in its stillness or in its sweeping winds can indicate so much.  A campfire or barbeque bleeding through the air from a house down the street, freshly mowed grass, a snow about to fall, even smaller changes occurring daily that we are not aware of.  Do flowers opening and budding give off small perfumes of their own like little bursts of cloud? Does water smell different as it thaws out of a freeze? Rain has its own particular smell, but what about when it mixes with the steel of a bridge, mulch freshly laid in a garden, when it lands on rotting plant life does it mask the smell of decay or enhance it with its wetness?  It's incredible that such small things can bring back distinct emotional connections to another time, to childhood, to a feeling from an experience many years passed.  Nature is constantly a cycle of renewal and reminder, connecting us in our lives through the seasons, through the scents they bring.  Even memories of a completely different lifetime in a person, with different loves and different things that filled those days, are connected in their own way to everything else that has happened in that season.  Laced with similar smells, sights, sounds of the world, our lives have another story-line other than chronologically- our seasonal lives take on through-lines all their own.

Walking to the pond this week, the air isn't much different in terms of temperature, but Spring is coming and it is tangible in the wind.  The particular chilliness of Spring weather has a distinctly fresher, newer smell than the same degree of temperature in Winter.  All around I feel my skin open up to breathe into its pores the arrival of the season, and I find myself wishing as I do many times a year that the smell could be bottled and brought out at will.  I suppose, though, that some of the magic and anticipation of these changes would be lost.  Instant gratification is much less lustrous and rewarding than the suspense, the looking-forward, the joyful surprise of walking out of your front door one day and suddenly you smell the Springtime.

I wonder what it is that causes these distinct seasonal smells?  Obviously it's through the different activity in the world that occurs at those particular times of year...but what would the ingredients be for each bottled seasons? What causes the smell of musty Autumn like beautiful burning wood, or what wafts up from the raw insides of squash when freshly opened? Would Spring only include fresh soil, budding greens of grass and leaves, or do the inside of young sapling branches have a distinct odor that escapes through the bark? Does the birth of all the animal young sift into the air and bring the newness of life that smells like the top of a baby's head or puppy breath?  What about the scent of human life wafting out the screens of windows open in all the houses? Is Winter mainly made up of the smell of snow and smoke and fire through chimneys, or is what we think to be the smell of snow actually the amassed smell of the absence of plant life and many animals, plus the combination of all the puffs of cold clouds that escape out of human mouths?  Summer brings the hot, sometimes humid, air full of opened grass blades, outdoor cooking, vegetation rotting and fecund in the higher temperatures, but what about the smell of millions of children's tennis shoe rubber slapping on blacktops or the scent of mud pies dug from the earth and laid out in the hot sun as a pretend picnic for kids and their bug friends?  Fireflies must give off some sort of smell because how can something so beautiful and interesting as a bug that carries its own light not give off something lovely? Or dogs sweating beneath the shade of a yard tree, tomatoes ripening in the sun, smell of skin and jeans baking in the summer sun on the body of a farmer tending his land?  What about all the ones unknown to us, things our noses aren't sharp enough for, that only the animals can smell?


If there were a bottle of Schenley pond from just this one day, this would be the list of ingredients:

Spring fresh air, pond water reacting to the warmer temperature, ducks and geese- their wet feathers, their food opening in their beaks, their waste, wet webbed feet, bike tires on asphalt trails, bugs and worms coming alive in the ground and moving the earth around, earth smell wafting upwards in reaction to that movement, car tires and exhaust sifting in the air above, faint scent of the first scratchy grasses unbrowning and new ones poking through, smell of the birds returning, leftover decay of wet leaves flattened by feet and weather, distinct smell of wet plants around the pond- different from that of frozen plants, smell of bird song, squirrel claws scraping against bark, small blooms of perfume from the couple small flowers and buds on weeds blossuming, a small red ivy leaf, litter that peppers the wooded trails around me, nest smell of those being gathered and constructed, my chilled and bare feet on the concrete steps, hints at the animals ripening into their heats, preparing for mating and reproduction, smell of wind blowing through the steel bridge to my left, smell of my favorite tree sucking in the air and breathing out a warmer, fresher oxygen, my coffee through the sipping hole, my shampoo and perfume mixing in the air, bluer sky and a dash of puffy white clouds.

Blog #8: The tree across from my stoop

Outside the front door of my apartment building, one that creaks as it shuts and bands loudly against its frame, there is a concrete stoop that I have spent a great deal of time on since moving into my apartment this past August.  It's a small square of concrete, maybe 6x6 feet, with two steps leading down to walkway that then leads the sidewalk.  A small lawn of grass frames the walkway on either side, and two large bushes, dead now in the cold air, browned and brittle, but soon to be greening and budding in the new season, frame the stairs. At the end of Summer and into Autumn, I sat on the right side of the stoop in the balmy night air, watching the people pass, doing a great deal of poetry writing. Something about these concrete stairs, this little patch of grass beneath them that I could rest my bare feet on, the street ahead, lamp posts and headlights, sounds of grocery carts from the Market District next door, welcomed me and stimulated my creative mind.  As Winter came and brought colder nights, I've still spent time on the stoop but in shorter spans of time and less opportunity to ponder.

Still, when I walk in or out of that door at night, there is something that I always look at for a few seconds, or longer if I sit.  Across the street from my stoop, growing up just beside a tall lamp post and right out of the concrete, is my tree.  Something about this particular tree has always called my attention and my focus.  Its trunk leans slightly to the right, seemingly imbalanced, but its strong roots push into the ground and hold it steady.  Beneath the lamp light, the leaves in the fall made shades of color that I found it difficult to describe in my poems and even more difficult to turn away from.  The leaves were greens and yellows, little tapered diamond points at one end and curved half circles on the other.  I can see them vividly, their particular hue, their clustered groups on the ends of branches.  When Winter came, the bones of its branches rose gracefully out of its base and seemed to wind around the light, seemed to catch glints of silver moon and yellow street light in its fingers and hold them still for me.

I'll included a poem that's come out of my muse, to give an idea of the captivating nature it has on me, on this constant pull I feel it wrapping me with. Some of it ended up leaking into a couple other poems so it's split off to become pieces of others, but it originated from this tree. I could see it being the inspiration for a woman character in a story, but in a way I think I connect with it too deeply to make it anyone other than myself. With this idea, I changed the subject of the poem from 'the oak' (I'm not even positive it's an oak, I should find this out) to her, to see what it would do if posed as a woman.

She makes her own silhouettes

of rash and many branches,

                        stable and frenzied.

She grows her leaves of

            coppered green metal

            like mold on yellowed bread crust

                        while tendrils and filament spider inside. 

 She loves them hard,   

only to let them go  

when they’ve paled their color.

She reaches her fingers through the silvered smog

grasps at the moonlight 

pulls it into her like a breath.

She rebels against the air,

seizes a new space to stab with branches,

             shudders into a gasp of buds and knobs,

                        breathless, bare.

Textured veins creep up her side

            where the trunk split out of the ground

her legs splayed in rooted grace,

where she leans against her weight

           

            a coat of knuckled surface around her rawness

                                    so stacatto, so gristled

is the bark.

Blog #7

I had some guests with me on my most recent pond visit who go by the names of Oscar and Simon.  They're two wonderful, imaginative boys that I nanny in Pittsburgh and on a day off of school, we went to the Schenley pond for a picnic. While walking down the pathway, I shared with them some of the thoughts that I have had on previous blog expeditions about this area of the park.  We talked about vining plants, about how I almost fell through the ice in the section at a clearing (naturally they started to run for that clearing and I had to pull them back fast), I told them about some of the plants I had learned were around us and about the large tree fallen during the wind storm. As soon as we came across the remains of the great trunk, we went for a climbing expedition.  Simon was first to clamber up the large, leaning trunk that started down in a bit of a mucky area and rose up against a hill. Oscar followed but then ran back to grab my phone and take a picture at the exposed area of the tree- the same thing that interested me when I first found it.  Simon climbed a little too far and became too scared to come back, so I went up to steady him and we slid down the trunk slowly together.

When we got to the big bean of Schenley pond we saw that the ducks were back.  I don't know that I've ever had enough interaction with a specific small body of water to see ducks there in one season, gone in the next, and then to also be there for when they return.  There was no pond or river around me growing up that I had that sort of relationship to, so I have never before experienced the kinship you can feel with a flock of birds that you feel like you know.  The same sort of warm surge of affection felt when seeing a family member or friend after awhile swelled in my chest. They're back! The ducks! My duck friends are back, woo hoo! We fed them crusts of our sandwiches, aiming as best we could at each one to make sure we rationed their morsels evenly among them.

In addition to the ducks there, about six geese were lurking at the other end of the pond. I say lurking because, although I find geese to be majestic and beautiful in their breadth and coloring, the artful S of their neck like a swan but with a different kind of elegance, I'm a little wary.  When I was growing up, my dad came home from the golf course one day after having been bitten by a goose and it's stuck in my mind that they can be aggressive when provoked.  I imagine this is true with most animals, and geese on a golf course are certainly encountering a different provocation than those at the pond, but still, I was wary being with the kids.  They saw us feeding the ducks and pushed their way over in the water faster than I anticipated until suddenly they were right up front.  I had Oscar and Simon stop feeding the birds for a little while, but the geese were smart; they knew what we had in our paper bags. One brave bird stretched his neck far over to my feet and began pecking around them until I moved up on the steps at the edge of the pond.  This goose was not backing down, though, and began to slowly waddle, webbed foot by webbed foot, up the pond steps.  Crumbling what was left of my sandwich, I threw the pieces out far into the pond and had the kids walk around the edge to a new section to avoid any two bump geese bites and tears.

While the kids were walking away and I was packing up the lunches, a really marvelous thing happened. In the span of just a couple seconds, Oscar and Simon came around from behind the marshy cat tail growth in the crook of one side of the pond...with a hawk following them.  I wasn't quick enough with my camera to capture it, but this beautiful, tawny and caramel colored red-tailed hawk was walking slowly with boys- the three of them seemingly on a calm stroll together in the park and me, just an on looker.  Their bright, wide eyes and huge smiles would have betrayed them to any real on looker, though, and they were just as awed as I was to have this gorgeous bird so calm and present among us. It walked towards me with them for a few seconds before pushing off with a gentle bend of it's body, splaying its great wings in the air to soar over the water and land in a tree on the other end of the pond.  After a moment of nearly pure silence watching it glide, the boys immediately burst into a fit of excited shrieks and exclamations and we all raced around what seemed like a much larger pond to get to the tree where it landed.  It sat there still when we arrived, now pretending it never walked among us and happily perched on a large branch. Oscar took a few great pictures of the bird and actually helped me identify what kind of hawk it was, being the avid nature lover he already is.

After spending a decent amount of time hoping the hawk would come back down to us, we decided to try and hike up a huge, mountainous hill that lay on that side of the pond. The ground was wet and soft, though, from recent winter weather, and after a few slides and muddied hands, we decided another day would be better for that.  We completed the full circle back around to where we had left our lunches, a part of the path that I had yet to explore very often.  We found a buried fire hydrant at the base of the hill, some smooth limestone chips in shades of various greenish greys, and I found my new favorite tree.  The photo cannot possibly do it justice, but I swear it's magical.  When I saw it off to my right, I felt myself take a sudden gasp of breath and stood entranced before this tree as though the air around it was forcefield that stilled you in your step.  It's hard to describe how it appeared to me or the feeling it caused.  The trunk was a smooth, luminous grey, with shades of a dusty purple and almost glittering silver around it.  When I was standing there, the effect of the coloring in the easy, grey daylight was almost like the swirl inside those rubber balls with milky silver fluid in them. It wasn't the iridescent rainbows of bubbles or oil, but a pearly shimmer, like certain bowling balls or these toy balls I found a picture of. Oscar and Simon breezed by me and called after to have me come look at something by the bridge with them, but I literally felt immobilized, like there was some energy being emitted from this tree that I either needed to feel or draw in. I can't explain it very well without sounding a little cheesy.  But it was a deep connection, like a soul connection, the kind that grabs something between your ribs and holds fast and long.

I stood for a long while, trying to figure out why it had this effect on me and what it meant I should do. In the end I decided I need to keep returning to it and let it continue to move me in this way, that something greater will come than this one feeling, this one magnetization, and that I won't be able to know what that will be until it reveals itself to me.

Blog #6

Friday I packed a lunch and spent the little free time I had at the pond.  It seems that each week it gets increasingly difficult to find a good time to dedicate for 'blog time'.   I'm enjoying having a reason to purposefully take time to breathe and observe for a little while, and put aside all of the "to do's" still on my list.  Even if I get a somewhat anxious about fitting it all in, this time I spend remembering to calm myself, to retain a wide-eyedness about the world, always leaves me feeling satisfied.

Usually when I'm walking anywhere, I have my headphones in and am listening to music.  On these occasions to Schenley, I'm more aware of the sounds around me.  Crossing the street first to the path leading down to the pond, the familiar rush of car winds and tires are around, with horns in the distance and sometimes children squeals from different areas of the park around.  Descending the first set of steps on the hill, cut into the earth among the plants (I pause to wonder if I consider this now a part of 'nature'), I'm aware of my own footsteps, my leather gloves squeaking slightly on the metal railing, the beginnings of birds.  The second stairs let me forget even more so the world left above, and the stream water a little below my feet bubbles over pebbles and drips down it's pathway.  Rustles of leaves and brush, more tweets from birds flitting around the branches, scurries of animals darting quickly away from the approach of something foreign.  Winding around the path toward the water, a wind bristles past the pine trees and around the hollow in my ear, a dog at the far end of the pond barks a playful dare at its owner teasing it with a stick. With each step I feel my ears being less in tune to the sounds of a busier world I'm leaving behind, and encased instead with the small music of the park.

I am thinking about those sound machines people often use to ease themselves in to sleep.  White noise to fill the silence, and why it is so comforting.  Sometimes stillness and quiet can be too big, so consuming it makes your mind fill with even more noise than what's being heard around you.  Even in the silence of the forest, you're never completely surrounded with an all consuming blanket of quiet.  The natural world has its own soundtrack, and though I don't own one, I'm pretty sure most of those sound machines feature a variety of nature settings: babbling brook, rainforest, field crickets, etc.  I think because we are so ingrained with the sounds of where we've come from, this is the most comforting breed of the white noise.  Being surrounded with what our bodies know to listen to, what our ancestors years and years ago were constantly surrounded by, what they heard as they eased their own minds into sleep, is the most delicious form of comfort.  Walking around the pond, staring up at a blueing sky and feeling the wind chill my face, the sounds around the air are a music all their own.

I wonder about the trees.

Why do we wish to bear 

 Forever the noise of these

 More than another noise

-Robert Frost

Blog #5: "If Not, Winter"

Yesterday, I went into the park a little after five, one of the latest times I've been to the pond.  It was cloudy because of the precipitation Pittsburgh has been having, so there wasn't much to see in the evening colors of the sky. The snow the past day or two has been light and constant, and I imagine this is what it might feel like to be inside a snow globe: constantly having your world speckled with dots of white descending around you, small patches of white on the grasses, bits of snowflake lasting a minute on an eyelash or a hand before fading away. As I made my way carefully down the frosty stone steps built into the hillside, it was lovely to see everything capped with the tiniest mounds of white. With the various grey shades of the trees, the puffy sky, and the black of the stones that made up the archway ahead of me, it felt like seeing the world through a black and white filter; a live-action, old time film.

I dedicated part of my exploration today to a closer inspection of some of the plants.  It's hard to get a good look at some of them for identification right now, because of all the weather abuse and slight death they've been enduring.  I'm no artist, but I took out my pen and paper and attempted to draw some of the plants I saw.  I sketched some of the white snakeroot I mentioned before, which has one of the most lovely winter lives. It grows hard and brittle, browns, but still retains its delicate structure and a bit of a tawny colored tuft.


Among a lot of the trodden-on brush along the side of the water, I found some bush-like plants that I sketched and looked up on the internet later.  On the Pittsburgh Parks website, under 'conservancy projects' I read how they had planted native tiarella and heuchera shrubs in 2003 to increase the sustainability of the wetland area.  I think a lot of the bushes I saw were winter versions of Heuchera Shrubs, but it's still hard to be sure.

Around the border of the pond on the left side, there are tall, grassy pond plants.  Some of them I think may be rush plants.  Others are the taller, bigger versions of what I thought were pussy willows, but every time I search on the internet I only get pussy willows.  Instead of having many, tiny fuzzy buds, they usually have a big, fat brown top about the side of a glass soda bottle. I remember my first grade teacher pointing them out to us and mentioning that they only grow near water.  If anyone knows what these are actually called, let me know.

Lastly, I wandered to the far end of the pond that I don't go to as often, where the ducks usually are if they're there.  In the woods on that side, I found my favorite type of tree- the paper birch.  White bark is one of the most lovely aspects of nature to me, the way it seems rolled out in circling strips around the trunk, the deep, scarred notches of dark brown or black, how smooth it is when you lay your hand on its body. I have a book Sappho's poetry translated by Anne Carson called "If Not, Winter".  It's mainly fragments of the writing that has endured time since she wrote it, and though some poems have great chunks of lines missing, even the fragmented ideas of what Sappho was speaking to are so affecting.  One of my favorites is simply: "I long and seek after."

The cover of the book makes me think of the paper birch, with its satin white and etching of tans and blacks along the binding. The books title, along with the bark of the paper birch, are some of the most romantic aspects of winter I can think of.  "If Not, Winter" as a title speaks to this longing, this anticipation of something lost or unattainable being able to be reached in the Winter season.  Perhaps it speaks of lovers, unable to see one another, separated, or maybe even too conflicted to find peace with each other at a time, having the winter to look forward to and resolve their love within.  This idea makes the starkness of winter, the cold, the bare raw spaces, the peeling white bark of the birch, the snow falling in slow procession around us into a picturesque scene so enchanting, so nostalgic, so romantic in its still, still quiet.

After some research, I learned that the first budding leaves on paper birch plants can be used to make tea if you collect them.  This might be now what I am most looking forward to in Spring: gathering tiny new leaves off the birch, pinching them inside of my metal strainer ball, steeping and drinking such a fresh tea. I have a strange infatuation with the idea of becoming a tree. Its a very prominent theme in my work, as I think I've mentioned before, and the idea of drinking something made from such a gorgeous tree, bringing the tree into my body, is so stirring for me.  If I were ever to be reincarnated or perhaps have been something in a previous life, I think it would be a tree. I wrote something for my prose poem class with Sheryl, a sort of fantastical imagining of a woman becoming part of a tree, and it's still in the works but I'll share it below.

The Fullness of Sap 

She travels the long way down the tree branch. It is enormous, the width of twice her waist, extending for miles. Each foot touches its underside to the etched line of wood, steals energy from the rawness inside. This is a dream but it is still important.  The bough she's chosen is a vibratory one to travel, full of the hard thick flow of sap inside the hollow, milking its way to the tips, sweet if you can get to it. Imagine how it feels to dip a finger in, how the thickness would surprise you, full of pressure, color of hard, glowing amber.

The wind pulls a little ahead and the branch begins to rise and dip, rise and dip. She lies her belly down on the wood, wraps herself around the hardness, doesn’t listen to the creak of the bending bough. Hands touching, thighs tight against the branch, she lays an ear against the surface, listens to the humming. It takes its time, warming, milking.

Imagine the branch could gasp open, take her in slowly, dipping a leg, the pressure pulling the other deeper, deeper, enveloping the small back, the belly, arms drawing in, further, further, the chest and collar bones submerging, pulling, pulling, while the wind blew them around. How full it would be, supple when the branch dips, tensing when it pulls up. 

What a marvelous thing, the branch muses, to be entered, and so gently.

Link to the Schenley Park information:
http://www.pittsburghparks.org/schenleyprojects

Blog #4

I've been thinking a lot about dependency, recently.  There are so many social stigmas around the subject that it's hard to sift through them all.  Our culture tells us that you should marry in your life, become "one" with someone else, but then criticizes a loss of independence.  Yet, it also criticizes being too independent, withdrawn from the world, from people.  Too much is bad, too little is bad, but whatever that too much or too little is, it doesn't seem to be left up to us to decide.

When I went to the pond yesterday evening, this subject was on my mind.  In nature, I think there is absolutely an indication of dependency.  Plants and trees are reliant upon the sun, on water, on soil.  Flowers rely on insects for pollination. Insects rely on plants for food. Animals rely on their mothers or parents, on a community, on the earth to give way to a home. I passed by a tree that was smiling at me, and noted that the holes were probably from a woodpecker, another instance of reliance: they need trees for shelter or nourishment. It seems that the 'natural way' IS to be dependent, on one thing or another.

Next to where I sat down by the pond, there were some vine-like branches twining their way up a light post. Vining flora have an interesting kind of dependency, the need to hang on, to wrap themselves around another object.  Stretching out their limbs, they reach for something stable, then grow their way up and around, letting their bodies bend and coil on something completely foreign to themselves.  They are unabashed in their dependency, letting their vulnerability be on display in all its rawness.  I'm not sure about what happens to plants such as this if they grow and cannot find a stabilizing structure.  Maybe they grow out on the ground, maybe they die without the necessary support.  Either way, without the help and solidity of something that is not a part of them, maybe even not a part of 'nature', they never reach the height they would without it.

When I was growing up in my first house, we had a clematis plant growing up the light post outside by our driveway.  I think a couple of our other neighbors did as well, in various shades of purple, fuschia, magenta, indigo.  I'd lay out on my driveway with my cats, drawing with sidewalk chalk or bending plants in to halos for my head.  One particularly warm Spring day, I remember lying down with my back on the hot, grainy concrete, my head right to the side of the light post.  Studying the Clematis, I couldn't figure out how it kept itself climbing on such a smooth, matte surface as the metal pole.  It had nothing sticky or suction like on its thin, brown vines, and with so many heavy flowers, thickly surrounded with leaves, it seemed against reason that it should be able to twine so high.  There seems to be something in the Clematis' nature that is meant to hold on, meant to grow with something close to it.

I think this is a great part of what makes plants like ivy and clematis so interesting: they seem to have an emotional need for touch, for connection.  They hold a yearning and ache just like all the rest of us.

Blog #3

 

Within me there is a fear and I don't know what it is. Untamed and delicate, it crystallizes on the smallest things, blues a new meaning to the word raw. It crowds and splinters inside the thin tubes of veins and catches like a burr to whatever it can: the blood, a memory, being left behind, settling.  Taking a seat among the fallen, great trunk of the tree with its inside exposed, its splinters raw, I touch the open sinews. Tender wood grips my palm and its smell of wounds and cuts is heady. Sitting in the smell of Spring, the crystals shatter, and raw meets raw as the wood absorbs the unknown.

This afternoon I walked through the woods in a light snow for about an hour.  I was drawn to all the tracks left in the snow, thought about the people who had traveled the paths and braved the weather before I had.  It was gorgeous and quiet, stilled by the white hills that piled on the branches and ground, dressing the trees with a delicate dust.

Along the path to the pond, a humongous tree had fallen, probably in the strong winds of a few days ago, directly on the pathway.  Trunk torn out of the earth, dipping into a small pond, broken in the middle and reaching back up into the sky, and then scattering into thousands of splintering directions.  I walked over to it and took a seat on one of the thick splits of trunk.  The open, exposed wood was so many colors- ambers, rich reds, deep chestnuts, light creams, with the grey brown bark on the outside, delicate light wintergreen fungi on the outside, and the small span of snow on top.  I touched the raw meat of the trunk, felt how warm the very middle was, breathed in the scent.  It smelled like fresh mulch that my dad ordered when I was younger, the pile that sat in the driveway for a week as he and my mom spread it around our trees and garden.  My brothers and I would sit on skateboards on top of what seemed like a mountain of mulch, and coast down the bumpy sides of the hill and fly down the driveway.  It was such an interesting mix of senses to be smelling spring amongst all the winter weather and scenery.  Nostalgic and peaceful, I sat for a while with the tree before moving on towards the pond.

I saw many tracks on the way- footprints of man, small hoof prints of deer, little diamonds of dog paw marks, my own marks following behind me.  I followed the deer prints into a small clearing, hoping slightly to catch the deer lying down in the woods or nuzzling the snow for food.  Instead, I heard a literal breath-taking crack as I realized I was walking across water that had frozen beneath the snow. Tense and terrified, I back tracked as quickly and lightly as I could and decided veering off paths in woods blanketed beneath snow was not the greatest idea.

My pond was covered in snow, save for a small patch of exposed ice and a little water pool by the willows.  All over the surface were great trunks of tree and logs reaching out of the snow.  Along the edge of the water, I investigated the plants today.  Small dry buds of delicate loveliness shook in the wind, and I learned from an information board on the way back through the woods that they were probably White Snakeroot.  There was another plant that interested me, larger dry tufts the shape of dandelion seeds once they've fluffed and blown off the stem. On a tree beyond the them, higher in the woods, small ledges of growth stuck out from the trunk.  I thought how wonderful it would be to be a small chipmunk or a bird and have a ledge such as that to settle on or curl up for a time.

On the way back out, I sat with the trunk again and touched the wood.  I've been having a difficult time lately, with lots of mixed emotions about where I am in my life physically and emotionally, with a distracting sense of unfulfillment and an anxiety about how to settle myself.  Sitting in the tree and focusing on it's texture and smell, and the energy it gave off while also absorbing my own, a felt a sense of calm I'd really be needing lately.

Blog #2

It's about 11:30 A.M. when I start out for the pond but feels both earlier and later than that since I have only just woken up. A weird thing happens when you wake up near the end of morning.  Your body is still sleepy and warm, so the walk to the water was a little bit more lazy and a little bit less cold than my last walk here.  But also, the light of the day indicates immediately that it's almost mid-day, which makes for some confusion. Since my mind is in morning mode but knows that it's later, it somehow feels even later than 11:30 and also makes me feel like I've wasted the morning. Alas.

Trudging through the dusty white snow, most of it still fresh on the ground since there has been few travelers on these paths since Friday, I get caught up thinking about the light.  Sometimes I play a game with myself in the mornings. If I open my eyes and haven't checked the time,  I'll look out the window from my bed where the light pushes in between the blinds. Or if I'm at Michael's, I'll get up and walk to the window by the chair, not looking at the clock, and try to guess the time based on the light.  Obviously, this is a tried and true method of time indication (sundials), but with the science aside, there's something very distinct about sunlight throughout the day.  The rosy, yellow light of very early morning, which bleeds into the whiter, brighter light of morning, followed by the harder light of mid day. By afternoon the light is darker, somehow, even though it's still light.  Almost a fuller, rounder light, which catches more yellow as it goes on into evening, and blues as it fades to dusk.  There's always a feeling to perceive, too, if you're patient.  If you're still for long enough you can gather the energy, and sense the time of the day.  I like to do this, to test my connection to the earth and the light, to make demands upon my body's sense of energy and it's ties to the world.

By the time I finish all this light-pondering, I'm sitting again on the edge of the pond, looking at the frozen fish. I brought a tarp today, to put on top of the snow so I could sit for a while and not freeze. Most of the water is covered with a padding of snow, but spots have melted away in the sun over the past few days, and the frozen fish are still down there staring up at me with their big, round eyes. Looking around at the trees, most of the snow that had landed on branches has already melted or fallen away, and I'm disappointed for not getting to the pond before this.  Already the quietness that comes with the descent and coating of snow has dissipated, and the enchantment of white topped mazes in the woods is gone.

Still, I'm drawn to looking up at the trees.  My eyes scan the full length around the opening of the canopy.  The big oval of sky above is roughly the same shape of the pond, with branchy distinctions here and there.  I spread out my tarp and lie down in the middle, snow all around and that particular cerulean blue of sky up ahead.

When I was younger, I was driving in my car with my family somewhere and on the way back had fallen asleep against in the back seat.  I woke up before we had reached our house and not wanting to move, opened my bleary eyes out the window and up at the sky.  Tree outlines passed by, creating a break between the indigo and navy night, and the darker, deeper brown of the woods. After a few seconds of watching, I realized I knew exactly where we were from the outline of the trees.  I sat up to look at the road and found that we were right where I had expected us to be- route 100 just before the Catherine Avenue exit- which means nothing if you're not from Pasadena, MD, but it's about two miles from where I grew up.  This memory has always stuck with me, probably about 12 years after the fact, even to the point of remembering the exact place in the road that we were.  I was fascinated then as I am still now that without even trying to memorize that information, I had spent so much time looking at the trees out the window of the car that I knew each indentation, each odd branch, each curve in the outline of the woods.


I spent my twenty minutes by the pond today lying on my tarp in the hard sun of the nearing afternoon, just looking at the outline of the trees, trying to memorize.



_____________________________________________________________________________________

Trees make their own silhouettes

hold arched hands against

            a dense sky, 

                        folding, folding

they rebel against the air,

seize a new space to stab with branches,

            shudder into a gasp of buds and knobs,

                         breathless, bare against a colder weather.

Always the reaching oak regards me,

            dark across the lawn.

I bristle at its lenient bend in wind,

wish I could be less like it:

                        how it trembles at the tips,

                        holds everything within,

                        traps records of the years.

Blog #1

My intention was to blog specifically about the pond at Schenley, but my mental blog really began on the walk to there.  I have been to the pond all the three of the other seasons- first in the Spring, then Summer, then Fall.  It felt very poetically just for me to now be visiting it in the Winter, as well, something which I probably wouldn't have done if not for this blog.  I hold a very passionate, fervent relationship with nature, but I suppose I'm a fickle lover, because my appreciation is often more scarce in the Winter.  Too often I focus negatively on the cold and barren landscape, and already I know the first few weeks of this blog will make me soak in the scenery with the same adoration I do for the fair weather months.

On the way through the woods on the path to the pond, a few things caught my eye.  First was a pair of bright red cardinals.  Their bodies were so glamorous and stark against the mostly grey/brown backdrop of dying trees and leaves. I saw a few more birds along the way, and my reading of Refuge by Terry Tempest Williams has significantly increased my interest in separate species- their bodies, their songs, their habits.  I could identify some finches and chickadees, but there were some I was less familiar with, as well. There was also a small, feeble pine sapling near the opening of the pond that someone had some at some point with a few little blue christmas bulbs and decorated so sweetly.  Not all natural- but an adorable sight nonetheless. It occurred to me then, through this small sign of human contribution, that I would probably be the only person at the pond on this day, in this 20 degree weather. The knowledge of probable solitude and aloneness seemed to open my perspective even more.  I lingered a little longer at a space, I felt more present and more aware of the nature around me without the possibility of people watching.

An important thought I had on the walk to my pond was a final appreciation of barren Winter trees. Normally I completely overlook these leafless forms.  The messy chaos of grey brown branches and bramble, all the same shade at a casual overlook, never appealed to me.  For the first time, I noted how with the leaves gone, you can fully appreciate the form and grace of some beautifully structured trees.  I stopped and stared for a few moments completely up at the canopy.  The elegant shape of long branches bleeding off into smaller; the way sunlight catches sides of them and shadows the other. I realized they are not at all one shade of grey brown, but a beautiful variation on a theme- all the hues and nuances of a black and white photograph.  The shadows and highlights create a depth that can only be seen in the winter, on the leafless branches.

Eventually I made it to the pond. First I had to slide on some ice that covered the path and I made another mental note to wear boots with good traction next time, as well. The first thing I notice is the absence of ducks. In all of my other visits, there were a great grouping of ducks honking and quacking and milling about.  The pond is shaped almost like a lima bean, and I thought next, while walking past the edge to sit in the very middle of the dip in the bean, of the turtles I had seen when I was here in the Fall. So I wondered, aloud, actually, what happens to the turtles when the pond freezes?  Do they hide out in the woods or burrow or make a nest in the willows?  Where do they go?

Sitting on the edge of the concrete lip that surrounds the pond, I took out my pen and notepad to jot my thoughts so far.  The ink in my pen was so cold it came out very thick and light.  My hands immediately turned red and stiff against the air.  I realized I forgotten to bring tissues as my nose started to run.  I made a mental note to bring my best gloves, a pencil, and tissues on my next visit.
After a few minutes, though, as the wind that had been blowing on my walk seemed to die down, I had the delicious feeling that is basking in the sun on a cold day.  With the air stilled, the warmth was direct on my face and I smiled into it, thinking how this is a feeling you can only have in the Winter.  No other appreciation of the sun is quite so rewarding as on a brisk, brisk day.  I mentally chastised myself for not spending enough time outdoors in the Winter, which I chalked up to the preconception I think a lot of society has about Winters only being beautiful in 'beautiful Winter places', such as Aspen, or the Alps, for example.  I hereby mentally resolve to give Winter more appreciation than I have been believing it deserves, wherever I may be.

As I made notes, I could hear the ice shifting and thawing in the sun. Birds tweeted above in the branches and farther away, dry branches scratched against each other like a hiss or whisper or the sound of a zipper, some cars on the bridge to my left and the water rushing from a brook I passed were the sounds I heard around me.  The hair the smell of plain cold- not snow smell, just ice smell.

I turned my attention to the pond.  There were so many surfaces that made up the bean.  Pussy willows along the left edge, and ice stretching out in a C from them.  In the middle, a patch of water that rippled and glinted against the sun, some lines where the water blew in different directions, and a patch of snow on the far right of the bean. The leaves suspended and frozen beneath the ice created the same depth as the trees in the canopy.  Various shades of brown and tan enhanced by the shadows and light made it look endless. In some spaces, the sunlight hit the water and the snow reflection to create a very glacial pale green, and the fungi growing the edges was a matted amber hue.  In the midst of the amber fungi, I found dead fish.  Small, frozen bodies in a brilliance of color- I 'fished' one out to get a better look.  They were so many colors in the sun- silver green yellow gold with a slight purpleish tint in the center and near the gills.  The circular eye with rings and dots and swirls, the fascinating hinge of the gaping mouth when I pulled gently with a finger, the smallest razors on the inside.  My 10 year old self made a mental appearance and wanted to give the extracted fish a burial, but then realized the proper burying site for a fish is the water, so I slid him back through the cold surface. I saw five dead dish total, floating in the water that day, although I couldn't help it, didn't like to keep looking for them. I didn't like to think about the process a living being feels when freezing to death.  I thought momentarily of how it reminded me of Titanic, but it wasn't fair because Titanic was filmed in an Olympic sized hot tub.  They had it easy.

After releasing the fish, I walked to the far edge of the pond where the snow was. There was a something on the surface I wanted to investigate. As I strolled around, happy to have my hands in my warmer pockets, I looked up and took in the deep blueness of the sky, the faint crescent of moon over the bridge.  Looking back to the pond, I saw how the snow seemed reach at the edges, fingers and peaks that longed for the center. I sang while I walked around, thought about the possible outcome if I happened to slip in the edge, walked a little more cautiously. I saw some dead plant life to my right as I approached the snowy side- one I particularly liked had tufts of taupe fuzz on the ends, and under the fuzz lay small daisy-like buds, about the size of a pea, in shades of brown and tan with black centers.  Sometimes death can be just as lovely as life.

The mass on the surface of the ice turned out to just be a log.  I wondered how a log came to be on top of completely frozen ice, instead of half in the ice and half out.  It came to my mind that I should check the time and saw my meter would be up in 7 minutes where I parked, so I hurried past the pond and through the path much quicker than when I came.  When I came to the final set of stairs up to the roads and out of the park, I was happy to see the brilliant Cardinals still flitting about.