Textures and Patterns

 from a recent trip to Blackwater Falls Nat'l Park:

    

"I am a frayed and nibbled survivor in a fallen world, and I am getting along. I am aging and eaten and have done my share of eating too.

I am not washed and beautiful, in control of a shining world in which everything fits, but instead am wandering awed about on a splintered wreck I’ve come to care for, whose gnawed trees breathe a delicate air, whose bloodied and scarred creatures are my dearest companions, and whose beauty beats and shines not in its imperfections but overwhelmingly in spite of them, under the wind-rent clouds, upstream and down.”

- Annie Dillard, 'Pilgrim at Tinker Creek'

Bedtime Gallop

 

 Starlight     wrested from its mooring of day. 

Night-weary cloak upon me

                    the leaden weight    

                                        of joy

                                weighs heavy with the knowledge

                                the scales tip as deep 

           in the other direction.

Sleep        a diamond mine trawled through

    longing for relief

                a thousand points of light.

The sullen waning Moon        running rough-trod through my fears.

With each settling

the words

they come

insistent on my recording.

My hand     furious     in attempt at catching

                                                        the mind's flight of fancy

                                                        the heart's embrace

                                                            of a moment    undone.

Vine and bracken        scrawled across the page

    painstaking indulgence

    stirred by cricket hymn.

Spring's unfolding

    redemption and torment

                        a banquet    laden with fruits

            soon enough to rot.

Not every bird caught in hand,

not every stone cast,

    we set out.

Full and empty.

Clutching at pearls

    of loss and longing

words slip by

    many lost to the night...

(Photos:  Yellow-Bellied Sapsucker Holes in a decades-old landscape Holly)

Photo Study: Monongahela Bark

These pictures were all taken during a visit in August 2010 to the Monongahela 
deep in the mountains of West Virginia...

   

“Get to know a tree...talk to a tree.  

Your neighbors will think your weird, but its ok...you’re an artist.“

- Bob Ross

"Trees outstrip most people in the extent and depth of their work for the public good." 

- Sara Ebenreck

"I willingly confess to so great a partiality for trees as tempts me to respect a man in exact proportion to his respect for them. " - James Russell Lowell

               

  "The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit." 
- Nelson Henderson

"Suburbia is where the developer bulldozes out the trees, 

then names the streets after them." - Bill Vaughn

"The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago.  The next best time is now. "

- Chinese Proverb

"There are rich counsels in the trees." - Herbert P. Horne

 

"Trees are poems that earth writes upon the sky,
We fell them down and turn them into paper,
That we may record our emptiness."
  - Kahlil Gibran

"Only when the last tree has died and the last river been poisoned and the last fish been caught will we realise we cannot eat money." - Cree Indian Proverb

“What is an oak tree except an acorn that stood it's ground.” - J. Duplantis

 

 "I frequently tramped eight or ten miles through the deepest snow to keep an appointment with a beech-tree, or a yellow birch, or an old acquaintance among the pines."  - Henry David Thoreau

“[God] loved birds and invented trees. Man loved birds and invented cages.” - Jacques Devall      ~