Nature

You’re sitting in a comfortable chair, around eight P.M., and the sun is gently lowered behind a tall oak tree.

A basket of red flowered petunias grows out of an orange ceramic pot. It’s very quiet.

You have a few birds chatting high up in the apple tree to your right, and two sparrows are hopping along the grass, searching for that last evening snack.

Out of nowhere, you hear a distant rumble. It’s very faint, very subtle. Barely audible. Barely distinguishable.

I love to see things that are so tangled they defy all logic to untangle or even understand their pattern.

Near our house is a Byzantine church. That in itself is so beautiful when they play the church bells with something like a piano keyboard. Anyhow, there is a huge nettle, a giant, wild hedge with small birds darting in and out.

Hundreds of birds seem to live in there. It is so amazing that they can so quickly and accurately navigate this dense and obtuse tangle of hedge at such a high speed. They must be geniuses.

I love walking thru fall leaves.

Not just walking thru them, but really kicking them up into the air, like wanting to see them fall again and again – to float gently down, swaying this way and that, living a little poetry for a minute, something myriad generations before had admired and enjoyed.

I love sunflowers. I mean, here is a flower that grows bigger than me. It is gigantic. And the seeds are so visible, so wildly bountiful, and so orderly arranged.

I see them growing in the community garden, and I admire their towering, poetic, lilting stance.

There are two local farms that plant thousands of sunflowers – acres and acres - and let you walk among them. It is breath-taking. So many circles of purple-black with a rim of yellow against a backdrop of greens and a light blue sky – like nature is looking with 10,000 eyes upon the world.

I sincerely thank whoever discovered the muffin.

There is something really irresistible about a muffin – all kinds of muffins.

Others may love their croissant, but I love my muffin.

Right away, I think of muffins wrapped in red and white checked gingham in a honey-colored wicker basket. I think of New England or charming European villages with fresh baked breads. I think of the open hearth, with a log fire, at the center of a home.

It’s so primal – food – eating – our daily bread.

It was the end of fall, and we put out a pumpkin on the front steps for the squirrels to enjoy.

A large chubby squirrel came up and started eating it. He was not shy, or perhaps he was too awestruck by such a wonderful feast appearing for him out of the blue.

In any case, we slowly opened the front door so only the storm door, a full pane of glass, stood between us and him. We were one foot away as he continued to chew his way thru the pumpkin – to the point at which he was able to sit inside it and eat all around himself.

I say to myself I need 5 minutes, I need a time out, I just gotta get away from all this stuff I’m doing.

So what do I do? Well what I do is I step outside.

I stepped out the other day. There was a patch of snow, covered the ground. Patches of grass broke out. The air was cool and cold. And as I breathed it in, it filled my lungs with this wonderful fillness of freshness and light itself. I looked up and the sky was crystal blue and clear.

A single hawk was soaring high. It just kept going higher and higher, and I watched him for a few minutes.

One day I went outside and saw mushrooms everywhere. Not only was the yard absolutely full of mushrooms, but they were all so different from each other. It’s like elves and fairies were celebrating there in the night before.

Some were large and off-white. Some were small and orange. Some were dark, dark brown, thin and tall. Some were white with an orange ring at their edge. Some were tiny and delicate, the size of a dime. Colony upon colony of each kind.

There was a huge 8 inch mushroom. There were colonies of bright yellow sprouts, just stems forming, of young mushrooms.

One of my earliest memories is playing in a sandbox with my brother. It had a striped awning, green and white.

The sand feels so cool, and has an unusually pleasant sensation. It’s similar to putting your hand into a bin of dried corn kernels, or sunflower seeds, or birdseed.

It feels like it is alive in some way, this easy ability to reshape as you move your hands or your feet through it. And it pours, like water.

I like to see the rain drops after the rain.

Find just the right tree, and they hang there like glistening jewels.

Sometimes it’s the way they decorate a bush like tiny ornaments.

Or on a window pane how they line up all in a row.

And of course, it’s a real find to see a single drop poised on the turning edge of a leaf.

I like to see how they gather together on broad cabbage leaves that are dusty, blue green.

Or how they bead up on the hood of a car.