5.25.17 ~ twilight at Denison Pequotsepos Nature Center photo by Timothy Rodgers
The pale stars were sliding into their places. The whispering of the leaves was almost hushed. All about them it was still and shadowy and sweet. It was that wonderful moment when, for lack of a visible horizon, the not yet darkened world seems infinitely greater — a moment when anything can happen, anything be believed in. ~ Olivia Howard Dunbar (The Shell of Sense)
barred owl photo by Mark Musselman South Carolina
Last night, we took a magical evening walk in the woods, an owl prowl, offered by the Denison Pequotsepos Nature Center. And something wonderful did happen! We saw and heard a family of barred owls, a mother and three fledglings!
Before the walk we listened to a lecture about the owls found in Connecticut, some common, like the barred owl, others rare, like the snowy owl. We met a little rescued screech owl who was blind in one eye. And there was a lab where we got to crack open a sterilized owl pellet and find the bones and teeth of swallowed rodents. A very informative and enchanting evening!
If I could, I would always work in silence and obscurity, and let my efforts be known by their results. ~ Charlotte Brontë (The Life of Charlotte Brontë)
I’ve acquired many labels in my sixty years: highly sensitive person, introvert, obsessive-compulsive, painfully shy, homebody, bookworm, social phobia, agoraphobia, chronic depression, chronic migraine, chronic anxiety. But none of them got to the crux of the matter more definitively than autism.
Feeling like an odd-duck for all of my life I started suspecting autism (or Asperger’s syndrome) a few years ago. Little hints in the occasional magazine article. (Caring for elderly relatives for most of my adult life I’ve spent countless hours in medical and hospital waiting rooms reading magazines.) But last October I read an autobiography written by someone who had been been “diagnosed” late in life. His experience compelled me to read a few more books on the subject. And then a few more. My curiosity finally led me to consult with a neuropsychologist who confirmed my suspicions in December, one month shy of my 60th birthday.
Talk about a paradigm shift! The news actually came as a huge relief. So many things about my life until now are finally making sense.
It can be harrowing to see life through the surreal lenses that warp and tangle and convolute the most simple of activities; activities that the neurologically typical consider ordinary, things like shopping and driving and studying and keeping a job and paying bills and visiting with friends. It can be sad to find that no matter how deeply committed the effort, tenuous results may be all that follow. ~ Liane Holliday Willey (Pretending to Be Normal: Living with Asperger’s Syndrome)
Reading the above quote for the first time deeply resonated with me. I’ve often tried to figure out how most people can simply hop in the car and run out to the store. For me it is a major and exhausting expedition that needs careful preparation and planning and a lot of recovery time afterwards. I’ve never been able to explain why this is to anyone — and still can’t. For me, so many things don’t respond to the ‘practice makes perfect’ philosophy. Now I know why. Now I can make the allowances I need without feeling so badly about it.
No doubt I will be writing more about this astonishing discovery in the coming months.
Not from successful love alone, Nor wealth, nor honor’d middle age, nor victories of politics or war; But as life wanes, and all the turbulent passions calm, As gorgeous, vapory, silent hues cover the evening sky, As softness, fullness, rest, suffuse the frame, like fresher, balmier air, As the days take on a mellower light, and the apple at last hangs really finish’d and indolent-ripe on the tree, Then for the teeming quietest, happiest days of all! The brooding and blissful halcyon days! ~ Walt Whitman (Sands at Seventy)
In the woods, sitting still, there is subtle joy in listening to the tiniest sounds. There is delight in the textures of light. ~ Joan Tollifson (Awake in the Heartland)
7.24.16 ~ Richmond, New Hampshire
We, all of us — blue-green algae, galaxies, and bear grass, philosophers and clams — will some day dissipate into vibrating motes. In the end, all of natural creation is only sound and silence moving through space and time, like music. ~ Kathleen Dean Moore (The Pine Island Paradox: Making Connections in a Disconnected World)
Rich meanings of the prophet-Spring adorn, Unseen, this colourless sky of folded showers, And folded winds; no blossom in the bowers; A poet’s face asleep is this grey morn.
Now in the midst of the old world forlorn A mystic child is set in these still hours. I keep this time, even before the flowers, Sacred to all the young and the unborn.
Was it light? Was it light within? Was it light within light? Stillness becoming alive, Yet still? ~ Theodore Roethke (The Quiet Room)
Katie got a little bit of snow…
So… We finally got a snowstorm on Saturday, seven inches of snow here. Washington, DC and New York City got much more snow than we did. Record breaking amounts, in fact.
After eleven days of misery it was determined that I had a particularly nasty virus and that it wasn’t necessarily food-borne. I could have caught it the same way one catches a cold or the flu. Sobering thought.
I did not recover in time to go to North Carolina. Very disappointed, but we were given credit from our cancelled flight to apply to a new flight. Thank you so much, Jet Blue.
Yesterday I was dazzled by a photo my Norwegian friend Ane Lisbet posted on Facebook. It was from a walk she took in the afternoon, and I’m grateful she gave me permission to use it here. 🙂 The light is returning to Norway and my longing to go back there in a different season is getting stronger.
1.24.16 ~ Dima and Katie
I hope we can schedule a new trip to see Katie and her parents very soon!
Well, I couldn’t wait to share the pictures tucked away on my camera so I decided to post this picture from my cell phone. Katherine has spent her first night at home and the new little family is settling into their nest. I am so thrilled to be holding my sweet little granddaughter so often. I love this blessing for a new baby written by John O’Donohue:
As I enter my new family, May they be delighted At how their kindness Comes into blossom.
Unknown to me and them, May I be exactly the one To restore in their forlorn places New vitality and promise.
May the hearts of others Hear again the music In the lost echoes Of their neglected wonder.
If my destiny is sheltered, May the grace of this privilege Reach and bless the other infants Who are destined for torn places.
If my destiny is bleak, May I find in myself A secret stillness And tranquillity Beneath the turmoil.
May my eyes never lose sight Of why I have come here, That I never be claimed By the falsity of fear Or eat the bread of bitterness.
In everything I do, think, Feel, and say, May I allow the light Of the world I am leaving To shine through and carry me home.
“Patience” comes from the same ancient roots as “petals” — to open like a flower, to unfurl, to receive the stroke of a moth’s tongue and the ministrations of a bee. And so we are given “passive” and “patient” and “passionate.” The philosopher Spinoza thought that passion was the opposite of action: to be acted upon rather than to act. And so a heron is passionate in this odd, old-fashioned way — open, unresisting, transparent, suffering the sense impressions to flow through its mind, exquisitely aware, a single still point of clarity. ~ Kathleen Dean Moore (Wild Comfort: The Solace of Nature)
I do an awful lot of thinking and dreaming about things in the past and the future – the timelessness of the rocks and the hills – all the people who have existed there. I prefer winter and fall, when you feel the bone structure in the landscape – the loneliness of it – the dead feeling of winter. Something waits beneath it – the whole story doesn’t show. I think anything like that – which is contemplative, silent, shows a person alone – people always feel is sad. Is it because we’ve lost the art of being alone? ~ Andrew Wyeth (LIFE, May 14, 1965)
