… from Boulder, Colorado.
Sigh.
One of my colleagues said today that it feels like we’ve slipped over the line into Narnia, where it’s “always winter but never Christmas.” (–C.S. Lewis: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe).
Cue the music here: ☆*♥¸.•*¨`*•♫♪♫♪ Someday our Spring will come…
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My dear friend Julianne Skai Arbor made the news in Canada by making love with their old-growth trees!
According to the news article, the tree she’s pictured in here, known as the San Juan spruce, “is the largest spruce tree in Canada at 62 metres tall, with a crown that spreads over 23 metres. It does not have any official protection.”
I hope her action (and these journalist allies’ reporting of it) helps bring about an official policy from the government of British Columbia that will protect that magnificent grove.
We need these ancient wild places to remain unmolested for so many reasons. First, there are the physical gifts they bring: oxygenating our air for better breathing; providing habitat for countless animals, birds, bugs, and more. Then there’s the intangible side, of beauty and wonder. Seeing such giant trees close-up evokes wonder in tourists from all over the world, particularly those from heavily populated areas who might never have experienced anything like them, or even been in someplace that is silent. Finally, these forests can confer a quality that’s hard to articulate but known to nearly everyone who encounters them – the deep soul peace that comes with just being with these ancient giants. When people encounter such enormous and old trees — our primordial birthplace and heritage as a hominid species — something deep and rich inside, something rooted, wakes up. We can begin to feel healed of the terminal speed and interminable distractions of western civilization. This doesn’t easily happen everywhere. As Julianne observes, “The peaceful feeling of being surrounded by nature’s life force in an old forest is very different from feelings generated by a clearcut or tree farm.”
You can read the whole Times Colonist article here: The naked tree-hugger makes her way to Port Renfrew, by Judith LaVoie.
The photo, very similar to much of Julianne’s work, was taken by Ancient Forest Alliance campaigner and founder TJ Watt.
(As an aside, I must admit to feeling taken aback by the name of that British Columbia newspaper. It’s actually called the “Colonist”?! Sounds like a hard road to hoe there regarding relationship to place, esp. indigenous peoples’ views.)
To see more of Julianne’s naked photos with special trees (or to learn more about being a treegirl or treeboy yourself), go to www.treegirl.org
And if you’re interested in the idea of making love with the earth, see also Annie Sprinkle and Elizabeth Stevens’ new work on ecosexuality. (I’ll write more on that yumminess later.)
You go, treegirl!
My resolutions are to dance, loaf, and not go on any diets.
This year, I’ve decided to be realistic.
Happy new year! May 2012 bring you much joy.
You never know when a small bit of grace will hit.
Perhaps during something quite mundane – like walking to get the mail. So we’ve gotta be ready to receive it at all times. This just means paying attention.
Seeing this poster on the fence across the street made my day!
So glad that Fern’s family bothered to tell us the happy ending.
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Spring is in the air! The other day as I was out for a walk, I noticed the traffic stopping, with no real reason that I could see – until I came around the front pickup.
A group of ducks were doing it in the middle of the road. (The Beatles live!) You can click on this picture to make it bigger. Check out the priceless look on the dog’s face.
More ducks came running across the street to join the orgy. The waiting cars piled up, with some drivers at the back of the line growing impatient.
I couldn’t help laughing out loud. I can hear the radio traffic announcement now: “Sebastopol: slight holdup on Pleasant Hill Road due to duck sex.”
When the folks in the hindmost car realized what the holdup was, they started laughing too. The weather was warm enough that their windows were down, and our laughter rang out all down the street. Some cars honked, but those ducks weren’t about to budge until their business was done.
Laughter now; baby ducklings in future. This little delay in traffic flow was a good moment.
Once I was camping on an offshore island in the Atlantic when we learned a big hurricane was due to hit. Being a westerner with experience in earthquakes but not in hurricanes, I felt great trepidation about this. We listened to emergency radio broadcasts so we could determine where our location was along its path, and decided to hunker down there rather than risk the ferry ride back over open sea to the mainland.
It turned out that the storm had begun to turn aside a few hundred miles below ours on its path out to sea, so we only got smacked by the tail end as it curled on by. But holy cow, even that was unbelievably windy and wet. I was sleeping outside in a zipped-up bivy sack, and at one point it felt like I was parked beneath a waterfall; like someone was standing directly over me and dumping buckets of water out right above my face. The hurricane’s power was awesome and the experience the fodder for some great complaining adventure tales. (As all travelers know, the most miserable experiences make the best stories – after they’re over.)
Later, back in a town, someone pulled up satellite images of the hurricane. The point I’m getting to is that when we got to see the storm from the perspective of above instead of in the middle of it, my attitude toward it changed. When seen as a whole entity, this hurricane was an enormous creamy white and blue moving spiral, like a galaxy made of water. I was awestruck. If I had to die young, I thought, a person could do worse than to be done in by such glorious beauty.
Yep, this is the one! Hurricane Dennis, 1999. (Image: Wikimedia commons)
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As above, so below; in the small the great. Relatively few of us get smacked by hurricanes, but many of us suffer from allergies.
Now the magic of electron microscopy can show us the beauty in this as well.
Sailing the tiny seas, “Micronaut” Martin Oeggerli has found a way to capture these gorgeous photos of pollens, showing us a glimpse into one of the remotest ecosystems left to explore.
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Forget-me-not pollen (Image: micronaut.ch)
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Sea Pink [Grasnelken
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Daisy pollen (Bellis perennis). (Image: micronaut.ch)
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What is pollen exactly?
To put it in simple terms, pollen is a seed plant’s equivalent of pre-ejaculate and sperm. (If you’re shocked, go further and ponder Loren Eiseley’s mind-blowing notion that flowers invented sexual desire as we know it! But I digress.)
Pollen consists of powdery grains and a hard shell that holds them; you can imagine it as being sort of like a capsule vitamin. The pollen grains (microgametophytes) produce the male gametes or sperm cells, and the pollen shell protects the sperm cells while they’re being transported from flower to flower. The pollen grows on a flower’s stamen (the part in the flower’s center that sticks out like a penis, capped by the anther), and are taken by bugs, birds, winds & sniffing noses to another flower’s pistil or carpel, the the equivalent of a yoni with its ovary buried deep inside.
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Flower parts (Image: http://www.uic.edu/classes/bios/bios100/f05pm/lect15.htm)
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As nature loves to experiment, pollen grains show as much diversity in their sizes and shapes as mammalian penises. Some pollen grains are equivalents of whale or horse penises, large and smooth; others like cats’, small and barbed. Some pollens are shaped like balls; others like coffee beans, dragonfly heads, or doughnuts, all of which can be witnessed below:
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Petunia pollen grain (Image: micronaut.ch)
Babiana (S. African plant) pollen grains on an anther. (Image: micronaut.ch)
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Pine tree pollen
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Pollen grain from an Akazia or Myrtle Wattle (Photo: micronaut.ch)
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You might think that the prickery looking ones would cause the worst allergies, irritating the sinuses. But surprisingly, some of the smooth ones are terrifically allergenic to humans. Witness the Alder tree’s pollen:
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Oeggerli’s photographs, more of which can be seen at his site, www.micronaut.ch, offer this small consolation:
Pollens might make our noses miserable, but hey, at least they’re beautiful.
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Birch pollen grain (Image: micronaut.ch)
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Among the arcane delights in my tiny cottage are a fat file of poetry admired & collected over the years, and another fat collection of photos I’ve taken myself.
Here begin the artistic sandwiches.
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What if we smashed the mirrors
And saw our true face?
What if we left the Sacred Books to the worms
And found our True Mind?
What if we burned the wooden Buddhas?
Gave the stone Buddhas back to the mountains?
Dispersed the gurus with a great laugh
And discovered the path we had always been on?
What if we told the Saviours
We were saved from our first breath
And the healers — If you could heal yourselves
All would be healed?
What if we washed clean of Authority’s ordure
And smelled the fresh smell of our own bodies?
What if, as Eve eating the Fruit of the Tree of Knowledge,
We knew the “Patriarchal Curse” a mere natural thunder
Bringing Eden a cleansing rain?
What if, in the lightning’s flash
We saw there were
NO
Mirrors
Sacred Books
Buddhas
Gurus
Saviours
Healers
Authority
And Knowledge was standing stark under the sky
Feet naked to earth
Eyes there for whatever light falls.
What if –?
– Audre Lorde
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