This is my beautiful and talented friend Aimee, who practices and teaches yoga and may be one of the dreamiest souls I know. She and I got together today to combine our passions and what resulted was more than yoga or photography, it's like a love poem about the strength, flexibility, and beauty of the human body. I'm really grateful that she shared her gift with me!
I think I missed my calling as an entymologist. It's really too bad that I can't have twelve completely different lives. One would be devoted entirely to bugs.
These are box elder beetles; a colony surrounds my garage, covering fallen magnolia leaves and some low plants. One of my favorite things about box elder bugs (and squash bugs, which are another member of the Coreoidae family) is that in the spring, you find them in large groups that include multiple life stages. Everything from teeny tiny first instar nymphs through fully-metamorphosed adults, all together. Sometimes it seems as though single adults are shepherding groups of younger bugs. If you click on the photo above, you can see labels for the adult beetle and 5th, 4th, and 2nd instars.
I found a couple of nymphs shedding their exoskeletons and emerging into a new phase of life. It never ceases to amaze me how delicate they are, and yet how sturdy.
And just look at this! Brilliant red masses of nymphs against vital spring green.
Look at the guy on the bottom right who's sipping from a fallen flower.
I had a poetry professor in college (can I cash in 1 life to be an English prof?) who finished reading a Seamus Heaney poem to us with a blissed-out expression on his face, looked up, closed the book, and uttered a simple, satisfied "ah."
This is my poetry and my bliss. Ah.
wee
- e.e. cummings
Today was my grandmother's birthday. She would have been 83. I feel lucky to have some things that belonged to her - a few pieces of jewelry, the ridiculous huge wooden fork and spoon that were on the wall over her breakfast table as long as I can remember, many pieces of her amethyst glass collection, boxes of recipes she clipped. Today I touched my necklace a lot, and thought of making meatballs and biscotti, and remembered camping trips and the smell of her house and the doll she gave me when I was two. I remembered big bouncy balls, the same kind they still sell in those huge cages in toy stores. I thought of the last time I visited her, when I cooked breakfast for her instead of the other way around. I considered how I wished I had known her better, lived closer, visited more often.
I do not know if she had a favorite poet, but the brevity and austerity of Emily Dickinson seems appropriate, and I do think she was, herself, a "courteous yet harrowing grace."
green and crimson
snow-capped jimson
'neath the ice they hide
while we're warm inside
Just after I shot this, bats crossed the sky above us. Happy Halloween!
(subject from William Dean Howells, From Generation to Generation)
How To Eat a Poem
Don't be polite.
Bite in.
Pick it up with your fingers and lick the juice that
may run down your chin.
It is ready and ripe now, whenever you are.
You do not need a knife or fork or spoon
or plate or napkin or tablecloth.
For there is no core
or stem
or rind
or pit
or seed
or skin
to throw away.
- Eve Merriam
