Musings

I've been in a musing mood this week on my personal Facebook page, and thought, hey, I'll share them here -- because sometimes leftovers taste better when they have a day or two to soak in the fridge.


Tell me, is there anything more wonderful than walking the garden path as bees, wasps, moths, and butterflies travel parallel alongside? They are like close friends keeping you company in the silent cacophony of a morning meandering. Wake the world. Break into blossom.

Watching bumblebees on the sunflowers out my office window. Their flights from bloom to bloom are erratic to me, yet I know they are simply feeling their way to the next flower -- ultraviolet light on petals, oppositely charged pollen. And just as I was typing this a goldfinch landed on a bud and began stabbing at something (eating ants?). A black-capped chickadee also landed and the two birds flapped and screamed at each other a few moments until the chickadee retreated. The finch soon flew off to another sunflower, then toward the garden, allowing the chickadee to come back. Plant sunflowers by your windows!

Cicadas remind me of August 1995 when I was scared out of my mind arriving for college in Indiana. It was so hot and my dorm had no a/c. I spent hours outside alone on a bench or drove to a park, and the cicadas pierced their echo into my heart while I cried, longing to be home again. I feel that anxiety today as I hear the cicadas in Nebraska, but I also feel the hope and excitement of later years, of growing up and becoming myself -- which must be the most frightening thing any of us can do. I can't wait to meet my college freshman in a month and help them (and push them to the place / people they will become).

It's that time of year when one has to be careful walking the garden; invisible threads of spider anchor lines cross in the least expected places. How do they drape these webs seemingly out in the middle of nowhere? Their silk is many times stronger than kevlar, holds droplets of dew that sparkle like flat chandeliers, then tear apart as the morning winds strengthen. Hunger. Purpose. Design. Loss. Repeat. Everything that we are a spider was long before.