Blogger Jeni Rankin wrote: “Now is a time of re-discovering the wonder of the natural world, remembering all that I had forgotten and seeing things I have never noticed before.”
Some bloggers blow me away with their nature writing. Mind you, it’s writing that would never use terms like ‘blow me away’ — and that’s a good thing!
Lavinia Ross and Andrea Stephenson write about the seasons — the seasons of the year, of place and life.
Take, for example, this post about August on Andrea’s blog, Harvesting Hecate:
“August is a month of waiting. Not the desperate waiting of winter, when you can no longer stand the darkness, but the sweet longing for something anticipated to come. I look at the calendar and am always surprised that the month isn’t yet over.
“There are days in August that seem poised on the edge of time. Perfect days, like this one, when the sun is hazy and still low in the sky, giving a blurred luminosity to the light. A day when the earth seems to be holding its breath. When I feel myself expand out into the silence and every step is like a sigh.”
A continent away, at Salmon Brook Farms in the US, Lavinia Ross observes each month’s visitors and blessings, even a creature some people fear — the garden spider:
“With luck, someday this autumn I may catch her tending her web, freshly festooned with the night’s dew. It has been too hot and dry lately to see these arachnid silk Brigadoons. Damp, sunlit mornings can sometimes reveal an entire dazzling city of webs, which fades into invisibility in the heat of the day.”
Their writing is multi-layered. In her August post, Andrea writes:
“Lately I have been feeling the speed of the world. I’m young enough to have used computers for two thirds of my life; old enough to remember when shops closed on Sundays, when letters were written by hand to far-flung penfriends, when, if you needed information, you had no choice but to visit a library. Lately, the world often seems ‘too much’ and I long to return to what I remember as a slower time.”
And Lavinia says:
“As occurs with most things in life, beauty and goodness come packaged along with assorted trials and tribulations; August was no exception….”
“August brings day after day of heat and drought; temperatures in the 90s and 100s are common, with few interludes of coolness… Dust devils, heat-spawned vortices known by different names around the world and thought to be the spirits of the dead in some cultures, spin lazily across the broad, barren farmlands, carrying the fertile soil of Oregon skyward until the bright blue above is stained with a tan haze.”
Congrats, Lavinia and Andrea. And thank you.
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This post is dedicated to the memory of Jeni Rankin, aka The Hopeful Herbalist, who also lifted my days with lyrical poetry, prose and pictures of life at her seaside cottage in Scotland.
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Cynthia Reyes 