Monthly Archives: May 2017

North Fork Weekend

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Over Memorial Weekend I stayed with the majority of my children and grandchildren in a couple of cabins in the foothills near Yosemite National Park. One day we were all attending the wedding of my niece. The other days we explored in smaller groups, or hung out at the larger cabin with all nineteen of us together, cooking, eating, playing bocce ball or swinging on the tire swing.

On my drive in to the village of North Fork, near which our cabins were located, I saw lots of these recumbent white lupine plants along the roads. Just now, trying to identify them, I read that there are around 200 species of lupines. I can’t find any that look like these, so I’m giving up.

But those pinkish flowers under the lupines appear to be clover. It covered the dry slopes around our cabins.

We trust that Jamie will soon grow out of his love for his toy cell phone that he uses remarkably like silly adults. After all, it is always dead.  His imagination obviously isn’t — but just what can he be imagining?

For a couple of hours Sunday Maggie and Annie played on a paddle board in Bass Lake while the others of us watched them, or watched Liam with his bubble wand. We might have rented a boat but they were all taken. Then we ate ice cream; it was hot!

In 2015 I was in the Sierra foothills south of here, and first learned of this plant below, called Bear Clover or Mountain Misery, Chamaebatia foliolosa. Back then we were in the same sort of dry terrain at a similar elevation, so I wasn’t surprised to see it again. Last week I couldn’t remember the name, but I recalled something about it being smelly.

A species of collinsia or Chinese Houses.

I had taken a big box of old maps up to the mountains with me, to offer to the family before I recycle them. Several people were curious, but Scout was most captivated by them and thrilled at the possibility of having some of them for his very own, now that he can read and decode them. His parents helped him sort them into categories, and eventually they let him take the whole box, to be more thoroughly sorted and culled later. He searched me out several times to thank me for the maps 🙂

One of the maps was called “Indian Country” and showed mostly the Southwest U.S. I don’t think it covered much of the territory that Lewis & Clark’s Corps of Discovery explored, which was certainly Indian Country as well. One of the plants the Corps encountered was a wildflower called Arrowleaf Balsamroot or Balsamorhiza sagittata, and I believe Pippin and I saw it, too, on a walk near our cabin.

The flowers had not quite opened yet, but they were showing some yellow. In the Corps’ journal we read, “The stem is eaten by the natives, without any preparation. On the Columbia. Aprl. 14th 1806.” By the way, lupine seeds were also food to Native Americans.

Our group didn’t eat anything like that. Our big meals together were BBQ on Sunday night, and bacon and eggs on Monday morning before we departed for our homes. I fried three pounds of bacon and drove off with my clothes and hair still pungent a couple of hours later.

It was far from North Fork, but I will end with this photo of alfalfa fields I drove past — slowly, in holiday traffic — in the Sacramento Delta. In one field I saw they were mowing, so I rolled down my window and got a whiff of that.

I’m happy and home and too tired to pull this all together somehow…. Oh, well, they are all things that I like, and/or think about. 🙂

 

Beyond the grave and beyond time.

death, quotes, time,

cemetery-markers-dont-know-where

“Saint John Chrysostom says in one of his writings that the terrible thing is, when someone dies, that we look at the person whom we loved and say, ‘And yet, I have been unable to love him, love her to perfection.’ But then we must remember that life does not cease with death, that life continues, that for God all are alive, and that our mutual love and our mutual power to forgive go beyond the grave and beyond time. This is what Father Lev Gillet called a certainty of hope.”

-Metropolitan Anthony Bloom

Amy Lowell laments the loss of leisure.

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The idea of leisure is almost un-American, in its disregard for achievement, efficiency, and time-management. Do you deep down suspect that to enjoy leisure is to be lazy? Laziness has no part in leisure as Amy Lowell knows it to be, which is as a Presence to be cherished for its “teeming vigor.” To abandon oneself to “unmeasured time,” and the silences and delights of Now, is to make ready to receive gifts that God can’t give us when we are scurrying to and fro.

Before cell phones, which tempt us to flit about from a text message to a game to an Instagram photo, those in less-developed countries might at least have enjoyed leisure, as Richard Swenson wrote about in his book Margin. They are often poor, and have short life spans, but he found that they were happier than we who are continually in the red as regards time, if not money. The number of people in the world without cell phones has surely shrunken drastically since he wrote.

Leisure: the Basis of Culture is a title and a truth (by Josef Pieper).

LEISURE

Leisure, thou goddess of a bygone age,
When hours were long and days sufficed to hold
Wide-eyed delights and pleasures uncontrolled
By shortening moments, when no gaunt presage
Of undone duties, modern heritage,
Haunted our happy minds; must thou withhold
Thy presence from this over-busy world,
And bearing silence with thee disengage
Our twined fortunes? Deeps of unhewn woods
Alone can cherish thee, alone possess
Thy quiet, teeming vigor. This our crime:
Not to have worshipped, marred by alien moods
That sole condition of all loveliness,
The dreaming lapse of slow, unmeasured time.

–Amy Lowell

Heralds and singers all day long.

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On the church calendar, we are still in Pentecost, that 50-day period between Easter/Pascha and Pentecost. We even take note of Mid-Pentecost, which was last week.

Of course, it’s never inappropriate to remind one another that “Christ is risen!” but during these weeks we make a special point of it and try to remember, instead of “Hello!” to greet one another with those words of joy and hope. For truly His resurrection from the dead, His overcoming of death, shows the power of God to deliver us from our own patches of darkness, no matter how impossibly deep and cold the current “grave” we find ourselves in.

Last night a robin came around to chirp the falling of dusk to me, “my” robin who always seems to be sent as an emissary from the Father – or more precisely, a herald: Gretchen, remember, God is here with you! I forgot to tell you that in my hotel in Atlanta earlier this month, the night when I was staying alone, a robin chirped right outside my ground-floor window just before darkness and a rainstorm.

This morning I woke to birdsong floating in from the garden and the trees. As I made my bed I joined in with them and sang a meditative version of the hymn, “Christ is risen from the dead, trampling down death by death, and upon those in the tombs bestowing Life.”

Next week will be the Leave-taking of Pascha, after which we will focus on the Ascension of Christ. At Vespers the evening before, we will sing all those rousing Paschal choruses for the last time liturgically. I know the little sorrows and worries, confusing thoughts and maybe even some big heartaches won’t disappear from my earthly life, and I will want to keep singing these re-orienting melodies of Christ’s transforming Life.

I’m counting on the birds to be my helpers.