The sky is the daily bread of the eyes.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
Daily bread in autumn.
Category Archives: nature
It blesses our neighborhoods.
The moon tonight is only waxing gibbous, but October 25, only a few hours away for me, is the day when I might see the fully full (Hunter’s) moon where I live. But I enjoyed standing in the street to look at the white globe in its lesser glory, not quite fully revealed. I even took a picture from the spot I often do, with my neighbor’s roofline and redwood tree in the frame. But my camera isn’t really up to the task, so I’m sharing this painting by Ivan Marchuk.
I love to think and consider again and again, the way all the people who have ever lived on the earth have seen that same moon in the sky. I only know how to gaze at it, so I’m thankful for Ivan and others who can magnify its beauty and enlarge my vision of our beloved moon, how it blesses our neighborhoods everywhere.
It crept in as an intruder.
“The world, knowing how all our real investments are beyond the grave, might expect us to be less concerned than other people who go in for what is called Higher Thought and tell us that ‘death doesn’t matter’; but we ‘are not high-minded’, and we follow One who stood and wept at the grave of Lazarus—not, surely, because He was grieved that Mary and Martha wept, and sorrowed for their lack of faith (though some thus interpret) but because death, the punishment of sin, is even more horrible in His eyes than in ours.
“The nature which He had created as God, the nature which He had assumed as Man, lay there before Him in its ignominy; a foul smell, food for worms. Though He was to revive it a moment later, He wept at the shame…. Of all men, we hope most of death; yet nothing will reconcile us to—well, its unnaturalness. We know that we were not made for it; we know how it crept into our destiny as an intruder; and we know Who has defeated it.
“Because Our Lord is risen we know that on one level it is an enemy already disarmed; but because we know that the natural level also is God’s creation we cannot cease to fight against the death which mars it, as against all other blemishes upon it, against pain and poverty, barbarism and ignorance. Because we love something else more than this world we love even this world better than those who know no other.”
— C.S. Lewis, “Some Thoughts”
Meals and sweet fields.
Who is likely to finish off the Narrow-Leaf milkweed?
Would it be the Monarch caterpillar or the aphids? That was my question last weekend, when Bea spotted the lone caterpillar, and we both took pictures of it. The next day it was still chewing away without any sense of impending scarcity. Unfortunately, that particular plant had volunteered to grow all on its lonesome, far from the clump of like species on the other side of the plum tree.
The following day, the cat was on the ground, but we propped it back up, between the leaves of Autumn Joy and a milkweed stem….
But the next day, it had disappeared. The few remaining milkweed leaves were left to the sucking insects. Maybe a bird had enjoyed our little friend for breakfast? It was nice to know you, little caterpillar….
A happier sight is nearby: Right there on the vast fields that are Autumn Joy flowers, can be found plenty of food for all the bees — or hairstreaks — who want to come. And they do!
