Tag Archives: birds

Joyfully sharing the wine.

poetry, ,

A Winter Bluejay

Crisply the bright snow whispered,
Crunching beneath our feet;
Behind us as we walked along the parkway,
Our shadows danced,
Fantastic shapes in vivid blue.
Across the lake the skaters
Flew to and fro,
With sharp turns weaving
A frail invisible net.
In ecstasy the earth
Drank the silver sunlight;
In ecstasy the skaters
Drank the wine of speed;
In ecstasy we laughed
Drinking the wine of love.
Had not the music of our joy
Sounded its highest note?
But no,
For suddenly, with lifted eyes you said,
“Oh look!”
There, on the black bough of a snow flecked maple,
Fearless and gay as our love,
A bluejay cocked his crest!
Oh who can tell the range of joy
Or set the bounds of beauty?

-Sara Teasdale

September Views

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This morning I pulled the heavy wooden shades halfway up the window, I was that hungry for the sun. Usually I just adjust the louvers, with the advantage that the dirty window is not much exposed.

bird on rosemary Sept 14

But looking out through the space, I saw five finch-sized birds pecking away at the rosemary, which is in bloom again. I wondered what are they doing? They weren’t hummingbirds, who might drink the nectar. And we don’t have a huge insect infestation on that bush. All but one flew away when I brought out my camera, and this one is not too sharp with the glare coming at me.

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See how brown the lawn is? It’s crisp now as well. Almost everyone is letting their lawn die this year; in fact, it might be a rule during drought that a few people are breaking. We do water the rest of the yard as needed, but our tomatoes only need a soaking once a month.

I hope everyone has noticed my restraint in publishing tomato reports. Except for the BLT post, I don’t think I’ve mentioned tomatoes all summer. We do have them, and my favorite this year is the Yellow Brandywine, pictured here with a pimiento.

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Sunday I took a couple of pictures in church. This little girl in a big dress was just learning to walk. When her mother let go of her hand she sat down and did a little crab walk instead of toddling.

 

And here is a view looking up into the dome, Christ Pantocrator surrounded by angels, and a little lower down, twelve prophets.

 

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We are in the middle of a lovely warm week. I haven’t been sleeping well, which makes me lazy. Laziness and summer go together by tradition – but how will I get all those tomatoes picked? Maybe when the weather turns cooler for good, I will become more energetic and productive. But for now I’m glad to have interesting things to look at.

Happy Things

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Today I’ll just mention a few things that have made me glad this week.

1) I’ve been waiting and waiting for a certain echinacea plant to start blooming. It is later than the purple coneflowers nearby, and I was expecting it to be the orangey-brown variety that I bought last summer after I saw Kim’s on her blog. It opened up this week and it’s not – it’s white, which I don’t even remember planting. That one like Kim’s must not have made it through the winter. But I like white.

2) I found some dishes I liked at Target. I like the color and the design, and that they were on clearance, so I bought the salad plates. I don’t have a complete set of any dishes. For most of my life I’ve specialized in white dishes, and we often bought a dozen bowls or plates at a restaurant supply store. They have held up very well over the decades of children learning to wash dishes. White dinnerware makes the simplest meal, if it has a balance of colors, look very special. To have this many dishes that are more colorful in themselves is a new thing around here.

3) We had Mr. and Mrs. C. over last night to watch a movie. We also ate some apple pie that I made and served on my new plates, and I picked a few zinnias for the table. I really did enjoy Elia Kazan’s “On the Waterfront.” It came out in 1954. Marlon Brando is great as the young man in the story, and the screenplay, as one reviewer said, is “impeccable.” There was an important part of the story about how Jesus is right there with you when you are at work in a dehumanizing job, and how He will help you to do the right thing. Those were the days!

4) I have alwaP1100786tshirtsys taken great satisfaction from doing laundry, especially my husband’s clothes. I even like ironing his shirts, but since he retired he wears more shirts that don’t need ironing, like the T-shirts I washed today. Folding and stacking these soft cotton knits freshly fluffed in the dryer makes it easy for me to be the Jolly Washerwoman.

5) Over 20 years ago we planted a rosemary bush next to our front sidewalk. Once or twice a year I prune it. Today I gave it a severe trimming and noticed how gnarly and thick the branches have become. I realized that even though it has some holes in its canopy, I’m not ready to replace it yet. It’s become an old friend.

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6) I love succulents. I like sticking them into places that don’t get quite enough water to support most annuals. This afternoon I decided to do something about a bare spot that has showed up in the front yard, where the automatic misters for some reason don’t spray enough water. I dug up some of the red sedum from the back yard where it spreads like crazy, and put it in that spot with some granite rocks. Of course, I love granite rocks, too!

7) I love my robins. Yes, I was thrilled to discover that “he” is actually a pair of robins who have become frequent hoppers about the back garden. One day they sat on the fence facing each other having what seemed to be an intense discussion, or maybe they were just singing a jazzy duet. They were too shy to let me take their picture together, but I did get one of them on that fence. A couple of days later I found “him” again on the other side of the garden, still at a distance, but more clearly silhouetted against the sky. Someday I hope to snap his picture on the birdbath, but I’m really glad to have this much success.

8) As I was planning this post I thought about how the many material things in our life can be thought of as having little value compared to the intangible realities like love and truth and kindness. But as soon as we are thankful for them, when we see them as gifts from our Father and receive a little bit of Him in them, they become threads connecting us to God, bringing grace in. And that’s the power of thankfulness.

Tuning my heart with St. Joanna.

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The robin outside my window this morning had his priorities straight. Before there was light enough to see by, before he even thought of going about his necessary business of sustaining himself by eating, he spent an hour and more in praise and song. I was unusually awake and he helped to me to tune my heart to the same frequency. Robin+vintage+graphic--graphicsfairy009bsm

That happy hour I spent with him was like a special gift I opened first thing on the occasion of my name day. In addition to Myrrhbearers Sunday, which is a movable feast, St. Joanna is commemorated on June 27 every year. It’s a good day to head over to church and do a little garden work along with some celebrations in the church.

This blog post contains a good overview of what we know of St. Joanna. It is from a man who was planning to name his daughter Joanna, though he admits she is a “relatively minor saint.”

I had my own reasons for choosing Joanna as my patron saint when I converted to the Orthodox Church in 2007, which were not exactly the same as the following that an anonymous Christian listed in a comment on that blog in the same year, but I am grateful for her thoughts and have added them to my personal list:

1. She did what she could. She couldn’t stop the beheading of John the Baptist, but she could give his head a decent burial, and she did that.

2. She went where Christ was–the cross and the tomb. She didn’t go alone–she was part of a group. I want to go where Christ is, and I need to go with the Church.

3. She had a name we can pronounce in English.

4. She died peacefully.myrrhbearers st joanna

One thing I can definitely relate to in Joanna is that she needed the angels to tell her not to seek the living among the dead. These lines from a hymn for Myrrhbearers Sunday will be good for me to sing all day:

The angel came to the myrrhbearing women at the tomb and said:
Myrrh is meet for the dead;
But Christ has shown Himself a stranger to corruption!
So proclaim: the Lord is risen,
Granting the world great mercy!