Encountering Earth

I have been visiting my family this week and I am enjoying all the sights and sounds of the Jersey Pine Barrens. Lady Slippers, Pine Barrens False Heather (although I am loath to call any flower false!), sheep laurel, mountain laurel, huckleberries, lance leaf violet just to name a few of the amazing diversity of the Pine not- barrens! What has really thrilled me is the nightly call of the Eastern whip-poor-will. You can set your watch by them - every night at about nine pm. I have never seen one. They are nocturnal and so well camouflaged that they are extremely hard to spot. But they make themselves heard! The nightly concert reminds me of my childhood - lying in bed and being lulled to sleep by their song. Now the chorus is a lot smaller. I wonder where they have gone. Habitat has shrunk; there are more feral cats; there are a lot more chemicals to poison the bugs they eat. Because of these threats, the bird is listed as near threatened on the IUCN Red List. This saddens me, but I

This Spring I have been reflecting a lot on dandelions. Their bright yellow faces have cheered me. Their hardiness and resilience have encouraged me. They are everywhere and so taken for granted!   They are mowed down, poisoned with weed killer, dugout, and defamed. But children love them and relish picking fistfuls. The abundance fills a child's heart and imagination. My favorite way to enjoy dandelions is to eat them! First of all, there is the wonderful memory of "picking" them with my Grandmom Jule. She would never get them around the house, even though there were tons because there were too many dogs in the neighborhood. This wasn't an exaggeration because at one time the dogs outnumbered the people in our area. So we would go to the corner of the farm, back near the woods in the six acres of asparagus my dad raised and we would pick them. Now, this had to be done in a certain way! One took a knife and with surgical precision, inserted it into the ground nea

The wildflowers are up and working through the leaf litter and duff to delight the woods. This weekend I went to the Shrine of the North American Martyrs in Auriesville. The ravine - a lovely, quiet spot on the property was flush with flowers - trout lilies, red trillium, violets in purple and yellow, white and lavender hepatica, and marsh marigolds- bursting more yellow than the sun. These early flowers are so delicate; they hardly look able to grow in the cooler early Spring and to vault through the remains of leaves and branches. They are fragile but so hardy. These colors are vibrant and announce that winter is over and Spring has indeed arrived. I often wonder why nature spends so much energy on these flowers. I understand the flowers of trees - they yield leaves, the flowers of vegetables produce all kinds of edibles. But these wildflowers don't bear fruit, of course, they produce seeds. But why? Beauty. Beauty is nature's way of being actually. Beauty entices and attract