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Tag Archives: milkweed


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the beautiful and the blurred. [kerri’s blog on two artists tuesday]

it is hard for me to pass by something this beautiful – this wispy milkweed pod – without stopping. i am fortunate to hike with someone who understands this. we stop and i study the milkweed; i take several shots.

it is not the first time i have taken photographs of milkweed in the winter. i’m pretty sure it won’t be the last. each time i see milkweed – even in the winter – even in its fallow – i feel like it is different – its slant in the meadow, the curve of the pod, the way sunlight plays on it.

this is how i will get through it all, i think. zeroing in on intense beauty, tiny nuances, millisecond moments. i realize that this is the power that is available to me. this is the distraction.

the invitations are numerous from the side of the trail, from the side of life. they beckon to each of us and it is up to us whether to accept those invitations.

i am kind of a detail person…so the invitations are somewhat evident to me, hard to miss. they blur out everything else, if you intend to really take notice.

and, in just that way, we are intending new practices – more intentional meditation, more exercise, more outside. and each time – despite any same-ness, there is the possibility of new. each time we may stop and study or gaze and admire.

“things will not be the same, because we will not be the same.” (anon)

it may be difficult to avoid focusing on the way things will be in these fraught times. nevertheless, we will try to focus elsewhere. to lean into the beautiful and leave the rest of it blurred.

*****

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wishes. [kerri’s blog on k.s. friday]

i wanted to pluck it off where it had landed. floating milkweed snagged on dried brush. but it was too beautiful to pluck – this pure white fluff in the middle of much brown. so i left it there for others to see and carried away a few photographs.

fluffs like this always make me think of dandelion fluff – and childhood – and wishes sent on the wind. curiously, there is – somehow – still dandelion fluff out there, on the trail, in the middle of november.

maybe the universe – overseeing all fluffs and all other things – knows we need a vessel in which to put our wishes, a way to wish them, a little wind to carry them on.

a few years ago – for holiday gift giving – we purchased a few dozen sets of flying wish papers. we sent them out hoping that each recipient would feel excited by the idea of flying their written wishes into the air. the icing on the cake of these wish papers is the lift-off – after you have written your very own wish on the paper, it is lit and lifts off into the air, turning into the finest of ash.

flying wish papers and milkweed fluffs, dandelion seeds – they are all somewhat like prayer flags – expressing to the universe a heart-wish, a prayer…asking the universe for a chance…something we wish to achieve, maybe imploring…for peace, goodness, health, maybe something whimsical, maybe something serious.

maybe the point of wishing is to make us more attentive – maybe more courageous – about what is in our hearts. maybe the point of prayer flags is to make us more attentive – maybe more courageous – about what is in our souls. maybe it all connects us inward – to places that aren’t superficial, that do not slough off the amazingness of actually living.

the milkweed fluff captured me. i wished wishes for solid ground, for good purposes, for decency in this world. i wished wishes of regaining balance, of hope, of support for each other.

wishes – both simple and complex – gathered on the filaments of the milkweed fluff. it waited there, on the brush, to gather more wishes from more wishers. and, then, i imagine it flew off into the wind, possibility in the air.

and i carried wishes – that had somehow magically turned into intentions – home with me.

and the finest ash settled on the forest after we left.

*****

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orange sherbet and milkweed. [kerri’s blog on two artists tuesday]

the orange sherbet sky is a stunning backdrop to most anything but the milkweed’s wisp is anything but most-anything.

we pass by and notice. we pay attention. texture and color and movement from the gentlest breeze – it is a photograph before it was a photograph. my job was simply to snap it.

our days are slower. we linger in not-knowing. we acknowledge time as it sneaks by. and the next week comes before any of us are ready, before it seems possible. even the milkweed is surprised.

we are learning lesson after lesson. that this is life: the things our fingertips touch, the scent on the wind, the view before us, the call of the black-capped chickadee, the ground under our feet. we are caught up by the impermanence of it all. we are realizing the folly in the gathering of stuff. we immerse in the river where there is no stratum. we feel the moment, without knowing the edges of next.

the orange sherbet sky doesn’t dawdle. color has another place to be. and as the sun drops below the horizon, the shadow-gaps fill in.

we stand with the milkweed in dusk, close, loitering in early night and, with gratitude and rest, ready for next.

*****

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the pod of our diapause. [two artists tuesday]

the color of a palomino, the pod of milkweed off the side of the trail captures my attention. though i want to touch it, to feel what looks like a velvety ear, i don’t disturb it. this pod has burst open, its seeds scattered, waiting for verdant spring and the eventual arrival of monarchs. the butterflies left the midwest for the winter, migrating, traveling up to 2500 miles to shelter and hibernate through winter in coolness that is not cold.

their diapause is a period of suspended development. it is common in the insect world, this inactivity: “a state in which their growth, development, and activities are suspended temporarily, with a metabolic rate that is high enough to keep them alive.” it’s a kind of dormancy. it sounds a little like isolating in the middle of a pandemic, a little like a response to a few more-difficult years. a slowing down, an insulating, a turning-in, heartbeats enough to sustain yet not enough for vast inspiration. hmm.

back on our favorite local trail, we are watching it wake. we take note of the changes in color, the changes in the woods, in the meadows. sipping coffee this morning we listen to the new sounds – birdcalls we have missed in the quietude of winter, the middle of our diapause.

we start to feel the pull of the outside more, the draw of places to see, the falling-off of quilts we have wrapped around us. i begin to wonder – with a little more energy – what next and next look like. the sun streams in the window and stays up later, pushing back night like feet on a crab soccer ball.

we begin to break open the pod of our diapause, long after milkweed but before the butterflies come back.

*****

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no timely manner. [d.r. thursday]

now i understand. at least, i am beginning to understand.

my sweet momma and poppo would linger…watching birds, gazing at flowers, studying the horizon – be it shorefront or mountainside, cityscape or tiny town or rural farmland, slowly taking it in. in the hurry-hurry of my younger years, i would scurry past, noticing but maybe not really.

i am moving slower now. not because i can’t scurry, but because i am choosing to list to the linger side. though we still watch re-runs after re-runs of joey hiking and climbing and backpacking and pitching tents any and everywhere, imagining ourselves in those canyonlands keeping up, imagining ourselves on the pct or the john muir or the colorado trail, i know that our pace would not match the pace of joey or the exuberant younguns on heading somewhere or walking with purpose or the meticulous norwegian xplorer. we would be slower, lingering, lingering. i’m not sure that would get us from point a to point b successfully or in a timely manner, but i’m thinking that our definition of ‘timely manner’ may have to just be different. because now – in the middle of this grand middle age – is different.

for now i want to watch the birds and gaze at flowers up-close. i want to stop and stare, drop to sit on a nearby log and take it in. i want to notice the intricasies of all of it, the undertones, the overtones.

as i look at the close-up of this milkweed trailside i am struck by the layers of detail. it somehow makes me recall decisions between the major chord and the relative minor, a continuum of impact. it makes me think of melodic gestures, a spectrum of color and of grace. a horsehair brush extended from the heights of the universe, painting perfection in the woods. artists’ hands waving paint on canvas, cupping clay on a wheel, flying over the white and black on a piano, coaxing lines that make you weep from a cello. all the same. creation in all its iterations.

on the call pat told me that the music – my music – had harmonics, tuned with the universe, that made her travel. humbling.

for i see that is what my momma and poppo were doing. traveling. they allowed the beauty around them to touch them, to slow them down, convincing them – in all the infinite glory that beauty -and art- can muster – that ‘a timely manner’ was relative, that time was relative. that time spent in a slow linger was precious.

*****

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linger on DAVID’s online gallery