listen

Time to get our heads out of the newspapers and oriented to the sounds of birds coming and going and preparing to breed.  The House Wrens we saw in Kansas on Saturday have arrived in Madison today, along with the Tree Swallows and the Warbling Vireos.  Their songs and twitters and enthusiasms entertained me this morning during my wanderings in the neighborhood and the U.W. Preserve.  It's impossible not to listen.  Boaz used the head-in-the-newspapers trick to escape the sounds of fireworks.  It didn't work.  

fleeting

What is more fleeting than a cloud, or a reflection of a cloud - or a color at daybreak? Can I run fast and catch up to it? Can I hold on tight and keep it?  If I wait, will it stay?  Do I change even as it changes? If I remember, will it be as it was? If I forget, will it never have been? 

a sharp line

A line is sometimes sharply drawn between:

science and art, 

thoughts and emotions, 

nature and nurture,

animal and environment,

me and not me.

Here, the plow and the prairie are becoming one.

be change

How much of me then
is still me now?
If  all is change, be changeable.
Life is movement.
Take a step.
Make friends with insecurity.

"Move
 and the way will open."

-Zen proverb  

I am

"I am a unique expression of the magnificent unfolding of the universe.  ...When I think about the Earth community, I am the Earth thinking about itself..."  

from Charlene Spretnack's States of Grace, page 228

When I spend my time taking care of the Earth's plant and animal communities, I feel myself to be a character in  their story - a prairie animal integral to the ongoing story of prairie.  

"it's what she does"

I am here throwing fire into a woods to clear the leaf litter. I like doing this very much. Yesterday a friend sent me a video of a mother dog fostering, feeding, nurturing a litter of kittens. They said that scientists will one day figure out why the dog was doing this. But the wise woman at the shelter simply said, "It's what she does." And so we are: it's what we do.

beginning

Burning prairies at night is a gloriously beautiful activity. Surely, there can be no fire in hell, for the flames and smoke are much too pleasing in all respects. We burned this section on Sunday night at Wildland, which is just outside of Wyocena, Wisconsin. I now understand why humans have always burned grasslands. It has very little to do with reasons.