Thank you very muches to all those who participated during Love of Nature Nature of Love Month on WIZ. The list includes:
D. H. Lawrence
Rainer Maria Rilke
Th. (Eric Jepson)
Adam K. K. Figueira
Laura Craner
Andrew Marvell
An esteemed company!
I almost forgot! Today, WIZ turns one. Happy Birthday to us! I’ve been preoccupied and haven’t come up with any fun thing to do in celebration, but I would like to run out a line of thanks yous.
Thanks–deep, ever-flowing thanks–to Wm Morris, for helping me open this space and for providing solid support.
Thanks, WIZ readers, [...]
How vainly men themselves amaze
To win the Palm, the Oke, or Bayes ;
And their uncessant Labors see
Crown’d from some single Herb or Tree,
Whose short and narrow-vergèd Shade
Does prudently their Toyles upbraid ;
While all the Flow’rs and Trees do close
To weave the Garlands of repose.
The poplar’s shadow on her hand
Indicates a tree in spring.
Willets, catbirds, and broncos all hear
Big-hipped nature dancing across the Rockies
Stripping and putting on the many faces of
A weather-beaten land:
Green, red, brown, and white,
The flag of summer on the horizon.
They are indivisible incompatibles,
This landscape and
The mutterings of a middle woman.
Her words lie naked in a field,
Lost [...]
In Virginia during the sixties and seventies, with a little concentrated looking, I could consort with eastern mud turtles, spotted turtles, elegant eastern painted turtles, snapping turtles, eastern box turtles, and even, I believe, although we lived rather east of its range as depicted in Petersen’s Eastern Reptiles and Amphibians, the occasional Terrapina ornata, the [...]
Although Turtle is a trickster of the highest order, it is true also that Turtle may be tricked. When this happens—when the trickster’s trickster is tricked—you may be sure the world has tipped out of balance.
Every year along the southeastern and gulf state coastlands of the U.S., females of several sea turtle species such as [...]
On a warm Virginia day I walked to the Eastern Seaboard Coastline double tracks near our house and came to a small pond lying between the track grade and the woods. A stand of wild irises grew in the water, along with rushes, green bubble-beaded algae, and sedges. It was a small habitat not entirely [...]
Beside serving as the foundation of the world, Turtle surfaces in folk literature as the trickster’s trickster. It may surprise some to learn that Turtle has the smarts necessary to get the best of flimflammers like Jackal and even Anansi, the trickster spider, but then surprise is part of the strategy.
I cannot kick a mound of maple leaves
or see a pumpkin peeking from the vine
before the frost and not remember hills
where summer laid her green. A distant line
of poplars gleams like curtains made of coins;
it shakes at passing clouds. And everywhere
the magpie hops, I see another sign
of hawthorns beckoning the winter air
to breathe upon the [...]
Saturday night, my husband and I made a last minute run to the only grocery store within 22 miles before it closed at 9 p.m. On the return trip, I drove with the SUV’s highbeams on, because we live on a country road whereon we’re likely to come across animals on the pavement, everything from [...]