About a week ago, I finally finished planting my garden. I ran late (as usual) setting out some seedlings and all three attempts to start my typical heirloom tomato lineup from seed ran afoul of greens-craving kittens and rough winds. So I bought hothouse starts, which as of this date are doing well, except for [...]
Today the secret names of everything
come back, the ancient names.
Tribe-of-the-morning names
call to me from the wind, which I know
as shut-your-eyes-breath,
hands-over-your-ears, gone-with-the-ice-song,
hymn-rising-out-of-cottonwood-sap.
Smell-of-dogwood; it is called,
smell-of-willow.
Daffodil has become again
small-pusher-of-earth-and-snow,
light-out-of-stone,
seawater-turned-sunshine.
This morning has its own name,
separate from all other mornings,
fire-in-the-clouds
waking-in-the-folds-of-mountain,
joy-of-long-shadows.
And now spring has brought
mist-in-my-breath,
shining-on-the-rocks,
quick-and-noisy-in-the-canyon,
to make soft soil in the garden
where I kneel for the first time
on the almost-warm-gift-to-growing
and work [...]
A little over four and a half years ago my family moved from Payson City in Utah County to a new home at the desert’s edge in San Juan County, Utah. Living on the Colorado Plateau has been something of a dream come true. Besides reintroducing me to a more natural (for me) environment, living [...]
[Greenfrog, aka Sean, is a piquant concoction of Mormonism, Buddhism, and Lawyerism living in the Denver, Colorado area. He describes himself as an amphibious creature who "breathes Mormon air and swims Buddhist waters, both quite happily." I became acquainted with him through his comments on posts at A Motley Vision. Field notes he contributed to some of my posts (see here, and here, scroll [...]
Gardening season has arrived, and nurseries and seed companies report a financial bumper crop this year as more people than usual put in yard gardens. In the e-mail newsletter Johnny’s Selected Seeds sent out at the beginning of the May, Joann Matuzas accounts for this seed-change saying, “The uncertainty of the economy definitely has prompted more people [...]
Last Friday night my son dug two of the last three holes needed to set our remaining fruit tree starts. We didn’t manage to plant any of them that night because he and my daughter needed to gather their things together for the early start they faced the next morning. They were to travel to Moab [...]