Early May

Constant birdsong, summer tanagers unafraid of our presence in their woods, cool rains, smell of distant burning juniper, giant walking sticks preying on others within the orchard trees, and a Creek that changes daily.  Waters are pulled by gravity, ever shifting shapes and humbly re-forming their ways according to the most immediate environments: faultline, hillside, boulder-face, fallen limb, fish scale, strider-leg, or crystal-housed diatom.  The waters' devotion to impermanence is reflected in the effect it has on all else, as well, for the humility of waters is balanced by the unrivaled strength of its substance.

Under heaven nothing is more soft and yielding than water.
Yet for attacking the solid and strong, nothing is better;
It has no equal.
The weak can overcome the strong;
The supple can overcome the stiff.
Under heaven everyone knows this,
Yet no one puts it into practice.

     (Lao Tzu, Tao Teh Ching, Chapter 78)

Insex

. . . and so it goes.

Back to the Creek as it looked the first week of May (2012).  Since then, we have felt several inches of rain, and the waters have turned a muddy torrent.

Waters

School of carp

Fearless jumping squirrel

Disintegration

Decomposing shale on the banks of the Creek

 

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My Favorite Tree (with chomped leaf, here)
American Sycamore (Platanus occidentalis)

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Our Creek represents the "frontier" for the American Sycamore

Andrew Wyeth's depiction of the tree

Hunger

Cultivated blackberries

Light of Wing

Gray Hairstreak (Strymon melinus) 

Great purple hairstreak butterfly (Atlides halesus)

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One species of sphinx moth (family Sphingidae)
feeding on horsemint (genus Monarda)

More nearly resembling a hummingbird than our usual image of a moth, this family of insects feeds on nectar by hovering at one flower and then quickly darting off to the next (they can fly up to thirty miles per hour, faster than nearly all other insects).  Such behavior (hovering in front of a flower to draw upon its nectar) is known to exist in only three groups of animals: bats, hummingbirds, and this family of moths. Notice the extremely long probosces of our species here.

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Life is short.  Only ten to thirty days long.  Fly fast, sweet-tongued sphinx of our creek-side flower meadows.

And rains.