Drought in the West is a never-ending story. We had daily rain several weeks ago, and then not a drop in April, in the PNW. I forgot to water my fall-planted garlic, but they sent me a notice with their brown-tipped leaves.
Sue, I'm glad your garlic got your attention so you could water them before they withered entirely, and I hope you get enough precipitation before the summer heat closes in to bring one last flush of spring wildflowers.
As for Finding Beauty in a Broken World, it is so timely and such a moving read. I find new realizations and now things to ponder each time I dip back in.
The weather lately here on Puget Sound has been great. Flowers are everywhere, dogwood, cherry trees, tulips, red-flowered current (native), bleeding heart (native), crab apple, rhododendrons, violets, and numerous others. The rose hedge along the cliff overlooking the sound is starting to bud. Some of that hedge is of the native nootka rose, the rest is a mix of Rosa rugosa and hybrid teas. Birds are nesting, from house sparrows to mallards.
Before the blooms popped out on the crab apple down the street it still retained some fruit from last year and in the late days of winter I was surprised by a flock of cedar waxwings feeding on them! I got some really nice photos with my Nikon!
Spring does come and is not stopped by the chaos in Washington, DC.
What a lovely description of spring there in the PNW where you have regular moisture, David! It's balm to my soul here were dry and dust rule. Enjoy the blooms and the birds, and the fact that spring comes no matter what happens in national politics.
Despite a rainy winter, our snow was way down and the Olympic Range snow level looks like June or July. We are not immune and I shudder to think of the coming fire season!
Christina, I think you'll find the structure interesting and perhaps useful to your work. I suspect it would be considered experimental because of the beginning with several pages of epigraphs and the weaving of disparate topics. But in Terry's hands, it all works. And the structure really does echo mosaics, and making beauty out of literal brokenness, since mosaics are made of broken bits of tile and glass. It's a fascinating and unsettling book, and I've learned a lot about writing and about the world from it.
Fortunately for me, i found this book at a library book sale years ago, cuz it took me a long time to savor my way through it. Facing the facts of Rwandan genocide thwarted my conviction--because yes, huge fan of Terry's--but she pulled me in as soon as i screwed up my courage. The prairie dog sections are amazingly addictive, without the generally-accepted ways of keeping a reader turning the pages. Looking forward to people's thoughts, and to the radical act of reading together.
Sid, I am glad you love Finding Beauty in a Broken World, too. And yes, the p-dog field journals are fantastic--a look at a world we so often don't stop to know, with a bit of eastern philosophy and wind-aversion woven through. I think this is going to be a very interesting way to stretch ourselves, and share what we find.
Just placed a hold at the library for TTW's book. It is the one book of hers I have not read. Your book club idea is fabulous. I'm looking forward to it.
Glad to have you, Carol, and I look forward to hearing what you learn from Finding Beauty in a Broken World. In some ways, I think it is Terry's most experimental book, in part because she is literally trying to find a way to piece her world and her heart back together in the face of not just 9/11, but also the Rwandan Genocide, and so may other assaults on the earth and each other.
Thank you for the lovely compliment, Patricia! It was a day of joy in the face of grief for me. I feel this drought keenly in myself, and yet, we found such bits of beauty in the landscape too, from the occasional wildflower with its cohort of excited pollinators, to the Say's phoebes singing from the dusty junipers and the ravens flying like paired jets along the canyon rim. Beauty in a world that feels broken, but where life is still going about its business of living.
This is how I feel on most days--seeking the beauty in a world that is falling apart. I'm a Reiki Master so I send Reiki to the Earth and her creatures. I admire the resiliance of the creatures.
Your Reiki is such a gift, Patricia! Thank you for sending that healing and strengthening energy to this planet and all the lives with whom ours are so intertwined. I like to take a moment during my day every day to breathe with the plants and other photosynthesizing beings as a way to send my gratitude for the oxygen they exhale that we breathe in and for their inhaling the CO2 that we and our fossil-fuel burning exhales. We are linked by breath and by our hearts.
In Texas we are not getting enough rain and Travis Lake is vey low. Still, I find beauty in the landscape around me and wish that there was more I could do. For instance, I lobbied our HOA for several months to see if we could get rid of the median strips of grass in front of all the homes and replace those strips with native plants that are drought tolerant. We'd save a lot of water by not watering those strips. Salt Lake City did this and had wonderful results with water conservation. The final word from the HOA was that they didn't "think it would look very good." Well you know what Willie Nelson says about Texans "-- you can always tell a Texan, you just can't tell 'em much." "Nuf said.
Stephanie, I almost spit out my sip of hot chocolate when I read your line from Willie Nelson. Thanks for the rueful laugh! I am sorry, but not at all surprised, that your HOA didn't want to change the median strips (we call them "hell strips" in the landscaping trade, because the pavement warms the soil there and makes them hellaciously hard to keep plants growing without way too much water). Lawn is what we know, and it carries the whiff of English gentry with it, a sense that those who live there can afford landscaping that serves no purpose except to be green carpet. It's pretty hard to change that value system, but I really appreciate your effort.
And the book club idea was inspired by Susan Albert's Guerrilla Readers book club, which I should have said in the post. Hers is much more of a deliberately designed course with shorter timelines; mine is more of an exploration with time to ponder, as befits a book club from an introvert!
Your JOY in the Mtn. shot really conveys your beautiful day! As always I love your sharing. I planted 6 trees with my groundskeeper on Earth Day & have been enjoying & tending to our Mother Earth since I’ve been home in Northern CA. The cycle of life is sure evident!
I would love to share the reading of, Finding Beauty in a Broken World!
I’ve always wanted to be in a book club & the unity of like minded spirits is really needed!
Thank you for observing Earth Day by planting trees with your landscape person, Carroll, and for taking joy in your part of California. I'll look forward to your participation in the book club. Blessings to you and yours....
Current research is also proving that plants have consciousness. There have been studies of trees communicating through their roots with other trees. And research on houseplants. Maybe this is why there are so many tree huggers.
Have you read Zoe Schlanger’s The Light Eaters: How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth? It’s a great book by a lyrical science writer. (I’m a botanist, so I keep up on all things plant, especially the research on communication and behavior.)
Don’t know if I’ll keep up with the reading, but the book club is a great idea and I will forward the comments! And today we have 3/4 of an inch of gentle soaking rain and about an hour more to go of this gift to a very dry world.
Whether or not you can keep up with the reading, please feel free to join the discussion, Kathryn. And how lovely to hear of your soaking rain. May it bring enough to relieve the drought there!
That sounds fascinating about the book you mentioned. When I learned about the consciousness of houseplants I used my tuning forks, singing bowl, and voice around them.
I thought I was losing my mind one day when a little tree said she was lonely. And then I placed her next to another plant. Of course, I don't know if the tree is male or female, it's just the energy I felt. The tree perked up after I moved her near the other plant. I love how I feel when I'm around the plants--happiness. I feel the opposite of that when another tree is removed from the neighborhood or people kill dandelions. This year, it looks like the dandelions are thriving throughout the neighborhood.
There is so much we don't know about plant communication and behavior, but we do know that we have a lot to learn. As you demonstrate by listening to the little tree, and then moving that tree next to another plant, resulting in the little tree perking up. Thanks for listening and caring!
Just put a hold on TTW's Finding Beauty in a Broken World at my local library. Read it years ago and am looking forward to revisiting it and joining the discussion over the next few months. Thank you for getting this book club together :-) The renewal of life in spring is refreshing in these difficult times.
Joni, I too am looking forward to revisiting Finding Beauty in a Broken World, though I wish it wasn't so appropriate for these times. But we are where we are, so we might as well acknowledge that and learn what we can about how to thrive. Glad you're joining the book club!
Excited about the book club - huge fan of Terry!
Drought in the West is a never-ending story. We had daily rain several weeks ago, and then not a drop in April, in the PNW. I forgot to water my fall-planted garlic, but they sent me a notice with their brown-tipped leaves.
Sue, I'm glad your garlic got your attention so you could water them before they withered entirely, and I hope you get enough precipitation before the summer heat closes in to bring one last flush of spring wildflowers.
As for Finding Beauty in a Broken World, it is so timely and such a moving read. I find new realizations and now things to ponder each time I dip back in.
The weather lately here on Puget Sound has been great. Flowers are everywhere, dogwood, cherry trees, tulips, red-flowered current (native), bleeding heart (native), crab apple, rhododendrons, violets, and numerous others. The rose hedge along the cliff overlooking the sound is starting to bud. Some of that hedge is of the native nootka rose, the rest is a mix of Rosa rugosa and hybrid teas. Birds are nesting, from house sparrows to mallards.
Before the blooms popped out on the crab apple down the street it still retained some fruit from last year and in the late days of winter I was surprised by a flock of cedar waxwings feeding on them! I got some really nice photos with my Nikon!
Spring does come and is not stopped by the chaos in Washington, DC.
What a lovely description of spring there in the PNW where you have regular moisture, David! It's balm to my soul here were dry and dust rule. Enjoy the blooms and the birds, and the fact that spring comes no matter what happens in national politics.
Despite a rainy winter, our snow was way down and the Olympic Range snow level looks like June or July. We are not immune and I shudder to think of the coming fire season!
I'm sorry to hear that. And especially since DOGE has just decimated the US Forest Service staff who coordinate wild land firefighting efforts.
I'm looking forward to your book club. Your first pick sounds wonderful!
Christina, I think you'll find the structure interesting and perhaps useful to your work. I suspect it would be considered experimental because of the beginning with several pages of epigraphs and the weaving of disparate topics. But in Terry's hands, it all works. And the structure really does echo mosaics, and making beauty out of literal brokenness, since mosaics are made of broken bits of tile and glass. It's a fascinating and unsettling book, and I've learned a lot about writing and about the world from it.
Fortunately for me, i found this book at a library book sale years ago, cuz it took me a long time to savor my way through it. Facing the facts of Rwandan genocide thwarted my conviction--because yes, huge fan of Terry's--but she pulled me in as soon as i screwed up my courage. The prairie dog sections are amazingly addictive, without the generally-accepted ways of keeping a reader turning the pages. Looking forward to people's thoughts, and to the radical act of reading together.
Sid, I am glad you love Finding Beauty in a Broken World, too. And yes, the p-dog field journals are fantastic--a look at a world we so often don't stop to know, with a bit of eastern philosophy and wind-aversion woven through. I think this is going to be a very interesting way to stretch ourselves, and share what we find.
Just placed a hold at the library for TTW's book. It is the one book of hers I have not read. Your book club idea is fabulous. I'm looking forward to it.
Glad to have you, Carol, and I look forward to hearing what you learn from Finding Beauty in a Broken World. In some ways, I think it is Terry's most experimental book, in part because she is literally trying to find a way to piece her world and her heart back together in the face of not just 9/11, but also the Rwandan Genocide, and so may other assaults on the earth and each other.
That sounds like quite the journey on horseback. Your writing is also poetic and a joy to read.
Thank you for the lovely compliment, Patricia! It was a day of joy in the face of grief for me. I feel this drought keenly in myself, and yet, we found such bits of beauty in the landscape too, from the occasional wildflower with its cohort of excited pollinators, to the Say's phoebes singing from the dusty junipers and the ravens flying like paired jets along the canyon rim. Beauty in a world that feels broken, but where life is still going about its business of living.
This is how I feel on most days--seeking the beauty in a world that is falling apart. I'm a Reiki Master so I send Reiki to the Earth and her creatures. I admire the resiliance of the creatures.
Your Reiki is such a gift, Patricia! Thank you for sending that healing and strengthening energy to this planet and all the lives with whom ours are so intertwined. I like to take a moment during my day every day to breathe with the plants and other photosynthesizing beings as a way to send my gratitude for the oxygen they exhale that we breathe in and for their inhaling the CO2 that we and our fossil-fuel burning exhales. We are linked by breath and by our hearts.
Your book club idea is wonderful.
In Texas we are not getting enough rain and Travis Lake is vey low. Still, I find beauty in the landscape around me and wish that there was more I could do. For instance, I lobbied our HOA for several months to see if we could get rid of the median strips of grass in front of all the homes and replace those strips with native plants that are drought tolerant. We'd save a lot of water by not watering those strips. Salt Lake City did this and had wonderful results with water conservation. The final word from the HOA was that they didn't "think it would look very good." Well you know what Willie Nelson says about Texans "-- you can always tell a Texan, you just can't tell 'em much." "Nuf said.
Stephanie, I almost spit out my sip of hot chocolate when I read your line from Willie Nelson. Thanks for the rueful laugh! I am sorry, but not at all surprised, that your HOA didn't want to change the median strips (we call them "hell strips" in the landscaping trade, because the pavement warms the soil there and makes them hellaciously hard to keep plants growing without way too much water). Lawn is what we know, and it carries the whiff of English gentry with it, a sense that those who live there can afford landscaping that serves no purpose except to be green carpet. It's pretty hard to change that value system, but I really appreciate your effort.
And the book club idea was inspired by Susan Albert's Guerrilla Readers book club, which I should have said in the post. Hers is much more of a deliberately designed course with shorter timelines; mine is more of an exploration with time to ponder, as befits a book club from an introvert!
Love the idea of reading together!
Thank you, Marlena. I am delighted that you're on board and look forward to hearing your thoughts. Mil gracias!
I rode with you.
Thank you, Cheryl! I am honored, and oh, what fun that would be to have you along in real life! Perhaps someday....
How I'd love that!
Your JOY in the Mtn. shot really conveys your beautiful day! As always I love your sharing. I planted 6 trees with my groundskeeper on Earth Day & have been enjoying & tending to our Mother Earth since I’ve been home in Northern CA. The cycle of life is sure evident!
I would love to share the reading of, Finding Beauty in a Broken World!
I’ve always wanted to be in a book club & the unity of like minded spirits is really needed!
Namaste-Carroll
Thank you for observing Earth Day by planting trees with your landscape person, Carroll, and for taking joy in your part of California. I'll look forward to your participation in the book club. Blessings to you and yours....
That's a beautiful practice and thought about linking breaths with other beings.
The poet Clifford Burke calls plants our "breathing-buddies," which recognizes that intrinsically reciprocal arrangement.
Current research is also proving that plants have consciousness. There have been studies of trees communicating through their roots with other trees. And research on houseplants. Maybe this is why there are so many tree huggers.
Have you read Zoe Schlanger’s The Light Eaters: How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth? It’s a great book by a lyrical science writer. (I’m a botanist, so I keep up on all things plant, especially the research on communication and behavior.)
Don’t know if I’ll keep up with the reading, but the book club is a great idea and I will forward the comments! And today we have 3/4 of an inch of gentle soaking rain and about an hour more to go of this gift to a very dry world.
Whether or not you can keep up with the reading, please feel free to join the discussion, Kathryn. And how lovely to hear of your soaking rain. May it bring enough to relieve the drought there!
That sounds fascinating about the book you mentioned. When I learned about the consciousness of houseplants I used my tuning forks, singing bowl, and voice around them.
I thought I was losing my mind one day when a little tree said she was lonely. And then I placed her next to another plant. Of course, I don't know if the tree is male or female, it's just the energy I felt. The tree perked up after I moved her near the other plant. I love how I feel when I'm around the plants--happiness. I feel the opposite of that when another tree is removed from the neighborhood or people kill dandelions. This year, it looks like the dandelions are thriving throughout the neighborhood.
There is so much we don't know about plant communication and behavior, but we do know that we have a lot to learn. As you demonstrate by listening to the little tree, and then moving that tree next to another plant, resulting in the little tree perking up. Thanks for listening and caring!
Just put a hold on TTW's Finding Beauty in a Broken World at my local library. Read it years ago and am looking forward to revisiting it and joining the discussion over the next few months. Thank you for getting this book club together :-) The renewal of life in spring is refreshing in these difficult times.
Joni, I too am looking forward to revisiting Finding Beauty in a Broken World, though I wish it wasn't so appropriate for these times. But we are where we are, so we might as well acknowledge that and learn what we can about how to thrive. Glad you're joining the book club!
May the analogy of using broken pieces to create a beautiful mosaic shift our perspective in this era of destruction.
That is exactly the point. Thank you.
You're welcome. I think I'll take a photo of the plants. I think one of them is a Norfolk Pine and the other a snake plant.
Susan played hooky,
dusty ride to blooming shrub.
Terraphiles book club!
Sneaky rhyme, Marisol! Fun!
Sonoma spring boon
in the Valley of the Moon.
Sunny superbloom!😉
Oh, how lovely that must be, Marisol! Thank you for the poetic reminder of Caifornia's amazing superblooms!