Tag Archives: hummingbirds

~thankful thursday~ hope and home

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11/25/21

~30 days of gratitude~ day 25

Happy Thanksgiving! I am thankful for all of you, dear friends and family!

 

11/26/21

~30 days of gratitude~ day 26

(Observed on day 27) At some point every November I will say I’m grateful for Grandma’s never-fail pie crust recipe. At some point I will notice that you don’t have to feel great to feel grateful. At some point I will skip a night and observe my post on the following day, showing up to the page only to close it again without writing a word, not feeling grateful enough, like there is some sort of minimum value. At some point the next day I will remember that it doesn’t matter what the reading on the gratitude gauge says, what matters is showing up for it. Grateful.

 

11/27/21

~30 days of gratitude~ day 27

I am grateful for mums, so there can be flowers in November.

11/28/21

~30 days of gratitude~ day 28

I am grateful for a sunny Sunday to follow a saturated Saturday. I am grateful to have travel arrangements made, to finally see my parents for the first time since the pandemic began. I am grateful to look forward to a trip that is a vacation, after the last several that were not. I am grateful for the tiny mascot for joyful flight who posed patiently for my camera today.

 

 

11/29/21

~30 days of gratitude~ day 29

Today I am grateful for the many connections made each year when I start posting November gratitude. If I was taking this class for a grade, I would not get an A in responding to comments this year, but I appreciated every one, and I see you all there, pressing your hearts and likes and hug faces. I felt your in-person encouragements at farmer’s market, and your messages directly to my inbox meant so much. It is just one of the ways that showing up to attempt gratitude creates the conditions under which more gratitude is generated. It comes on wings, it comes in waves, it comes one popcorn and one cranberry at a time.

 

 

11/30/21

~30 days of gratitude~ day 30

This morning getting ready for work:

“It’s day 30! Last one! I’m grateful for these hot towels! The End!”

Rich didn’t seem convinced. I guess I did already use the hot towels on Day 4.

~

After work:

“We have been alerted that the recent lone sea otter near Yaquina Head, has hauled itself ashore on Cobble Beach with an apparent injury.

It has been taken into captivity for assessment and treatment. That’s all the information we know at this time. We will keep you updated. Let’s hope for the best. (Elakha Alliance)”

Dang it.

~

Let’s hope for….

Hope, the thing with fur. Oh, I am so sad.

Let’s hope he lives.

Let’s hope he heals.

Let’s hope he has caregivers like D from 3 West in St. Francis hospital.

Let’s hope his caregivers do not have to play hospice nurse like D.

Let’s hope he swims free again soon.

Let’s hope for all those other bigger grander outcomes, too. The triumphant return of his kin to these shores. The reunions long awaited.

Let’s hope…

~

When I tried to learn more about joy, it turned out gratitude was at its root. Maybe there is a similar connection between gratitude and hope.

~

I am grateful for…. hot towels. Nachos. Rutabagas. Chocolate cupcakes. Injured butterflies who keep flying. Injured sea otters who keep swimming.

I am grateful for the love. Sometime early in November I scrolled by a Ram Dass quote that has been bobbing to the surface of my consciousness all month. “We’re all just walking each other home.” I like that. I am grateful for how well it sums up what this year’s 30 days have been about, and grateful for your company on the walk.

~summer shorts~ thrive

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Mid-July, I’ve gravitated each afternoon around 2:30 to the butterfly bush, which is situated in full sun at that time of day. I’m usually ready for a screen break from my work laptop, full of its regression plots of respiration data, its shellfish pedigree spreadsheets, its people in boxes having meetings, by that time.

I’m not the only one gravitating there, that time of day, but join an already-rocking party of butterflies and hummingbirds, bees and moths.

So many of our Western Tiger Swallowtail friends have been hanging around this last week since our butterfly bush bloomed. The buddleia is thriving so well, we think, because one of our weeding dates last summer found Rich hauling out blackberries and me extricating morning glories from their stranglehold around the butterfly bush branches. Then Rich did a substantial pruning job on it, which it responded well to, and he has kept the understory trimmed through the seasons.

With careful tending and nurture, things – shrubs, butterflies, relationships – are sure to thrive.

Happy fourth wedding anniversary to my partner in weeding and everything else in life!

~rainbow mondays~ blooming

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Posting from Aurora, Colorado, this morning as we have been stuck in an epic airline debacle overnight on our way home from Adulting In Oklahoma Part II. It feels appropriate that there are so many pictures of columbine in this post, which resonates for this town not too far from the April 1999 mass shooting at Columbine High. But mostly these photos make me long to be home again, as I trust we will be by this evening.

 

~rainbow mondays~

a splash of color on monday morning

a photo study documenting the colors of the spectrum: the balance points between light reflected and light absorbed

tidepool immersion ~ pink moon low tide

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Last week we enjoyed a very low minus tide series courtesy of the full, pink, willow moon. It was just setting when I arrived at my destination.

I met this hummingbird while tidepooling – a bit unusual for a tidepooling find!

 

I don’t often get photos of feather duster worms, so this was a special treat. Apparently they have giant nerve fibers that help them retract very quickly when disturbed, to avoid getting eaten. They also have light-sensitive eyespots on their gills so they can sense a predator by its shadow passing overhead!

As the sun started coming up over the ridge, the colors became so much more vibrant.

>crow’s feet<

~rainbow mondays~ equanimity

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Baby dahlias are sprouting!

 

Equanimity (n.) – calmness, composure.

Composed of equal parts light and darkness, I perch and hover on this equinox, my compass needle steadying but this orienting is an active state, an attentive tending. The direction I steer toward depends upon the territory I’ve already crossed as much as it does the destination to which I’m headed. And while both inform my bearing, it is neither of them, but the balancing here in the present, that is the point.

         

~rainbow mondays~

a splash of color on monday morning

a photo study documenting the colors of the spectrum: the balance points between light reflected and light absorbed

~rainbow mondays~ reflect

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We’ve reached the end of the rainbow for 2020 so I’ve rounded up the last photos of the year.

Two days of perching on my whale watching rock produced one whale, and many rainbows.

Roses were blooming for Christmas again!

A few of these were taken to document how high the bayou rose during our recent big rain! The handsome, bearded man in the photo has spent nine years with me and 2020 has kept me mindful of how lucky I am!

Black oystercatchers

Harbor seal

Snowy egrets! I have never seen them flying in formation before!

Moon on the bayou above, and sunrise on the bayou below. One year ends and a new year begins – always a time for reflection, and possibly even more than usual this time around. It is a time I think we will look back on and with the clarity of time passing, be able to see how we grew. It was painful growth, full of a grief that somehow made me more grateful. I never announced a word for 2020, though back in the beginning of the year when I was meditating on mediocrity, I did have the lightness of butterflies in mind, the flux of tides and cycles. My concrete goals for the year were to grow more flowers for butterflies and a few purple vegetables, to go to the beach more and drink more tea, to not try to be everything for everybody. I did not envision that this extreme contraction of our lives, this hunkering down into self is the context in which I’d be carrying out these goals. One of the things I’d like to remember for this year is finding out that going inward allowed me to, paradoxically, expand in ways I wouldn’t have guessed. Though very much still cocooned, I believe I am emerging in new and exciting ways.

I have not arrived at a word for 2021 yet, though there is something resonating for me with navigation, with orienting. Discerning the best course to steer my little ship. I’m not sure what that’s about yet, or where I’m going with it (ha!) but I think there will be time to figure it out as the year starts to unfold.

violets are purple

roses are pink

they just call violets blue

because it’s hard to rhyme with purple, i think.

 

~rainbow mondays~

a splash of color on monday morning

a photo study documenting the colors of the spectrum: the balance points between light reflected and light absorbed

~rainbow mondays~ among

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~rainbow mondays~

a splash of color on monday morning

a photo study documenting the colors of the spectrum: the balance points between light reflected and light absorbed

~thankful thursday~ caterpillar care

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11/12/20

~30 days of gratitude~ day 12

After I posted, I wondered if speaking of placentas yesterday made anyone uncomfortable. I’m not apologizing, but I would like to say for myself that I’ve never honestly had any squeamishness about such things and sometimes forget other people do. I blame my Dad, who called me out to the barn to help deliver any calf that was stuck (or breach, or twins), and we were a good life-bringing, life-saving team. Placentas have always been a part of my surroundings, familiar and sacred.

Mom called today to tell me Dad is spending the night in the hospital tonight. Everything will be fine, but he passed out and his heart rate dropped a scary amount when they put in his IV for a routine procedure he was supposed to be having. I am feeling very grateful tonight for the quick response of the health care workers who were by his side, and those who rushed in until he was completely surrounded. By the time I talked to Mom, he had eaten dinner and napped and was ready to leave, but they convinced him to wait until after the EKG.

When I was driving today I swerved to avoid a rabbit on the highway, and I am grateful I did not hit it. I was coming home from feeding my fish, which is not that different, in my mind, than the work I grew up doing around the farm. I developed the right muscle groups for hauling buckets of water around, for sure, and caring for animals is in my veins. I am grateful my Dad made me do all those farm chores, so grateful that he is okay, and immensely grateful for the medical team who are making sure of that.

 

11/13/20

~30 days of gratitude~ day 13

Grateful. (In photos today.)

 

11/14/20

~30 days of gratitude~ day 14

I am grateful for my farm, and my farm crew. At the end of our veggie day, four women stood in a parking lot and decided that word of our farm stand’s new rainy day location had happily spread “faster than corona.” A remarkably steady trickle of our regular customers came and stocked up on soup ingredients. And they told two friends, and they told two friends… we figured people were ecstatic to have some good news to pass on, so they did. Gratitude is a wonderful ingredient to add to November cooking, and I came home with a good-sized bundle of it.

 

11/15/20

~30 days of gratitude~ day 15

I am grateful for a little time in person today, hiking with my kid. With the increasing COVID numbers, he stayed even farther away from me than our last few biweekly hikes, but he did agree to come. Our first pandemic hike back in June was the subject of the essay I wrote and ended up submitting for the writing workshop I am attending, in which I observed that, “Wandering in a wilderness area together all day is unlike our hour-long video calls in all ways, but most acutely in that I am positioned beside the waterfall of his imagination like I have not been in months. The story comes spilling forth of a pod of whimsical dragons hatched out of colorful eggs…”

Today the waterfall of imagination poured out a quest in which I was meant to establish a civilization in a landscape he vividly described, then challenged me to decide where and how to build shelter, how to best provision myself with food, how to build tools with the various materials available to be gathered. He came up with a name for these “Talking Games” when he was very small, and still likes to play them now that he is very big. In the game, I set out on a hunting mission like any good Oregon Trail generation kid would do, but the story took a left turn and instead, I ended up finding a rare white deer who healed the deer I had speared, licking its wound until it closed, and then became my companion when I fed it a magical root and vowed to never hunt its kin again.

On our biweekly hike, we are not going for any speed or distance records. Instead, he stops to look at each caterpillar crossing the path. When this occurs on the dirt road before we get to the trailhead, he helps them to the edge. He uses his walking stick to move them, waiting for them to climb onto it, and then moves them to safety.

Today I am grateful for the kids who care about caterpillars.

 

11/16/20

~30 days of gratitude~ day 16

I’m grateful for gratitude. It’s usually around this time in the month that I feel grateful for gratitude, I think (and I’m not fact-checking that because it’s bedtime). I really did not think it would be the same as other years, because it isn’t like the other years in any other way. I am filled with a multitude of emotions, and nothing at all is simple. But I am warm, (relatively) safe, content, loved. Having retreated into my home, I find it is a place within which I can expand, rather than a place of confinement. I think this snail from October might agree to be my mascot tonight, since I don’t have any photos of my rare white deer. I’m also grateful for the bunches of you nice people bothering to stop scrolling and connect for a moment.

 

11/17/20

~30 days of gratitude~ day 17

Today I am thankful for the refuge I find in nature. It can be as simple as the hummingbirds buzzing Rich’s head as he leaves for work, the apricot-lit reflection of a cloud in the water we walk down to every day, a pinecone colonized by tiny mushrooms, or a newt comically toppling off the side of a large spruce root we had just stood watching it laboriously climb. It’s the little things. It’s also the big things; the wind bathing us in fresh air after a year in which breathing has become much more sacred, the eagle dancing above the rainbow-glazed waterfall at the low-tide-without-storm-during-daylight I enjoyed solo the other day, a unicorn of a tide this time of year, with rainbow sprinkles on top.

 

11/18/20

~30 days of gratitude~ day 18

Elements are often a favorite theme Quinn explores in his Talking Games. He is inspired by games like Pokémon, Magic the Gathering, D&D, and many of the book series he has devoured throughout his childhood. He favors forest/tree/leaf/grass types himself, and we recognize as a family that I am of the water element, while Rich is of fire. I have always loved the phrase that someone is “in their element,” and I love to be around a person in that state, soaking up (see? Water) whatever I can learn from them. The person on my mind today is my father-in-law, whose element is, beyond any shadow of a doubt, Rock. He embodies this element in his steadfast, stable personality, his imperviousness to pain, his unwavering faith, his matter-of-factness when going about chores, and when he is in his element, he can be found tumbling, grinding, polishing, and sawing through rocks. Each of the few visits we have shared have been gems. On our last visit to Oklahoma, he gave me a lapidary lesson, and it was a highlight of our time together. Today I am grateful for Bob.

~

Postscript for those reading it on the blog…

Both Dads could use prayer. Dad Rew is home and healthy and repairing things, but is awaiting test results and answers so please keep him in your thoughts. Dad Hicks is in the hospital just days after Dad Rew, and we would appreciate all good thoughts/chants/prayers heading towards Oklahoma on his behalf.