Category: Nature

The Time Will Come

~ TiffanyCreek ~ Leave a comment

The time will come when, with elation

You will greet yourself arriving 

At your own door, in your own mirror,

And each will smile at the others welcome,

And say, sit here. 

Eat.

You will love again the stranger who was yourself.

By Derek Walcott

     My friend Sally sent me this poem several month ago.  I take it as a message to make peace with oneself. Before we forgive others, we must forgive ourselves.  

     Another version of this theme is found in a jingle my mom taught to me when I left her house one day.  It goes like this:

I’ve gone out to look for myself, if I should return before I get back, keep me here.

     And finally a quote by David Bowie:

Aging is an extraordinary process whereby

You become the person you always should have been.”

I like David’s quote because we race through life trying to figure out what we want to be and do when we grow up, only to realize that our true selves were within us all the time.  I like to relive the idyllic aspects of my childhood and re-create them whenever I can.  Things like chasing butterflies and collecting crickets for that much loathed science project you had to do at the beginning of every school year.  I hated jabbing those pins into the thoraces of those poor insects and sticking them on cardboard poster board.  Egads! then you had to label them.  I went back to chasing butterflies instead and looking at wildflowers in the field, and consequently failed the school assignment.   I’m happy I failed, because to this day I can come back to myself and the child that lives within, and say:

This is who I was, this is who I am. GRB

~ TiffanyCreek ~ Leave a comment

A picture I took the day before yesterday on a hike.  This is about a mile from my house through the woods.  Running off the wetlands, a stream of water runs under a foot bridge right before a walk up a huge hill.  At the top of the hill you can look across the valley to the other hills, almost mountains.  One spring red trilliums popped up along the rivulet.  The rocks in the area are now covered with moss.

RAINDROPS

~ TiffanyCreek ~ Leave a comment

Two years ago, on April 9th, 2019, I wrote this caption for the photograph, called RAINDROPS:

The highlight of my day, yesterday, definitely tops my many nature explorations of all time. I stopped at the wetlands on the way home, in the rain. It was early morning and I was wearing my yellow rain jacket. Mesmerized by the concentric circles the raindrops were making in the water, after numerous shots, I remained fascinated by the circular arrangement of tiny waves expanding from the annulus, defined as the space between two concentric circles of different radii. Although the camera stopped the action you see here, the changing configurations were constant, depending upon where, and at what speed, the rain drops fell.

Stepping Stones

~ TiffanyCreek ~ Leave a comment

My journal is filled with disconnected ideas, weather conditions, and random thoughts.  Days and dates, and months of the year quickly pass by.   Yesterday marked the first day of Spring, an annual milestone, filled with new hopes and dreams, like a toddler taking their first steps across the room. 

I don’t remember learning to walk, but will never forget when I learned to ride bike.   One day, a small bicycle suddenly appeared in the yard, and I knew what to do.  It wasn’t mine.  It was borrowed, and I would teach myself to ride.  No eyes watched me, and no one talked.  No training wheels attached themselves to the frame, either.  It was hop on and go, from the top of a small embankment of the lawn, down.  The incline was slight, and the soft, fluffy grass protected me when I fell.  The time  spent balancing became greater than time on the ground, until finally I was sailing away.  It only took a day, or two.  Left to my imagination,  in this crucial task of growing up,  the  way to build and sustain my fragile confidence, was to be left alone, to own the accomplishment for myself.  

It just occurred to me that the photograph I took of the stepping stones, leading from the forest into the open field, can be a metaphor for every task I embark upon, in every new stage of life, like riding the bike.  And now, as each page of the calendar gets turned, and every new season passes by, the uncertainty remains as powerful as before.  But, to move along means to cross the stepping stones at every  juncture, and make the most, of tous les jours.   

A New Leaf!

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One week into the new year, of 2021 – resolutions made are resolutions broken. Three days ago I saw a single red breasted robin mingling with other feathered friends in the yard. Two days later in the sunshine, dozens were bopping around the grass, pecking the earth, in search of bait. Learned as a child that the return of the Robin was a sign of spring. Interestingly, they decided to show up, in January, the coldest month of winter, where I live, in the northern hemisphere. Why weren’t they around in December, or November? I want to know.

On January 1st I found this frosty leaf, sitting upon a stone step. Perfectly sculpted in crystals, it may soon get blown away, and disintegrate, only to penetrate the soil of the earth, and decay, for renewal, and rebirth. To dust it shall return. Nature reminds us we’re here on a temporary basis, and from dust we too came, and to dust, like the leaf, will likewise return. But, in the meantime, we can use our hands, motivated by our hearts, and directed by our heads, to achieve the most we can, for the good of all, as long as we’re here. And when life gets boring, or when we realize our resolutions have been broken, or we forgot they were ever made, we can turn a new leaf, for purpose, and redirection.

Images from Home

~ TiffanyCreek ~ Leave a comment

The seasons converge in Autumn; Winter, Spring, Summer and Fall. September, October, November and December come together. Snow, sunshine, birth and death happen. The wind blows, or doesn’t blow, and what we know for sure is that which we don’t know, in the face of uncertainty. We feel sadness, happiness, hope and despair. One is irrelevant, without the other.

The Wine Month

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The Saxons called October Wyn-Monath, or Wine Month.

Ancient Germans called October, Winter fyleth 

In honor of the full moon.  

In 2020 the golden colors of the Wine Month

leave me feeling drunk.

In my stupor I dream of snowy days

And white snowflakes tumbling down from the sky.