Calm

 

How a walk in nature restores attention (Medical X Press)

"New research from University of Utah psychology researchers is helping prove what American authors John Muir and Henry David Thoreau tried to teach more than 150 years ago: Time spent in nature is good for the heart and soul."

I don't need research to prove what I already know, but I imagine people need to find some way of developing their careers.

Talking to an arborist for the City, doing a sketch of a tree on my street, so that they have a record before they prune it. He said my street was good because there were no power lines to plan around. He says they're going to prune and uproot stumps in the next several months. He said they shouldn't take more than 1/3 of a plant in pruning, that's just a rule of thumb.

He reports the tree in the courtyard are London plane. It is a hybrid of Platanus orientalis (oriental plane) and Platanus occidentalis (American sycamore). According to the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation the symbol of that organization is a cross between the leaf of the London plane and a maple leaf. It is prominently featured on signs and buildings in public parks across the city. The tree is on the NYC Parks Department's list of restricted use species for street tree planting, because it constitutes more than 10% of all street trees.

They grow so fast, they swallow up insects trying to invade them. I asked about Lantern flies. He says they attack fruit trees. He recommended buying up wine because the prices are going to go up. I told him I don't drink any more.

Creek to lake

 

39 degrees F

"As a child looks forward to the coming of the summer, so could we contemplate with quiet joy the circle of the seasons returning without fail eternally." (HDT's journal)

Global warming is confusing because I can't really guess the temperature, and I'd for sure wouldn't notice a 2 degree difference, but it would be disastrous. I'm wondering how much this like is going to raise when the waters start rising. I'm not sure if it's going to happen much in my lifetime. That's another issue, humans are kind of selfish, not really concerned about what happens after them. A hot day or a cold day isn't global warming, and change and extinction is always happening. I guess the question is what can we to to avoid some man made changes that might harm humanity. I want my children to live in a fairly stable and kind world. In AA we are tought to think through the consequences of picking up that first drink. I think humans are addicted to selfishness and self absorption against their own interests, and we need to think about the future constructively. 

Valley of tears

23 degrees Fahrenheit

 

 

Leaving Martindale by Kathleen Raine

SHALL I be true
As these hills bind me
As these skies find me,
As waters weather me,
As leaves crown me?
My kiss keep faith
With death and birth, 

My joy with pain, 

My heaven with earth?

I love you as the air
Enfolds the earth,
As darkness holds a star,
As waters, life.
You are the smiling heart, 

The sunlit noon
Of one who soon must sleep
Her death alone.

Shall I be true?

Love binds in vain
Whom death must loose -
The flesh, the pain
That knows you now
Soon will not know
That love must pass,
That times must go.

Reading backwards in her Guardian obituary (born June 14 1908; died July 6 2003): "After her greatest love - for the naturalist Gavin Maxwell, author of Ring Of Bright Water - proved disastrous, she renounced personal emotions, and judged her own part in these dramas with ruthless severity. Threads of sorrow, regret and loneliness run through her four volumes of autobiography, as well as through her poetry. Among the unpublished poems she chose for her last collection of poems (in 2000) were the lines: "Being what I am/ What could I do but wrong?""

Also,

"...her spirit was more at home in the eastern traditions and the world view of Plato, Plotinus and the 18th-century English Platonist Thomas Taylor, on all of whom she produced scholarly studies. She drew Jungian psychology into her poetic vision of the divinity manifest in nature and the cosmos, and the "perennial wisdom" and spiritual symbols common to all religions, peoples and times.

These enthusiasms did not make her popular in her own culture, whose scorn she robustly reciprocated. She minded that Roy Fuller was preferred to herself as Edmund Blunden's successor for the Oxford poetry chair in 1968. In 1991, she declined the Royal Society of Literature's companionship of literature when she realised it had already been given to Anthony Burgess and Iris Murdoch, whom she dismissed as journalists."

Plus,

"William Blake was her master, and she shared his belief that "one power alone makes a poet - imagination, the divine vision". As WB Yeats, her other great exemplar, put it, "poetry and religion are the same thing". To this vision she committed not only her poetry and erudition, but her whole life. She stood as a witness to spiritual values in a society that rejected them."

 

Calm water today. Inspired by Mary Oliver, I've gone down to the lake. 

I cultivate metta, karuna, mudita and upeka. 

There's a turtle in the water, and I can't tell if it's dead, stuck, relaxing, or hibernating. And because I don't know, I don't try to save it, though I do have the urge to save it.

I have a soul searching time. 

I saw one person, don't usually see anyone that time of day.