At first, I thought it might be the unusually warm days and all the rain, but lilies, especially the common orange day lilies (not true lilies) that were brought by early European settlers, had long graced my town. Perhaps it was just that specific gardeners had planted lilies where I could not help but notice their joyful spirit.
A woman told me that she was the gardener who had planted all the different lilies in the “hellstrip” by the sidewalk. She told me that she did not own the land where they were planted. I said I was sure the town would not mind, especially as she had carefully added stakes to keep the riot of color and form from flopping out into the street.
Once again it has been an unusually rainy spring and summer with mushrooms in mossy spots in the woods as well as in our yards and even cracks in sidewalks.
Now that I have been paying more careful attention for a couple of years, I am finding examples that you might not normally think of as mushrooms, as well as slime molds with their fruiting bodies deposited where the wind can help with propagation.
Smiles after a 2019 Christmas Concert Where Everything Came Together (Photo by Betty Poleet)
Joyful attunement is to be expected when choir friends sing music together that they know and love. But, as I learned, it is also possible for strangers who have just spent several days intentionally not speaking with each other.
Toward the end of a 7-day silent retreat I attended, the hundred or so of us in the hall were taught a lovely evening chant. That something out of the ordinary was going on was evident in the sound. The teacher asked us to repeat the chant and it happened again.
As Linn Nagata found in her research on somatic mindfulness, “The ability to resonate or attune to another person somatically can provide a type of communication even when language differences preclude verbal communication (p. 97, Kossak, M. , Attunement in Expressive Arts Therapy).
Perhaps we had been subtly attuning via body language without knowing it, even as we avoided eye contact. Or our kind and wise retreat teachers’ influence and support was enough to get us all on the same wavelength. I could also see how a few talented individuals with unusual musical sensitivity might have acted as catalysts for the effortless attunement that had a great deal of freedom to it – like a flock of birds wheeling out patterns in the evening sky.
That this kind of group-level intuitive heartfelt intelligence is still possible provides me with hope for our troubled world.
Wasn’t it a bit early for mushrooms? I had never seen such a fuzzy yellow growth. Perhaps it was something else. When I posted a photo online, I learned it might be a young dyer’s polypore. Evidently, the timing of all kinds of things is more variable these days.
I found two. They both started out as fuzzy yellow lumps and kept changing. Dyer’s polypore seemed correct as there were certainly pores rather than the usual gills on the undersides.
I learned dyer’s polypores can be used to stain fibers a number of different colors – yellows, various shades of browns and even greens – depending on the type of fiber and how it is pretreated. This video shows it being used to dye wool lovely shades of yellow.
The first two photos below show the two I found mid-way through their cycle and the remaining photos show the changes that each went through closer in.
Young one – quite yellow and quite fuzzyBeginning to turn brownExpanding and flattening outChanging colors around the edgeGetting harder with light edgeAfter rainAnother young oneSeen from the sideA few days olderTurning colors and flattening outSeen from underneathAfter rainSeveral days laterGetting harder and drying out
After noticing the effects of light at the highest elevation of Menotomy Rocks park, I began to notice the many interesting compositions that would fade and reappear lower down along its dirt paths.
Leaves seemed to be acting like lenses producing patterns with soft rounded shapes while crisp leaf and branch shapes danced over the paths. I had found another worthy subject to capture in photos. No matter how often I come here, this nearby park can surprise me with new delights.
Trees have taken root among the moss and lichen-covered granite outcrops in a secluded high spot in Menotomy Rocks Park. There are wide open spaces between patches of vegetation where the soil is deep enough to support larger roots.
Morning or evening are generally considered good times to capture light and shadows, but up here, the noon sun creates interesting shadows as well. This high spot with its scattered blueberry bushes and mixture of trees always seems so much more alive on a bright sunny day.
Japanese maple trees can have brighter colors in spring than in the fall with interesting transformations as tender new leaves unfurl or flatten their accordion pleats.
Like many Japanese gardens, my garden’s design keeps flowery distractions to a minimum so as to better appreciate the radiant moss, and in this season, the new maple leaves that bring me such joy.
These crocuses planted by volunteers in a nearby park certainly brightened my day.
For a number of decades, we have lived in a world where food and other resources have became increasingly available, but when things in general are going relatively well, we may not realize that we are lacking a critical psychological nutrient for human wellbeing.
Chapter 4 of the World Happiness Report 2023 describes how acts of kindness, particularly when they are unexpected, create warm feelings of happiness in actors, receivers and even in observing bystanders. It goes on to note that happy people are more likely to do acts of kindness, thus spreading happiness even further.
Perhaps some form of the “golden rule” is so universal precisely because we need to be reminded about how much benefit acts of kindness provide. Acts of kindness, especially when unexpected, tend to have a bigger positive impact than we may realize according to “Kindness Goes Farther Than You Think” by Amit Kumar (Scientific American, April, 2023).
Ironically, our human tendency to respond to crises with acts of kindness is contributing to greaterhappiness in our troubled world according to the World Happiness Report.
The odds of finding that particular rock again seemed slim. When I first noticed it in the leaf litter, it looked organic, perhaps a late season fungus, so I took a quick photo and continued on without noting the location.
But in reviewing the photos I took on that walk, I realized that this was no fungus. The interesting bubbly texture was glassy, not soft, and clearly part of an agate; I saw suggestions of macro quartz crystals within fortification bands. It was quite unlike the common gray, white veined, or sometimes salmon and green rocks that lie scattered everywhere in Menotomy Rocks Park.
Agates are not normally found in eastern Massachusetts. Perhaps a glacier picked this one up, carrying it some distance from its point of origin.
I would welcome the opportunity to examine the agate from all angles, if I ever come across it again, but it somehow seems fitting for this rare treasure to remain hidden in plain sight among the many rocks of its new woodland home.
Since many abalone are rapidly disappearing from their rocky coastal homes, I was lucky that lovely shells from all over the world were still available online. Originally, I wanted to take closeups of the iridescent interiors. I did not anticipate that the other side would also be worthy of careful study.
For a particular species, the shape seemed fairly consistent but the colors and patterns could vary all over the place. While the interiors could be mysterious and speak of the tides and the sea, the spiraling exteriors could seem like expressions of pure joy.
Radiant Refuge 