“The Spiders Are On My Tomatoes!”

“The spiders are on my tomatoes!” she cried, “and my husband is in front of the TV watching football... ”

The seasons change. Here in the northern hemisphere my patient laments the coming of winter, the loss of her garden signaled by the spiders, and the loss of her husband to televised sports until spring. He does emerge in the spring along with her flowers.

What is your lament about the season change?

How can you ritualize the loss of the last season?

What can you get excited about in the season to come?

You can make your seasonal transitions beautiful when you look with an artist’s eye or a poet’s heart.

And remember Ecclesiastes’ wisdom text.

To every thing there is a season and a time to every purpose under the heaven.

A time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted;

The rest goes on in this fashion. I am fascinated by the pairings. (You can read it all here.)

Dive into the seasonal changes.

My goal is to enjoy the loss of each season, and celebrate the new season.

Farewell summer,

William

Do You Keep A Nature Log?

Do You Keep A Nature Log?

August 14th, 2007 – An black eagle landed on a branch 20feet below an adult in our “eagle” tree.
It fell off while still holding on with its talons. Yikes!
It flapped and screeched to get back up on top of thebranch, barely succeeded. Woof!
Because of her clumsiness and her complete blackness, Isuspect she is a newly fledged bald eagle that I heardbegging for food at the nest last week. – fancy version of my entry in my Duwamish Head Nature Log.

Do you keep a nature log?

I recommend it. It is part of your Simple Is Sophisticatedplan and part of your deliberate living program.

When you pay attention to the rhythms of nature, invariablyyou engage in life more completely, with more presence. Your engagement will immerse you into your heart-felt life. I promise.

To pray is to pay attention to something or someone otherthan oneself. Whenever a man so concentrates hisattention— on a landscape, a poem, a geometrical problem,an idol, or the True God— that he completely forgets hisown ego and desires, he is praying. – W. H. Auden

Here’s What You Do

Just make notes in log weekly or daily. It tunes you intothe seasons. I am just completing my first year in the newhome.

I am keeping my log in MS Word so I can keep enteringthings in the rhythm of the year. What I mean is, as theseasons repeat, I can insert the new information inside themonth of January cyclically and not sequentially. All theJanuary notes will go together. All the September entrieslikewise go together.

Are you with me?

I am not just tracking events and cool sightings butwanting to feel into the rhythms of place.
Then I can say things like, “The purple martins will beback any day now.”

Or with a sigh, “The ospreys will be leaving soon.”

I want to feel the presence of these events and rhythms inmy marrow.

Notice the ordinary and the glamorous. Admittedly,fledgling Bald Eagles impress, but all of nature ispotentially as amazing if you only see rightly. • The spider webs dripping with dew on cool sunny Septembermornings catching the light in ways that make you say,“Wow!”

• The osprey flying with his prey back to the nest.• The last leaf blowing away in the winter storm.

• Unidentified scat on the rocks below the seawallfascinated me for months.

• The first crocus.

Keep your entries simple enough so you’ll be inclined to doit regularly, and detailed enough to be useful. I stillhave the nature log I kept in 1980 in our underground solarhome on the edge of a forested ravine in Ohio. Theone-line notes still bring back the smells and the light ofthose woods.

I make entries on Sundays trying to recall the week. Some seasons stay fairly stable for weeks so I skip some weeks.

I challenge myself by seeing if I can tell when theswallows or the ospreys leave. I find it hard to noticewhen something is gone. Much easier to notice the arrivalof the swallows in May.

Watching nature this clearly trumps the old suggestion tostop and smell the roses wouldn’t you say. Stopping andsmelling the spiders doesn’t sound as good though, does it.

Keep a log. Dive into presence. Feel the rhythms. Fallin love with it all – that’s the promise.
If you want to see my Duwamish Head Nature Log, let me know.

***Paradigms engaged in this article:
• Simple Is Sophisticated• Presencing• Spaceship Earth• Upgrade Your Right Brain

http://www.bodyandsoulmentor.com/