L is for Luna

"The world today is sick to its thin blood for lack of elemental things, for fire before the hands, for water welling from the earth, for air, for the dear earth itself underfoot. --Henry Beston

The moon is one of those elemental things. Often I'm surprised by the moon blinking bright when I open the blind in the early morning dark or when it appears like a ghost in the midday sky, or on an evening drive as it rises slowly from behind the mountains like a hot-air balloon.

How removed is my awareness from the moon, its phases and cycles. How would my life change if I made an effort to be aware.? How would I apply this knowledge? What different choices would I make, knowing, anticipating each full moon, each new moon, marking the times of moon rise and moon set?

And conversely, how would my life need to change in order for this awareness to come naturally, to be an imperative of my daily requirements for living, to be noticed, observed assimilated as easily as I now note whether or not the sun shines? I plan to find the answers to these questions.

Alphabet Bloggers

The Swan

If I were to make a collage of my childhood memories, there would be many images of swans. I read and reread my volumes of Grimm Brothers and Hans Christian Andersen, eyes tracing every line of the old-fashioned pen and ink illustrations. I especially remember the story of The Seven Swans, bewitched brothers who could be restored to human form only through the long suffering loyalty of their sister. Her task was to remain mute while knitting seven shirts out of nettles. Who of us hasn’t felt kinship with the ugly ‘duckling’, hoping, as he did, to someday find that niche where we feel right and true and beautiful--swanlike. I owe my love of nature in great part to my paternal grandmother. The backyard of her modest home was separated from a large city park by just a narrow alley and hedge. It was magical to slip through a gap in the hedge, holding my grandmother's hand, and enter a vast world of huge trees, squirrels, fat goldfish, fountains and flowers. We spent hours walking the paths where swans glided to and fro across a lake. Nana died more than 40 years ago. She is forever connected in my heart with swans.

Friendly Ferns

Herbert Durand's Field Book of Common Ferns, 1928 opens with:

To All Who Follow the Long Brown Path

Here are fifty fascinating ferns of the wild, whose ancestry antedates Adam by unnumbered eons, and whose myriads of fair and friendly children await your coming in every field and every forest, by every stream and on every mountain. Their ways are truly ways of pleasantness and the path to their dwelling place is a path of perfect peace. May this unpretentious Field Book of Ferns spur you to follow this path with eyes opened to the exquisite beauty that greets you on every hand

These friendly children greet visitors to Eidolon Nature Preserve in Morgan County, WV.

Clockwise from top left: Common Polypody, Ebony Spleenwort, Sensitive Fern, Bracken Fern, Rock with Southern Lady Fern. Durand writes that Spleenworts were so named due to the belief in their ability to treat diseases of the spleen, and that Common Polypody was a favorite remedy for the 'blues' and for 'fearsome and troublesome' dreams and nightmares. I call these ferns 'heavenly.'