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Parts South

Two weeks ago this morning I was in high clover–among vegetation and birdlife unlike anything around here, that’s for sure. Sarasota is another world, and on a beautiful balmy morning surrounded by herons and ibises and spoonbills and ducks and……

Forest Is…

Forest: a bunch of trees. A product. A profit source for shareholders. A place where something useful might be built. Forest: a living community of interconnected lifeforms, above and below ground, that breathes oxygen, captures and stores CO2, communicates across…

The Earth Has Ears

I’m having returning waves of nausea after accidentally allowing malevolent rays in through the closed drapes I had hoped would quarantine me from bizarro world. By way of a chink in the blinks came recent news items belching details of the ongoing stranger-than-fiction conversion to…

You Can’t Plant a Forest

“You can’t plant a forest.” This was one the things spoken by poet WS Merwin in last night’s final SustainFloyd Movie Night at the Floyd Country Store. The poignancy of the short, simple statement might have escaped notice by some, even…

The Honesty of Insects

They are never duplicitous or deceitful. They are not envious of more powerful or attractive members of their group nor do they seek more creature comforts than is their hardwired destiny. They may stink or sting, buzz and bump their…

Out of Chaos, Order

Structure–even frail and fragile and failing structure–seems preferable to sudden and complete disorder. The center does not hold. The old logic is suddenly devoid of common understanding. Change for its own sake yields a horrible tsunami of ambiguity and chaos where…

WayBack: Fragments June 2002

Towards the end of writing elsewhere about the start of the writing habit–and later, the shift toward writing from, for and about nature–I’ve been revisiting the earliest days of the blog via the Wayback Machine.  So don’t say you weren’t…

Forest Afloat

Some day I’ll post my bigger-picture thoughts that come from this image taken after rock-hopping across Nameless Creek yesterday. Today, there’s time for only the image I’m afraid. Off to have a short session in town along with other SustainFloyd board…

Final Flowers

This Pearl Crescent (my best guess at ID–click image to enlarge) makes a final stop for nectar before–what? Has this butterly already laid eggs to overwinter while the adults will succumb to the first hard freeze? If the latter, this…

Setting Moon

There have been some issues with the blog overnight, I learned this morning, so am not sure this will post, will post correctly or will persist in the corrupted blog database. Don’t ask me. I just type here. I am…

What Writing Spiders Write

Whatever it is (if anything more than the zigzag of z’s below center stage) they’d better write it quickly and close up shop. The cool damp makes sluggish morning spiders easy enough victims of bird breakfasts that I’d expect to…

Fungal Fancy

We did not get out to view the bioluminescence of this cluster of Jack’o’lantern mushrooms last night due to the much-needed rain. It is raining still. And the [ look carefully ] unknown salamander, I suppose, is happy as a pig…