I am drawn to the quiet of the forest.  At least I think of the forest as quiet because I don’t hear the cacophanous sounds of cars, telephones, and television. 

     As I sit on the ground in the woods down below our house, I tune in to the sounds I do hear.  And there are many.  But unlike some of the sounds of human activity, the forest sounds are soothing, calming.  After a matter of seconds, I feel different.  Just as I have gone down into the forest, I feel I have gone down into myself as well.  A quiet well-being grows within my body, and my mind is peaceful. 

     As I settle in to listen, I have a sense of myself as  the audience, present to the performance of an orchestra.   From all directions, the dominant sound is the buzz of crickets.  Far off to my left, the buzzing is building to a crescendo.  Then it fades, and as it does, I begin to notice those crickets off to the right.  Now they are growing louder.  Suddenly they stop, with no decrescendo at all.  It takes the absence of their sound to make me realize just how loud they were.  Out of the silence grows a soft buzzing from nowhere in particular, and from down the hill comes a pulsing rhythm.  Maybe another type of cricket;  maybe another creature.   

     Other  ‘instruments’ weigh in.  An unseen pewee adds its sweet, questioning song.  I hear staccato chips from a cardinal.  Fluttering wings whisper, and then a breeze blows through the ‘orchestra,’ creating the grand whisper of thousands of leaves.   An insect flies by. 

     Then there are the occasional accents from the percussion section.  A high-up twig breaks and falls.  Its downward journey registers through bumps on wood and the shaking of leaves.  An acorn, premature, lets go and drops, settling with a muffled thud into dead leaves on the ground.  

     Like an orchestra, the sounds of the forest work together to create a pleasing whole.  And why wouldn’t they?  The ‘forest orchestra’ reflects the wholeness of the forest, where its member species thrive together in true harmony.–April Moore

     August is beach time.   Who doesn’t love the smells, the sounds, the sunshine, and the rhythms of the waves?  How awesome to stand on the beach and look  into the distance, imagining the continent that is at the opposite side of the ocean.

     For the last four months, since the BP oil disaster, we have been focused on the Gulf shoreline, that delicate area where salt meets fresh to form a unique coastal ecosystem.  No one has written more beautifully, in my view, of coastal beauty than Rachel Carson, one of my heroes.  

     I love this brief excerpt from her 1955 book The Edge of the Sea, and I hope you will enjoy it too.–April Moore

     “The shore is an ancient world, for as long as there has been an earth and sea there has been this place of the meeting of land and water.  Yet it is a world that keeps alive the sense of continuing creation and of the relentless drive of life.  Each time that I enter it, I gain some new awareness of its beauty and its deeper meanings, sensing that intricate fabric of life by which one creature is linked with another, and each with its surroundings. . . . .

     “There is a common thread that links these scenes and memories–the spectacle of life in all its varied manifestations as it has appearead, evolved, and sometiems died out.  Underlying the beauty of the spectacle there is a meaning and significance.  It is the elusiveness of that meaning that haunts us, that sends us again and again into the natural world where the key to the riddle is hidden.  It sends us back to the edge of the sea, where the drama of life played its first scene on earth and perhaps even its prelude;  where the forces of evolution are at work today, as they have been since the appearance of what we know as life;  and where the spectacle of living creatures faced by the cosmic realities of their world is crystal clear.”

     Below is a link to an article my husband Andy Schmookler published several years ago in The Baltimore Sun and The Albuquerque Tribune.  If you have had the experience of freezing indoors on a hot summer day, you may have had similar thoughts.–April Moore 

 http://articles.baltimoresun.com/2002-09-17/news/0209170047_1_enlightened-summer-winter

     I awoke this morning to the subdued aftermath of last night’s raging rainstorm.  The second in two days, the storm had pummelled our ridge, yanked trees this way and that, and  lashed the house with angry fits of hard rain.

     Now the air felt friendly, the fresh breeze light and caressing.  But signs of last night’s siege were everywhere.  Branches, large and small, littered the driveway.  Oak twigs, fully alive with their perfect leaves and  firm green acorns fallen before their time, lay here and there on the ground.  I wondered if the animals would find these unripe summer versions of their favorite food acceptable.

       As I strolled down the hill into the woods, my attention was immediately absorbed by the greenshield dotting, splotching, coating many of the trees.  Were my eyes drawn to this lichen all about because I had just written about greenshield for this website (http://www.theearthconnection.org/blog/2010/08/the-secret-life-of-greenshield/)?  Or was the greenshield greener than usual this morning, holding moisture from last night’s storm? 

     Gazing at the myriad manifestations of this greenish lichen on one tree after another, I noticed that what I had read is indeed true.  Greenshield is most prominent at the base of a tree.  Yes, on just about every tree I looked at, the greenshield appeared thickest and greenest just where the trunk’s bark met the ground.  And mosses, bright green and plump, reached upward from the earth, joining the greenshield on the tree’s lowest bark.

     As I crouched to examine the life at the base of a large chestnut oak, I noticed just inches from the tree the tiniest, daintiest white wildflower growing up between some mosses.  How lovely, I thought, were these two close neighbors, one so massive and one so slight, living next to each other in perfect harmony.   

     Also very alive-seeming on this damp morning were the fungi.  They too looked fatter and fuller after the rain.  I was intrigued by a dense colony of little shelflike fungi, clustered in a concave portion of the base of a tall oak.  There in the lee of this living tree, away from the sun’s drying warmth, dampness reigned to create the perfect home for this little fungus community.  And farther down the hill, tiny white fungi grew on a log, but only along the edges of the bark tearing away from the wood inside.  The fungus formed a perfect trim for the bark’s torn edges.  

     And there was a third fungus I especially enjoyed, this one for its surprising precision.  Back in the driveway, in the woodpile, was a piece of wood that was almost completely ringed by some small shelflike fungus.  The circular, cross-section of the firewood, however, was entirely bare, circled by the fungus growing from the bark. 

     Bright, sunny days have nothing on a damp, post-storm morning when the lingerning wetness accentuates beauties that may go unnoticed in the bright light.–April Moore 

a fungus colony in the 'lee' of the base of an oak trunk

         

fungus growing along the torn edges of bark

 

fungus encircling firewood

     I invite you to click below and listen to an illuminating commentary my husband Andy Schmookler delivered recently on our local NPR station, WMRA.–April Moore

http://www.publicbroadcasting.net/wmra/news.newsmain/article/0/3507/1679029/Civic.Soapbox/The.Warrior.Ideal.of.Manhood.and.Global.Warming

     It never ceases to amaze me that whenever I go into the woods just below our house, I invariably see something I’ve never noticed before.  And this morning was no exception.

      After strolling down the hill into the forest, I took a seat on a spread of dead oak leaves.   Then I proceeded to take in what could be seen from this particular vantage point.    Lots of tall chestnut oaks, some hickories and tupelo.  There were smaller red maples, slender and leaning in one direction or another.  Some moosewood, a few as tall as the maples, others no taller than a shrub.  And here and there a little ’tree sprout,’ no more than a foot high and sporting just a few leaves.  And there was no shortage of fallen branches strewn about, resting at various angles and some partially covered in a year or two’s worth of dead leaves.

     As I sat looking, I began to take in more.  A large ant on a mission, determinedly carrying some little white sphere uphill and down through the leaves.  The cicadas, I noticed, were almost silent, after having made quite a din yesterday.  Only a couple of birds were singing.  A woodpecker tapped for a few moments. 

     And, perhaps most dramatic of all, the sun cast streaks of light through the trees–onto a patch of forest floor, onto leaves fluttering from certain trees, onto a few tree trunks.

     Then my eye caught something I don’t remember having seen before. 

     About 30 feet away, on the trunk of a hickory tree lit by the morning sun, was a very large shadow of a leaf.  The shadow came from one of the few chestnut oak leaves that hung on a spindly tree between the sun and the hickory.  Of course I had to capture the tree with its leaf shadow on film (if one can refer to digital photography as film!).  Moving nearer to the tree to take my picture, I noticed, on a pine tree farther on, a much more pleasing, even delightful shadow.  There on the reddish pine bark danced several small leaf shadows.  As the breeze rustled the living leaves on a nearby red maple, their shadows moved gracefully in the sunshine against their scaly pine bark background.  The sight gave me joy, and I eagerly snapped a couple of pictures.

     Feeling very happy as I hiked back up the hill to the house, I paused to observe a daddy long legs ambling along nearby.  It too paused, and with a couple of its legs, sensitively investigated my shoe.  Then the daddy long legs moved on.  I watched as its small body, suspended among many long, arched legs, cast a little oblong shadow that followed along on the ground.–April Moore

maple leaf shadows dancing on a pine tree in the sunshine

 

an oak leaf shadow on the trunk of a hickory tree

     I have written before about the milkweed, about its starring role in ensuring a healthy population of monarch butterflies, about the winter beauty of  its pods, dry and open, still embracing some of the fall’s silken seeds.  

     But now, it’s mid-summer, and this year’s pods are just getting started.  They are small, soft, and green, clustered under the  dying flowers so loved by butterflies and bees.  As I visited and photographed a stand of milkweed along our road yesterday, I delighted to see a monarch caterpillar stretched along one of the leaves.

     I hope you will enjoy my photos below, as well as Robert Frost’s poem.  It is a beautiful poem, I think, full of wonder at the wild enthusiasm the unassuming plant inspires among butterflies.–April Moore

emerging milkweed pods among dying flowers

monarch caterpillar on milkweed leaf

POD OF THE MILKWEED–Robert Frost

Calling all butterflies of every race
From source unknown but from no special place
They ever will return to all their lives,
Because unlike the bees they have no hives,
The milkweed brings up to my very door
The theme of wanton waste in peace and war
As it has never been to me before.
And so it seems a flower’s coming out
That should if not be talked then sung about.
The countless wings that from the infinite
Make such a noiseless tumult over it
Do no doubt with their color compensate
For what the drab weed lacks of the ornate.
For drab it is its fondest must admit.
And yes, although it is a flower that flows
With milk and honey, it is bitter milk,
As anyone who ever broke its stem
And dared to taste the wound a little knows.
It tastes as if it might be opiate.
But whatsoever else it may secrete,
Its flowers’ distilled honey is so sweet|
It makes the butterflies intemperate.
There is no slumber in its juice for them.
One knocks another off from where he clings.
They knock the dyestuff off each other’s wings–
With thirst on hunger to the point of lust.
They raise in their intemperance a cloud
Of mingled butterfly and flower dust
That hangs perceptibly above the scene.
In being sweet to these ephemerals
The sober weed has managed to contrive
In our three hundred days and sixty-five
One day too sweet for beings to survive.
Many shall come away as struggle-worn
And spent and dusted off of their regalia,
To which at daybreak they were freshly born,
As after one-of-them’s proverbial failure
From having beaten all day long in vain
Against the wrong side of a windowpane.

But waste was of the essence of the scheme.
And all the good they did for man or god
To all those flowers they passionately trod
Was leave as their posterity one pod
With an inheritance of restless dream.
He hangs on upside down with talon feet
In an inquisitive position odd
As any Guatemalan parakeet.
Something eludes him.  Is it food to eat?
Or some dim secret of the good of waste?
He almost has it in his talon clutch.
Where have those flowers and butterflies all gone
That science may have staked the future on?
He seems to say the reason why so much
Should come to nothing must be fairly faced. 

 

    

     I have long been a fan of the writings of Leo Tolstoy.  But until recently I didn’t realize how deeply he loved nature.  The following short passage from his story “The Invaders” is poignant in his incredulity that humans who share the glory of this beautiful world can still hate and kill each other.–April Moore 

     “Such silence reigned in the whole detachment, that there could be plainly distinguished all the harmonious voices of the night, full of mysterious charm.  The distant melancholy howls of jackals, sometimes like the wails of despair, sometimes like laughter;  the monotonous ringing song of the cricket, the frog, the quail;  a gradually approaching murmur, the cause of which I could not make clear to my own mind;  and all those nocturnal, almost audible motions of Nature, which, it is so impossible either to comprehend or define, –united into one complete, beautiful harmony which we call “the silence of the night.”

     “This silence was broken, or rather was unified, by the dull thud of the hoofs, and the rustling of the tall grass through which the division ws slowly moving. 

     “Occasionally, however, was heard in the ranks the ring of a heavy cannon, the sound of clashing bayonets, stifled conversation, and the snorting of a horse.

     “Nature breathed peacefully in beauty and power.

     “Is it possible that people find no room to live together in this beautiful world, under this boundless starry heaven?  Is it possible that, amid this bewitching Nature, the soul of man can harbor the sentiments of hatred and revenge, or the passion for inflicting destruction on his own kind?  All ugly feelings in the heart of man ought, it would seem, to vanish away in this intercourse with Nature–with this immediate expression of beauty and goodness!”

     I have been thinking about my love for nature, which I would describe as still growing.  And did I always love nature?  I’m not sure. 

     I certainly did not consciously love nature as a young child.  But in my many, many memories of childhood, the outdoor world plays a starring role:  drinking in the sweetness of lilac as I roller skated past our neighbor’s hedge; walking home from school in crisp October sunshine;  examining the season’s first snowflakes as they fell;  chasing lightening bugs, barefoot through the grass, on a summer evening.  All of these moments are pleasant to recall.  But did I ever think to myself, at the time, that I loved the nature around me?  Never.  Nature was simply there, as were family, home, everything else in my life.  I took it all for granted, as kids do.

     It wasn’t until early adolescence that I knew I loved nature.  I remember vaguely, as a sixth grader, going alone on a Saturday morning to the University of Washington arboretum, near our Seattle home.  The one clear spot in that hazy memory is standing, in wonder, by a tiny stream that ran through a meadow-like space in the arboretum.  The stream was a pretty little thing, running clear and unencumbered between grassy banks.  The stones, mosses, and twigs in the stream all looked vivid through the moving water.  I felt a stirring inside, an excited new aliveness. 

     Today I am not sure just why that scene was so special;  no doubt I had seen prettier sights before that morning at the arboretum.  The specialness of standing by the stream, that has stayed with me all these years, must have had something to do with my age.  Early adolescence is a time of ‘waking up,’ I remember my son’s sixth grade teacher saying about a decade ago.  I assumed he was talking about sex, but I think adolescence is also a time when many young people begin to come alive spiritually.    

     Yes, I believe I was looking at that little stream through new eyes.  And they were the eyes of one who had decided on her own to visit the arboretum, who had gone there by herself, just as a grown-up might.  I had chosen this experience all on my own, and it belonged to me.

     In the months that followed my visit to the arboretum, I began seeking other opportunities to be alone in nature.  On weekend campouts with my Girl Scout troop, I needed to be the first one up in the morning, so that I could take a walk by myself in the quiet woods.  There I found delight and a deep happiness. 

     Even now, the forest is where I go to soothe my spirit, to center myself.  And while sharing the forest with a loved one can also be a fine experience, it is when I am in the forest alone that I am most deeply connected with the earth’s sacredness.  These days I frequently go into the woods alone for what I call ‘Spirit time.’   These forest forays have given rise to many of the most heartfelt writings I have shared here. –April Moore 

  

     Like millions of others, I was mildly offended when BP’s Swedish Chairman Carl-Henric Svanberg insisted that he and his company care about “the small people.”  Americans bristled at the term.  It sounded demeaning, implying that we U.S. citizens are little and weak, not like ’the big people’ who run BP. 

     But as I thought about Svanberg’s gaffe, I realized that his term for us Americans is spot on.  We are ’the small people.’  Even though we number more than 300 million, and even though we have a federal agency tasked with making big oil companies conduct their operations safely, we are the ones bearing the pain of damage that grows daily as oil continues to gush into the Gulf, out of control.  We ’small people’ are paying because the ‘big people’ at BP used their might to make sure the Mining and Minerals Service did not interfere with BP’s cheating on safety or with its failure to prepare for a possible accident. 

     BP’s CEO Tony Hayward promised that BP would ‘make things right.’  But the ’small people’ of the Gulf coast know he can’t.  They know that the damage is too great, that their means of livelihood–fishing, shrimping, tourism–at least for the foresseable future.   The $20 billion President Obama wrung out of the company to compensate Gulf coast victims is tiny, compared to the suffering being endured by so many in the Gulf region.

     While BP is losing lots of money–in payments to victims, in trying to clean up the disaster it has caused, and in plummeting stock prices–the corporation’s giant size protects it from the kinds of costs we ’small people’ must pay for much smaller crimes.  Any one of us ’small people’ who kills another person faces life in prison or even execution.  But ‘big people’ who run corporations like BP never face execution.  And prison sentences are almost as rare.  Despite the 11 human deaths BP caused when the Gulf rig exploded, it is unlikely that those deaths will cost BP anything more than money.

     Unfortunately, there is nothing unique about BP.  The tragic deaths of 29 Massey coal miners in West Virginia recently, and the irresponsible behavior of giant financial institutions that brought us to the brink of Depression, were caused by the greed of ‘big people,’ unchecked by the federal agencies charged with their oversight.

     Yes, Svanberg was right.  We are ‘the small people.’  And we’ll remain small and weak, suffering what we must at the hands of giant corporations, for the foreseeable future.  

     But I do believe we can change the current great imbalance of power.  We the people need to take our democracy back.  We desperately need campaign finance reform, so that we can minimize the influence of Big Corporate Money on Congress, on the White House, and on our regulatory agencies.–April Moore