I recently discovered this poem by D. H. Lawrence, and I find it a perceptive and good-humored portrayal of the tortoise.  Enjoy.–April Moore

     I always enjoy examples of animals of different species forming loving bonds ‘across species lines.’  I am intrigued that some mammals are able to extend their maternal or companionable feelings to other mammals very different from themselves.  

   I thank my friend Sondra for sending me photos of a tender relationship between a chimp and two baby white tigers.  Please click the link below to see the pictures.–April Moore

http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/news/article1793366.ece?slideshowPopup=true&articleId=1793366

     First of all, I apologize to anyone who has tried to visit www.TheEarthConnection.org in the last few days.  The site had a problem which, fortunately, is now solved.–AM

     I am posting below two very short excerpts from the book The Mill on the Floss by George Elliot.  These paragraphs are filled with the author’s love for the natural world, a world made all the more precious by the repetition of the seasons, year after year.  Elliot’s love of nature, deepened by her childhood experiences, makes a powerful argument for getting today’s kids outside.  To fail to do so, I think, is to deprive them of experiences that will nurture them all their lives.–April Moore   

     “We could never have loved the earth so well if we had had no childhood in it–if it were not the earth where the same flowers come up again every spring that we used to gather with our tiny fingers as we sat lisping to ourselves on the grass–the same hips and haws on the autumn hedgerows–the same redbreasts that we used to call ‘God’s birds’ because they did no harm to the precious crops.  What novelty is worth that sweet monotony where everything is known, loved because it is known?”

     “Our delight in the sunshine on the deep-bladed grass today might be no more than the faint perception of wearied souls, if it were not for the sunshine and the grass in the far-off years, which still live in us, and transform our perception into love.”–George Elliot

     Wendell Berry is one of my heroes.  He writes lovingly and insightfully about the natural world.  In this short excerpt, Berry helps me to think of soil in a new way.  Soil seems humble;  after all, it’s dirt.  But what a powerful life force it is!

     “The most exemplary nature is that of the topsoil.  It is very Christlike in its passivity and beneficence, and in the penetrating energy that issues out of its peaceableness.  It increases by experience, by the passage of seasons over it, growth rising out of it and returning to it, not by ambition or aggressiveness.  It is enriched by all things that die and enter into it.  It keeps the past, not as history or as memory, but as richness, new possibility.  Its fertility is always building up out of death into promise.  Death is the bridge or the tunnel by which its past enters its future.”

                          –Wendell Berry, Recollected Essays 1965-1980

     I know this is not nesting season for robins, but I was so charmed by this short video I received the other day that I want to share it.  It amazes me how the baby robins can hold their mouths straight up and open them so wide.  I guess the chicks have evolved to maximize their chances of getting the food they need.

     Please click and enjoy.–April Moore

Life in the Nest of the Robin

     This touching little tale is from Teaching Your Children About God by David J. Wolfe.  I imagine that anyone who loves nature can relate to it.

     “There is a wonderful Chasidic stoary about the child of a rabbi who used to wander in the woods.  At first the father let him wander, but over time he became concerned.  The woods were dangerous.  The father did not know what lurked there.

     “He decided to discuss the matter with his child.  One day he took him aside and said, “You know, I have noticed that each day you walk into the woods.  I wonder, why do you go there?”

     “The boy said to his father, “I go there to find God.”

     “”That is a very good thing,” the father replied gently.  “I am glad you are searching for God.  But, my child, don’t you know that God is the same everywhere?”

     “”Yes,” the boy answered.  “But I’m not.”" 

     When I am feeling angry and distressed about what’s going on in Washington, the best antidote I know is to go down into the woods.  I know that even a little forest time will rejuvenate my spirit. 

     The other morning was no exception.  I walked from our house down into the woods and eyed one of my favorite resting spots—a glade (isn’t that a great word!) where long, dry stalks of grass leaned this way and that.  I chose a reasonably flat spot among them and laid down on my back. 

     Every time I lie down in the forest, I am amazed anew at how good the ground feels under my body.  Silently, it seems to impart sustenance and strength.   

     Enjoying the firm earth beneath me, I looked up.  Mostly I saw the highest leaves of the tallest trees, gathering around a small space of sky.  And in that blue opening, a wispy cloud hurried east.  A hawk, wings spread, glided through, disappearing again behind the leaves. 

     Those leaves are a wonder.  The farther down the tree trunks, the darker green the leaves.  These leaves live in the shadow of their ‘higher-ups.’  The higher the branches, the lighter and brighter their leaves.  These are the ones that receive the most direct sun.  And as those high-up leaves rustled in the breeze, they shifted about, trading translucence for shade and back again.  Some leaves were partly shaded and partly shining at the same time. 

     I closed my eyes.  The sounds of the living forest pleased me.  From up the hill came an avian chortle.  It must have been a wild turkey.  The chortles continued, each one fainter and more distant, until they died out completely.  A woodpecker pounded its beak against a tree somewhere to my right, another off to the left,  here and there, sometimes muffled, sometimes pronounced. 

     After a little while, I sat up and looked around.  Murmuring a word of thanks, I stood up, and began walking back up the hill to the house.  I was lighter, my anger subdued.  Once again, the forest had calmed and strengthened me.—April Moore   

     During the summer months, it feels natural to me to awaken early, unlike in the winter, when I only want to burrow more deeply into the cozy warmth of bed.  But on these summer mornings, it is a delight to get up, step outside, and feel the morning’s sunny warmth.

     I very much like Mary Oliver’s poem below, on the joy of greeting the sun early in the day.–April Moore

Why I Wake Early

Hello, sun in my face.

Hello, you who made the morning

and spread it over the fields

and into the faces of the tulips

and the nodding morning glories,

and into the windows of, even, the

miserable and the crotchety –

best preacher that ever was,

dear star, that just happens

to be where you are in the universe

to keep us from ever-darkness,

to ease us with warm touching,

to hold us in the great hands of light –

good morning, good morning, good morning.

Watch, now, how I start the day

in happiness, in kindness.

~ Mary Oliver ~

the view from our deck on this July morning

     I am grateful to Barbi Schulick for her permission to publish this lovely piece she wrote about her son’s thrilling experience with a pine siskin.  I have always longed to have such an experience myself.  Enjoy.–April Moore

     When he was a small boy, my son Geremy loved small creatures.  

     He’d take joy in catching a cricket in his cupped hands, then make a show of letting it go, hopping when it hopped, following it into the tall grass until he lost sight of it.  He traveled our yard with his head down, his big dark eyes hunting for anything moving at ground level.  I was forever piercing holes in jar tops to supply airflow for his spiders and their prey.  

     Soon he moved on to toads, and he had an eye for them—locating one hunched and brown among autumn leaves, scooping another out from the dirt behind the front steps.  He kept two as pets:  “Toader” and “Toaderette.”  When they peed in his palm, he’d yelp and toss them to the kitchen floor.  I constructed a chicken wire cage for them in the backyard, digging it two feet under so they could hibernate for the winter.

     When Geremy was eight or nine, he discovered birds.  I didn’t fully witness his love for them emerging, didn’t notice the first moment he maraveled at a chickadee cracking a seed against a branch or caught sight of the flash of red inside a blackbird’s wing.  But more often, it seemed, his gaze focused upwards and out came the binoculars, field guides, birding journals.

     Geremy was a thin, slight boy with a shy sweetness that placed him barely on the edge of his grade school’s in-crowd.  His lack of competitive spirit confined him to the bench in Little League.  He was one to do puzzles, to painstakingly sort and categorize his baseball cards, to read the Nintendo guideline booklet cover to cover, and to watch birds—for hours—outside the kitchen window, keeping track in his journal of how many goldfinch came at what time, whether they were male or female, whether there were babies, and describing how they scattered with the arrival of a blue jay.

     I remember a spring when a flock of pine siskins frequented the feeders.  Geremy loved how miniature they were, even smaller than juncos and cipping sparrows.  The thin, brown-speckled wisps of their bodies balanced on legs slighter than toothpicks.  He longed to know them better, and so after school each day, he stood on the deck in front of the feeders, holding black oil sunflower seeds in his outstretched hand.  

     At first his arrival sent dozens of birds away from the feeders ands nearby bushes, flapping their tiny wings in alarmed retreat.  But gradually the group swooped back, in what seemed a corporate decision to ignore the small human holding out seeds.  Geremy stayed put, applying his trademark patience, moving only to wave off a mosquito now and then.  And I’d watch, wishing with a mother’s fervor that a bird would come to him but never surprised that one didn’t.  Eventually I’d announce dinner, and he’d plod in, dragging his feet, vowing not to give up.

     The afternoon the pine siskin perched on his hand, I was cooking something demanding:  a sauce that mustn’t boil, a stir-fry to constantly stir, food that should be eaten right away, and so, as I turned off the stove burners, I yelled:  “Geremy, come in now, it’s dinner!”

     Then setting the table in a flurry, I yelled again:  “Geremy, Dinner!”

     And while pouring drinks:  “Geremy!”

     “Quiet!” came an urgent whisper from behind me.  I turned to find my husband staring out the glass swing set door at Geremy on the deck.  There, our little bird of a son was standing straight as a soldier, one thin arm shooting out at a perfect right angle.  As if in salute, his palm was upturned, the long fingers flattened together to form a platform for a tiny, brown pine siskin that stood equally erect and looked back at him.

     I studied Geremy from the kitchen for those three, four, maybe five seconds, and although he appeared so still that even his breath was halted, I could detect a gentle tilt in his stance, his head and torso reaching delicately towards the bird at the edge of his unmoving arm.  It was a yielding that spoke of reverence, recognition, of the sort of hospitality a flower might offer a butterfly.  He had become a place for a pine siskin to rest.

     When the bird finally flew, Geremy’s breath shuddered through him, returning in a grateful rush.  He turned to look at us.  Sweat had formed on his upper lip, his cheeks were flaming, and I saw wisdom in his young eyes.  Through the coming weeks, he would describe over and over how it felt to be so close to the bird, to feel it buoyant, almost weightless, on his fingers.  And though he’d try again to woo one, he’d never be successful, so that those few seconds with a pine siskin, his siskin, would be held in memory and heart, the way one remembers words from God issuing through a breeze.

     I thank John Cochrane for sending me this delightful poem by Mary Oliver.  I love the feeling of sweet safety the poet imagines the snake experiencing upon escape from an encounter with a human!  –April Moore    

 WATER SNAKE
        by Mary Oliver

I saw him
in a dry place
on a hot day,
a traveler
making his way
from one pond to another,
and he lifted up
his chary face
and looked at me
with his gravel eyes,
and the feather of his tongue
shot in and out
of his otherwise clamped mouth
and I stopped on the path
to give him room,
and he went past me
with his head high,
loathing me, I think,
for my long legs,
my poor body, like a post,
my many fingers,
for he didn’t linger
but, touching the other side of the path,
he headed, in long lunges and quick heaves,
straight to the nearest basin
of sweet black water and weeds,
and solitude