Sauntering Photographer

Backyard Beauty

I’ve taken to carrying my camera outside when I go play with my daughters. It’s remarkable how many beautiful “weeds” grow in an urban environment. Our human quest for order carries over into our lawns and even into the parks we consider ‘wild’ areas. Grass routinely cut. Sidewalks, driveways, and curbs edged. The verge trimmed meticulously. All of this to the point of killing every plant and insect in the yard and planting an exclusive type of grass so it looks even more manicured. I can’t fault people for that, though I myself find it not only tedious to maintain, but it removes some of the beauty that naturally occurs. As for me, I try to curb the tick population as best I can, mow as infrequently as I can and look for the beauty that naturally springs up. Don’t get me wrong, I’m in compliance with city ordinances and I don’t let the grass grow unchecked. We do live close to the swamp and this area is known for copperheads. I won’t expose my children, nor myself, to that risk. I won’t delve into the politics of manicured lawns and homesteading / gardening. Suffice it to say there’s plenty of pros and cons you can read about — ad nauseam — on Facebook, to include the usual colorful ad hominems.

This is about the beauty of the so-called weeds and other plants that grow in my yard and all around this area. These are the plants we routinely walk by without even noticing. Part of not seeing is driven by our busy lives, another part driven by the tiny size of the plants, and yet another is driven by our conditioning to overlook anything other than well manicured lawns and a meticulously trimmed verge. But it’s there in resplendent beauty waiting for us to discover it. That’s not entirely true, I’m sure the plants and weeds are ambivalent about us, so long as we aren’t breaking out the lawn mower, string trimmer, and edger. They’re more interested in the bees and other pollinating insects that help ensure their continued life through their offspring. They’re also more interested in something we seem to take for granted anymore — life.

The ‘Covid Kerfuffle’ has made us all slow down, and given us the time to stop and smell the roses. Unfortunately, the roses aren’t being smelled. Instead people seem caught in existential crisis and ennui. Ironically, smelling the roses, taking time to appreciate flowers, and even pausing to admire the flowering weeds are perfect remedies to existential crisis and ennui.

The pictures I’ve included in this post are a tease of the beauty that hides all around. Hopefully they’ll encourage you to take the time to go outside and enjoy the natural beauty hiding under your feet. Perhaps it will even help overcome ennui.

Perhaps we can take a pointer from the weeds — live life. It doesn’t matter that things are uncertain of late. It doesn’t matter that we have no real concept of when this crisis is going to end. What matters is that we enjoy the life we have, we enjoy the beauty that is around us, and we have hope for the future. I think JRR Tolkien summed up well in The Fellowship of the Ring:

“‘I wish it need not have happened in my time,’ said Frodo.

‘So do I,’ said Gandalf, ‘and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.’”

Perhaps we should spend some of that time like the Hobbits of the Shire enjoying “things that grow”.

Swamp Visitors

Domestic Rabbit – *Oryctolagus cuniculus domesticus*

We don’t always see the animals, but we know they are there. Fortunately, the shelter at home orders have slowed down human activity enough that more animals from the Great Dismal Swamp have taken to wandering through the neighborhood. I haven’t seen a bear yet — I don’t know if that’s bad or good — though I wouldn’t be surprised if they lurked around at night.

My yard has seen a few visitors, most of them are residents, but there is one that I managed to catch in the yard at 3 o’clock in the afternoon, strolling around looking for food — a grey fox. I’m not sure if he smelled something my daughters took out and left in the yard or if he was on the trail of a rabbit. Either way, it was a bit of a natural blessing to see him wandering in my yard, almost unafraid. I say ‘almost’ because my youngest daughter (2yo) heard me clamoring for the camera and ran to the patio door, scaring him away. I had to replace the SD card in the camera and missed getting some really good shots, but I did the best I could with the iPhone.

But he wasn’t the only visitor.

We celebrated Mother’s Day with a take out dinner from Williamsburg Winery. Dinner included cupcakes with a grenadine infused icing. My eldest daughter (4yo) doesn’t like cake but will typically eat the frosting then give her cupcake to her sister. The grenadine was a no-go for her so she didn’t eat any of her cupcake. Instead, she decided to throw it out in the back yard. Not into the trees or somewhere out of the way, but right in the middle of the back yard. I was in the middle of working on something when I realized where she had thrown the cupcake. Before I finished my project, I looked out the window and a fox squirrel had decided to make a meal out of the cupcake, particularly the icing. I had my camera ready on my desk this time and managed to get a few shots. As the squirrel was munching away on the cupcake, a thrasher dropped out of one of the trees and tried to get a piece of the cupcake action, too. The squirrel wasn’t having it and chased the thrasher away. The thrasher was intimidated, but not too much. He stayed in the yard, bouncing around the squirrel, looking for any crumbs that were dropped. A few minutes later two large crows swooped into the yard and scared both the squirrel and the thrasher away. The crows seemed interested in what the squirrel was eating, but upon further investigation, apparently they, like my daughter don’t like cake and frosting with grenadine.

I left my camera setting on my desk that afternoon and night. “Fortune favors the foolish,” Kirk said in Star Trek. When I woke up the next morning, there was a rabbit at the back of the yard near the fence munching on some clover. I managed to snap a few pictures of him before he got skittish and disappeared back into the tree line. I suppose that answers my question about the fox and his quest — if he was after rabbit, he was unsuccessful.

Is there a point to this long post? An ephemeral point. The animals that share the yard with me are beautiful little souls who have no concept of the delight they bring me and my children as we watch them scurry and scamper around the back yard. They’re mostly oblivious to us when we are in the house, and I suppose we’re mostly oblivious to them, too, unless I see them while working at my desk. Those brief moments, those little sparkling diamonds throughout the day — they take my mind off of any problems (well, other than “where is my camera?!”) giving me some respite from whatever problem is vexing me. That, I guess, is the point. We get so troubled that we forget to stop and watch the natural beauty of the world around us. We take it for granted because we’ve been conditioned to focus on the problems at hand. Human endeavor can take us only so far forward before it weighs on us and brings us, if not crashing at least spiraling down. Nature is a cure for that ill — the studies are showing more and more that being out in nature is good for all of us, not just children. Maybe we should make more time to spend outside. If you really want to make it special, spend it outside with your kids — the vicissitudes of nature seen through their eyes will shock you. I know the implication of that is that it is unwelcome or unpleasant — and at first it will be. Adults have been conditioned to see things in a way that is more matter of fact, as though the only way to view life is through the scientific method. Children aren’t corrupted by that. They see the world through lenses of wonder and excitement! They explore not only because of a desire for knowledge and learning as embodied in the scientific method, but out of a desire to experience it, to *FEEL* it, both tactile and emotional. Children connect with nature in such a way that it shocks us as adults, though we experienced it that way as children, too.

How soon we forget our true nature isn’t to be automatons that produce and consume goods. Our true nature is the transcendent reality of our souls.

God bless the children.

Bunny Poop

This probably isn’t the picture you wanted to see when you first opened this blog, but there is a reason for it.

My two daughters, both toddlers, ran out into the yard to play this morning. Their hope was to discover mud puddles from last night’s rain to jump and splash in, and pour over each others’ heads. That’s what toddlers do. As they ran towards the back fence line, they reached a spot, stopped, and screamed for me. My first instinct was a torpid snake. It’s cloudy and somewhat cool out, a snake could be stuck waiting for the sun to warm him up.

It was not a snake. Nor a lizard. Nor a dead animal.

It was bunny poop — apparently I’m raising budding zoologists who specialize in scatology.

We live in the suburbs, but our suburb is awfully close to the Great Dismal Swamp. So close to the swamp that it is not uncommon for black bears to wander into our neighborhoods. Our neighborhood sits along an on-ramp to an interstate and extends along a portion of it. There are considerable easements from both the state and the city on either side of the interstate. Those easement provide a corridor that acts like a highway of its own for all kinds of wildlife to go on their own sauntering adventures. Some of them have established new homes in the storm water mitigation pond behind my house. There is a family of rabbits that live in the tree line and in the pond area and there are squirrels that live in the trees along the tree line. The rabbits have brought at least one fox into the neighborhood — we won’t discuss the vagaries of nature at this point. I’m not sure if the fox lives here or just visits, I’ve only seem him a few times, and always just after sunset or just before sunrise. The rabbits and the squirrels usually wander around the yard shortly after sunrise looking for any scraps I’ve thrown out for them. Vegetable scraps, bread — and the leftover pancakes from breakfast this morning. It’s nice to see the squirrels and rabbits bound through the yard, sniffing as they go, looking for food. The scraps have also attracted crows who land in the yard, look around, pick up a slice of bread or a pancake, then fly off somewhere, whether to share or devour on their own, I do not know. It’s nice to sit at my desk, look out the window and watch them all — squirrels, rabbits, crows — scavenge the food I toss out.

All short lived, I guess. I’m planning to put in a raised garden and grow vegetables and herbs. I made sure to order one with a deer fence around it — yes, sometimes there are deer who will wander through the neighborhood, more frequently than the bears. I am looking to put a few Compots in the garden for composting my scraps. The advantage of Compots are they can be buried in the garden and meat, vegetables, oil — whatever — can be put into them for composting. They require no real attention other than to keep them replenished with scraps. The scraps will decompose, attract fly larvae and worms and will leach off into the garden providing nutrients for the soil. Unfortunately, as I place more scraps into the Compots and not into the yard, the return of the squirrels, rabbits, and crows will be short lived. That makes me sad. I enjoy their presence. Perhaps I should share the wealth of the scraps with them so I can continue to enjoy them scampering through the yard, eating, playing, and rejuvenating — all metaphors for the joy they bring me as I watch their natural exuberance.

So, what does this all have to do with bunny poop? Nothing? Everything? I tell my daughters, “everything poops”. It makes little never mind to them *what* there is to explore so long as there is *something* to explore. They looked at the bunny poop as though it were some sorcery, some inexplicable evidence of fairies or gnomes, and summoned me to see that which bewitched them. The eyes of children perceive and intuit more than the eyes of adults. “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio….” (1)

And therein lies the lesson of bunny poop: looking to see, not looking to look. As adults, we overlook so much beauty in our lives as we continue to chase whatever goal we have set for today, forgetting the simple joys of life — sunrises, sunsets, wildflowers, our children’s drawings, our children’s musings and play. Long ago Thoreau “lost a hound, a bay horse, and a turtledove” and is probably still on their trail. (2) We should all be like Thoreau and pursue them. It will only give more meaning to our otherwise stressed and stretched lives.

That was a really long way to say go look for bunny poop, you’ll be surprised what you find.

——————————————

(1) Shakespeare, William. Shakespeare: The Complete Collection. Hamlet; Act 1, Scene 5. Pandora’s Box. Kindle Edition.

(2) Thoreau, Henry David. Walden and Civil Disobedience (Illustrated) (p. 8). American Renaissance Books. Kindle Edition.

It Begins

Sauntering Photographer — Ratio – Logos – Fides – Pisti — Reason and Faith

Ratio Logos — Fides Pisti

Reason and Faith.

This blog, I hope, will become a place to posit philosophical and theological ideas so they can be discussed rationally and forthrightly. The idea is to evaluate beauty and life in words and in pictures so we can all grow a better appreciation of the world. This is my welcome post. I hope to have many more in the future.

Welcome aboard.