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Retreat in the finger lakes. Beautiful weather. Bright and clear, bees in the flowering apple trees. Red-winged black bird lands next to me by the pond as I sit in meditation. After meditation I snooze a bit.
sun through eyelids
everything red and warm
some bird sings
Link: Dharma Bums: May 2005.
Dragonfly This dragonfly is probably a darner. I found it on the floor at work a few years ago and asked a student to photograph it for me. What a beauty.
Love this photo. When the towers came down I was in a field overlooking a pond in california for 3 weeks. I spent hours watching the dragonflies.
Link: Leaning Birch.
A great blue heron flew from the marsh. I love the way the chalky blue wing tips flap as they move—so slow. The wing span is magnificent.
Many red-winged blackbirds in the flashed in the cattails—the tall ones still dried and pale from last winter.
Each year our family makes a dinner date at the liilac festival. The festival is held in Highland Park on the side of a hill. The Lilac bushes create a wonderful atmosphere where families eat picnics and play tag and hide-and-go-seek. Teenagers wander in groups playing frisbee, vendors sell fried dough and hot dogs and cotton candy. I hear Neil Young in the beck of my head "Oh to live on sugar mountain...".
Lisa and I look at our kids now, how they have grown up over the years. Yet we find ourselves playing freeze-tag with our three teens, and stuffing gobs of cotton candy into our mouths. The sun is warm and the sky is bright blue. We end up lying in a pile of limbs and tossled hair, staring up at the sky. Her hand reaches over to grab mine and she does not need to say it. Does it get any better?
For the first time this year I head out in the kayak. It’s a
red fiberglass seventeen foot sea kayak. A “
I slide into the seat, steadying the craft with the paddle bridging from the back of the seat to the dock. Immediately I can feel my weight buoyed by the bottom of the kayak and the water of the bay.
Dipping the paddle in I give it a pull. Muscle memory kicks
in and in moments I am gliding past reeds on the flat part of
red-winged-blackbird
swoop-cuts across my bow
too close to her nest
The morning is warm and it doesn’t take long to break a sweat but there is a breeze that cools you off if you stay out in the open. The sounds of traffic become more distant as I get out of sight of the dock and the Empire Boulevard bridge. I work my way across the broad flats and into one of the channels between the reeds. I pick the west branch which gives me a little more time in the marsh before heading southward and up into the main part of the creek that looses the marsh feel and becomes more wooded and hilly.
cat-tails rustle
at the back end of the cove
two swans
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