Dhobi Tree Outside The Smithsonian Castle

Bloom On The Dhobi Tree,  Droid Shots, Washington, D.C., June 2014, photos © 2014 by QuoinMonkey. All rights reserved.

spring equinox
eclipsed by the dark
side of the moon

Spring arrived under a New Moon and Total Solar Eclipse fanfare, in spite of March with her gray skies and flurries. Snow has melted from the Twin Cities landscape, leaving behind a patchwork of late winter beige and timid green. Anxious for spring color, I revisited photographs from a June walk in the Enid A. Haupt Garden outside the Smithsonian Castle. It was the first time I had seen a Dhobi Tree and it was in full bloom.

The Dhobi Tree (Mussaenda frondosa) is pollinated by butterflies attracted by a modified leaf growing at the base of the flowers. The plant grows wild in India and is part of the Rubiaceae Family which also includes Coffee and Gardenias. I am grateful for urban green space, a refuge and remembrance that every city was once a wild place.

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-posted on red Ravine, Sunday, March 22nd, 2015

-Part of a yearly practice to write a short form piece of poetry in a Moleskine journal once a day for the next year. Related to post: haiku 4 (one a day) Meets renga 52

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Prairie Spring

by Willa Cather

Evening and the flat land,
Rich and sombre and always silent;
The miles of fresh-plowed soil,
Heavy and black, full of strength and harshness;
The growing wheat, the growing weeds,
The toiling horses, the tired men;
The long empty roads,
Sullen fires of sunset, fading,
The eternal, unresponsive sky.
Against all this, Youth,
Flaming like the wild roses,
Singing like the larks over the plowed fields,
Flashing like a star out of the twilight;
Youth with its insupportable sweetness,
Its fierce necessity,
Its sharp desire,
Singing and singing,
Out of the lips of silence,
Out of the earthy dusk.

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“Prairie Spring” is in the public domain and was released by Poem-A-Day from The American Academy of Poets on December 29th, 3013. Launched during National Poetry Month in 2006, Poem-A-Day features new and previously unpublished poems by contemporary poets on weekdays and classic poems on weekends.

Willa Cather was born on December 7, 1873, in Virginia. She grew up in Nebraska and studied at the University of Nebraska, before moving to Pennsylvania, and then to New York. Cather is best remembered for her novels depicting frontier life on the Great Plains. “Prairie Spring” was first published in 1913 as the prologue to Willa Cather’s novel O Pioneers! Although Cather received widespread recognition as a novelist, her first published book was April Twilights (1903), a collection of poetry. In 1923, Cather was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for her novel, One of Ours (1922). Cather died in 1947 in New York City.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

After our New Year’s book cleaning, I pulled out all of our poetry books and was inspired to read poetry every day. On a frigid winter weekend, when the air temperatures will drop to -27°F in the Twin Cities, it helps to read poems about spring. I felt closest to Willa Cather when I traveled through Nebraska on frequent road trips to New Mexico where she met D. H. Lawrence in 1924. I stayed in the Cather room at the Mabel Dodge Luhan House and wrote about her after one of those trips in Valentine.

-posted on red Ravine, Sunday, January 5th, 2014

-Related to posts: Discovering The Big Read, Midwest Poets & Writers — When Can You Call A Place Home?, The Vitality Of Place — Preserving The Legacy Of “Home”, The World According To Mr. Schminda (et al.)

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May Day Self-Portrait: Searching For Spring

May Day Self-Portrait: Searching For Spring – 16/52, BlackBerry 52 –
Week 16, Golden Valley, Minnesota, April 2011, photo © 2011 by
QuoinMonkey. All rights reserved. Medium: original BlackBerry photo
from April 28, 2011, processed in Photoshop Elements.

Happy Beltane! Glastonbury is celebrating big time. As is Circle Sanctuary in Wisconsin. In Minnesota, we woke up to gray and windy skies with a temperature of 33 degrees. But it’s not keeping us from honoring the coming of Spring. The Twin Cities annual In The Heart of the Beast May Day Parade will go on as scheduled in Powderhorn Park! I hope they don’t get blown off the lake.

The self-portrait is a response to Lotus for the BlackBerry 52 Collaboration (the Jump-Off is her self-portrait: Self-Portrait #2: Locker Room). I took the original photograph on April 28th, a warm, sunny day in the front yard. My glasses are actually red, but I reversed them out to the green of Spring. The white area is the reversed shadow of me taking the photograph; the inky background is the spruce in our front yard.

I hope you all enjoy your May Day, rain, bluster, or shine!

Lotus and I will continue to respond to each other’s BlackBerry Jump-Off photos with text, photography, poetry (however we are inspired) for the 52 weeks of 2011. You can read more at BlackBerry 52 Collaboration. If you are inspired to join us, send us a link to your images, poetry, or prose and we’ll add them to our posts.

-posted on red Ravine, Sunday, May 1st, 2011

-related to posts: The Yogi (Cover Page) — 14/52, Nesting & Resting, Pulling Out The Sun (By Day, By Night), BlackBerry 365 Project — White Winter Squirrel, Flying Solo — Dragonfly In Yellow Rain, Searching For Stillness, icicle tumbleweed (haiga) — 2/52, The Mirado Black Warrior, Waning Moon (Haiga), Alter-Ego Mandala: Dreaming Of The Albatross (For Bukowski), EarthHealer — Mandala For The Tortoise

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blue ice haiku

Melting, Awash, Brooklyn Park,
Minnesota, March 2010, photo
© 2010 by QuoinMonkey.
All rights reserved.

frozen in your tracks —
blue ice on black macadam
melting into Spring

-posted on red Ravine, Saturday, March 6th, 2010

-related to post: haiku 2 (one-a-day)

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This, That & The Other

This.


This is our wisteria vine just about this time last year, right before a hard freeze zapped the blooms.

We’re hopeful that we’ll see the wisteria go wild this spring, yet the vine’s tender young buds already froze once, last month, and a second set is barely sprouting anew.

This is the time of year when I can’t wait for the weather to make up its mind and choose warm over cold, calm over windy. It’s the time of year when I go crazy wanting to fast-track nature. I’m tired of the color brown and the dull tan of cottonwood leaves and old pine needles. I long to see sumptuous greens and every hue of purple imaginable.

I plant pansies in pots and spend too much money at the nursery. I tempt nature by pulling the geraniums out of the greenhouse, and the jade plant, too. Then nature pulls a punch, with a day of rain that almost turns to snow. And right when I think I’ve once again underestimated how cool these desert mountains of the Rio Grande Valley can be, the sun comes out and a rainbow, too.



 




That.


April is a windy month in Albuquerque. You can sweep the elm seeds from the porch and in an hour open the front door to an entire elm seed colony waiting to swirl on in and see the place.

But I like April anyway. Good people are born in April. My youngest daughter. My sister. One friend I’ve known since junior high school and another I’ve known since our first job out of graduate school.

And there’s our friend and fellow writer/blogger/traveler “lil,” who recently celebrated a birthday and received an amazing poem from her husband, which she posted on C. Little, no less. Check it out.

Happy birthday to those all you Aries and happy blowy days to the rest of you!




The other.


       

    




Obama Peace, gouache on 12×12 canvas, painting © 2009 by ybonesy. All rights reserved. (Trying to figure out if it’s finished.)

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window geranium haiku

Window Geranium, looking inside the potting shed window at a geranium stored there until winter’s last frost, photo © 2009 by ybonesy. All rights reserved.

one morning in march
nose pressed against the window
i spy spring’s arrival

-related to posts WRITING TOPIC – WINDOW, haiku 2 (one-a-day), late winter haiku, and WRITING TOPIC – NAMES OF FLOWERS

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Bear Revisited — Promise Of Spring

Bear circles Yule fire
drumming sunrise to sunset
gift of tobacco

cool blue snow cave hides
monks of the animal world
heartbeat disappears

long sleep of Winter
cubs born in hibernation
lean fat of the land

Winter Solstice past
contemplative Void lingers
the promise of Spring

Cool Drums, Minneapolis, Minnesota, Winter Solstice, December 21st 2008, all photos © 2008 by QuoinMonkey. All rights reserved.

Promise Of Spring

New Year’s Eve approaches. Black-eyed peas are soaking in a pot on the stove, awaiting the bone of ham. Taking a much needed rest, I’m reminded of the hibernation of Bear. We learned on a wind chilled, -18 degree Winter Solstice that bear cubs are born during hibernation in the black cold of January.

After the Winter cave of silent dreams, we move into 2009 with the promise of rebirth — Spring.

The Bear Facts

To learn more about the winter habits of Bears and other hibernating animals such as squirrels, groundhogs, chipmunks, bats, rattlesnakes, and hedgehogs, visit these links:

• Secrets of Hibernation by Peter Tyson on PBS Nova Online — with University of Minnesota graduate student and bear expert, Lynn Rogers
• Ask A Wildlife Biologist: Do Bears Really Sleep All Winter? By Sean Farley — Alaska Department of Fish & Game, Division of Wildlife Conservation
• Ursus Americanus — American Black Bear — University of Michigan Museum of Zoology – Animal Diversity Web
• Alaska Department of Fish and Game – Brown Bear (Ursus Arctos)

-posted on red Ravine, Tuesday, December 30th, 2008, with gratitude to my friends Carol, Susan, and Gail

-related to post:  haiku (one-a-day)

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gateway haiku

Gateways, Lakewood Cemetery near Lake Calhoun, Minneapolis, Minnesota, May 2008. Spring blooms in Babyland, near the Chinese Community Memorial. Photo © 2008 by QuoinMonkey. All rights reserved.

white-belled bleeding hearts
spring sweeps through silent gateways
cemetery pause

-posted on red Ravine, Friday, May 9th, 2008

-related to post, haiku (one-a-day)

 

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gratitude haiku (orange)

Taste Of Things To Come, Minneapolis, Minnesota, June 2007, photo © 2008 by QuoinMonkey. All rights reserved.

moon in a dewdrop
gratitude to ybonesy
deep bows to the spring

An ancient buddha said:

For the time being stand on top of the highest peak.
For the time being proceed along the bottom of the deepest ocean.
For the time being three heads and eight arms.
For the time being an eight- or sixteen-foot body.
For the time being a staff or whisk.
For the time being a pillar or lantern.
For the time being the sons of Zhang and Li.
For the time being the earth and sky.

-Dōgen, Uji: The Time-Being, from The Moon in a Dewdrop, written in 1240 at Kosho Horin Monastery

-posted on red Ravine, Wednesday, March 12th, 2008

-related to posts: haiku (one-a-day)

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