Today I made my first camera outing since having hip replacement surgery in mid-June! I walked without a cane or walker! And I took my camera! It was lovely!
Wildflower Daze
We went to nearby French Regional Park where I had seen the prairie area full of beautiful wild flowers in bloom earlier this week. What soft beauty—with bumble bees and dragonflies busily flying and gathering nectar and flowers all around me. I walked up a hill covered with blooming bee balm, black eyed Susan, and graceful grasses.
Altogether I spent no more than 10 – 15 minutes walking and photographing and I was limping by the time I was done. But I did it!
It left me in a wildflower daze.
I’ll leave you today with my heart full of joy at the beauty of it all. This Mary Oliver poem says it all…
The Summer Day
Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean-
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down-
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
With your one wild and precious life?
May you walk in beauty.
2 Comments
carol m.tierney · July 22, 2019 at 3:49 am
Beautiful. In my youth in northern MN I walked every week around our country church. It was filled with wild flowers. We often brought them in. My dear father on the farm, never cut down a wild flower. There were some near the hay meadow and he would bring them home to us and we had them in our living room. Over 50 years ago, they were everywhere. I even remember a field of yellow lady slippers in a swamp, we brought some to our bible school days but a gun shoot out came in, took over and wrecked the land. It is gone now. So are the lady slippers.
Marilyn · July 22, 2019 at 11:48 pm
Thanks you Carol. What wonderful memories you have from your childhood. I too grew up on a farm and learned to love wildflowers then too. How lucky you were to have seen a field of yellow lady slippers in the wild. So sad to see the loss of them to those who do not respect the land.