What do you see?

Everywhere I look I see a haze of green emerging on trees and bushes. It’s the time of year when I can’t stop looking and asking myself

What do you see?

Everything is changing quickly now, and with the rain predicted for tonight and tomorrow, I imagine that the changes may accelerate even more. More green, more leaves, more spring flowers!

This morning I took a walk at Big Willow Park in Minnetonka. In the marsh I saw two red winged blackbirds perched on last last year’s cattails, singing their territorial songs. Such beauty in a commonly seen and heard bird! But how many people walking this path today will really see and hear them?

Further on a group of geese swam and honked in the marshy area beside the path. One might say, “It’s just a bunch of geese.” Or one who is looking and listening might exclaim at the wonder of these magnificent birds.

We are here to witness the creation and to abet it.
― Annie Dillard, Teaching a Stone to Talk: Expeditions and Encounters

I was looking for wildflowers along the path and saw lots of scilla and some wild ginger just emerging from the ground. Then I hiked to an area where there is a colony of bloodroot plants each year, to see if they were in bloom yet. I found only a single bud that had managed to rise above last year’s fallen leaves. And I delighted in its grace and beauty. But I wondered how many people walked by without even noticing the tiny bud with its leaf furled around its stem.

Our life is a faint tracing on the surface of mystery, like the idle curved tunnels of leaf miners on the face of a leaf. We must somehow take a wider view, look at the whole landscape, really see it, and describe what’s going on here. Then we can at least wail the right question into the swaddling band of darkness, or, if it comes to that, choir the proper praise.
― Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

When I walk in the woods I want to see and hear and feel it all and I want to take in the miracle of life, beauty, existence, and even of death. It’s all here all around us all the time.

While I was on my way to look for the bloodroot flowers I saw a pileated woodpecker fly across the path ahead of me and land on a tree near the path. Because I had only my 50 mm lens with me, I wasn’t able to get a good closeup of this beautiful bird but I managed to make a couple of photos AND as I stood and admired the woodpecker, I saw it pause, look around, and then slowly climb up the tree and enter it’s nest through a large round hole in the tree. What a gift! New life!

Now I can come back with my longer lens and lots of patience and wait to see if I can make photographs of the woodpecker and its young ones after they hatch.

At a certain point, you say to the woods, to the sea, to the mountains, the world, Now I am ready. Now I will stop and be wholly attentive. You empty yourself and wait, listening.

   — Annie Dillard

Is not the greening of the world that happens every year a miracle? The trees, flowers, bushes, grasses pulse with life as the days lengthen and temperatures rise.

Chloroplasts bear chlorophyll; they give the green world its color, and they carry out the business of photosynthesis. Around the inside perimeter of each gigantic cell trailed a continuous loop of these bright green dots. They spun . . . they pulsed, pressed, and thronged . . . they shone, they swarmed in ever-shifting files around and around the edge of the cell; they wandered, they charged, they milled, raced . . . they flowed and trooped greenly . . . All the green in the planted world consists of these whole, rounded chloroplasts . . . If you analyze a molecule of chlorophyll itself, what you get is one hundred thirty-six atoms of hydrogen, carbon, oxygen, and nitrogen arranged in an exact and complex relationship around a central ring. At the ring’s center is a single atom of magnesium. Now: If you remove the atom of magnesium and in its place put an atom of iron, you get a molecule of hemoglobin. The iron atom combines with all the other atoms to make red blood, the streaming red dots in the goldfish’s tail.
― Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

What do you love about this season? And when you go to the woods and walk what do you see?

May you walk in beauty.

Do you see the pilated woodpecker?

Wild ginger plants emerging

Scilla flowers

Bloodroot bud

Pilated woodpecker looking into nest hole