July 10.13
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Your Choice…
The unwelcome fires burning in you
are secretly fed, with fuel
—your old dry broken sticks of thought,
innermost imaginings, cravings crackle
into words, actions
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Your highest, holy will decides:
choose not to feed the fuel of thorns,
the raging fires die down.
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So also, with the Godly fires:
feed them your favorite bouquets of dried flowers,
cherished folded letters, lost prayers,
forgotten words of praise, toss them all—
they burn warm colors of mercy flames,
the strong forgiving light of Love.
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–Quilla
Images of Late September
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Beginnings
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Barn door, perspective
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Sunscape on blue waters
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Autumn morning mist, Beaver Lake
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Bicycle shadows
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September morning sun, wild grass
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Butterfly and shadow, stone
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Bottomland farm, goldenrods, morning mist
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Horsebarn windows and stalls
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Dreamscape
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Dead grasses
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Late, in the colorful story of steel. . . . (closeup of a rusted wheel)
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Autumn roses, morning mist
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Stacked rock wall, spider web
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Begonias in September
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Weeping cedar, hydrangeas, boulder
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Inner depths of brokenness
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Roots and stone
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“September Mountains”, by Jonas Girard
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The last word
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Images of Late August
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An August painting, by Jonas Girard
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Cicada Days, Screech Owl Nights
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August Butterfly on a stone
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Riverside meadow, wild Clematis
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Tiger Swallowtail
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Cicada Days, Screech-Owl Nights……Late August, 2011
(Published in the Yancey Journal and Common Times, August 24, 2011)
These dwindling latesummer mountain days, each morning the closest star (the one we call ‘the sun’) rises a minute or two later, over the eastern trees. Through empty space the tilted earth is always turning, whirling like a top (though we can not feel it) and leaning—toward the sun or away from it, giving us seasons: warmth and chill, shadows and radiance. Plants and animals respond in wise and beautiful ways to the growing or diminishing light. Already there is a yellowing in the leaves. Along roadsides and rivers, Buckeyes have been coloring shades of orange since late July. Birds are mostly silent now, compared with their mating jubilations those noisy mornings in spring and early summer. The fledgling broods have been raised. Countless thousands of them will be leaving in the next month or two, as they have through many centuries of turning light, winging south across the mountains to avoid the coming chill and lack of food.
I sit quietly and read the ancient holy words for thirty minutes or so, sipping strong coffee, watching and thinking, listening to the day awaken. It is my favorite time of day, regardless of the season, seeing life rise again out of darkness. Many of these latesummer mornings begin under a damp blanket of fog, as earth’s moisture condenses in the cooler morning air. The last several days have begun quite refreshingly, temperatures in the fifties. Such relief, after another unusually hot summer.
I’m off to look at a mountain property on upper Doe Bag, secluded high above the Double Island community. One of the joys of my work is driving the back roads of our beautifully varied county: from Cabbage Patch to Flat Top, headwater springs of Indian Creek to the confluence of North and South Toe rivers, and further downstream where they pick up the cooler Cane waters, forming the wild Nolichucky—crashing over boulders down that steep-walled Lost Cove gorge into flatland Tennessee. Some of the most picturesque scenes in Yancey are not the better known ones. It is a lifelong joy—discovering new places and people, revisiting familiar ones rich with the memories of earlier seasons, younger light.
This morning I park on the side of the quiet mountain road, and listen a few minutes. By ten o’clock the trees are already singing with cicadas in the hot sunlight, a sound like coiled rattlesnakes. Growing up, I heard them called ‘Jar Flies’. I’m not certain why. Nearly impossible–to catch one in a jar. (and who would want to?). We rarely see them, as they mostly remain high in the summer trees, singing that sibilant drone the very stones might sing, sizzling in the sun, perhaps something about the end of time….
From the emerald shadows of a wooded cove echoes the haunting latesummer song of another creature very few ever see—the reclusive Blackbilled Cuckoo, sometimes called “Rain Crow” by country folk. Its hollow repetitious one-note lament always sounds far off, softly whimpering, not unlike a panting wounded dog. Old folks said the Rain Crow’s plaintive song foretold rain later in the day. But I’ve listened for many summers, entranced by that hypnotic chant, and many days no rain falls. “Oh well”, as Chief Dan George said dryly in the movie The Little Big Man “sometimes the magic works, and sometimes it doesn’t.”
These latesummer days backroad fencerows are dazzling with a chaos of wildflowers, briers and butterflies. Just to name two of our many late-season blossoms: the soft blue Chicory that closes it sky-colored blooms by mid-day, whose bitter taproot was roasted and ground as a coffee substitute during the early wars when coffee was hard to get. And the tall heathery Joe Pye Weed is one of our favorites, named for an itinerant Native American herb doctor of the 1700’s.
One of the singular joys of latesummer is the host of night sounds, the cacophony of music trilled by a thousand insects in the warm darkness. And in the last week or so I’ve begun hearing the quavering songs of young Screech Owls, crying like ghosts in the orchard trees. Their eerie whinnying is both beautiful, and a bit frightful, evoking a sense of wonder with a childlike sort of shuddering goose-flesh fear. Just two evenings ago I was standing under the hazy stars, listening to this little owl’s enchanting music at the woods’ edge. I am always quietly thrilled with the sweet mysteries of the sound. It is easy to feel how indigenous cultures ascribed dreadful forebodings to the songs of owls: dark music moaning Who?—these fierce flying predators with large eyes that pierce the night. They descend swiftly on silent wings, curved talons opening to seize helpless creatures in the thin light of stars.
Suddenly the whole southwest sky flashes and flickers violet with large sheets of far lightning, too distant for thunder. Perhaps we will wake later in the night, the sound and smell of warm rain falling on the leaves.
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“Latesummer”, by Jonas Girard
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Images of August
Jonas Girard’s splatter wall
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Thunderhead
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NC Arboretum wall
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Jonas Girard, 8.14.10
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Mussel shells, dried river-silt
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Farrah’s favorite quilt, NC Arboretum
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Stephan
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Passage II, by Leigh Wen, at Haen Gallery, Asheville NC
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Zoey with a bagel
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August 14.10, #II, by Jonas Girard
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Rocks, South Estatoe River
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Tiger Swallowtail, Butterfly bush
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Rails
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Goldfinch bathing
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2010, III X by Stephen Pentak, displayed at Haen Gallery, Asheville NC
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The last sunlight
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Ruach 333, by Quilla 