Viewing all posts in the category "Ed’s Corner"

I have heard this time of year, mid-May until the beginning of July, referred to as ‘The High Tide of Life’. It seems an apt image to me, as the green world is definitely growing and flowering and seeding. Insects are doing their usual multiplying, bird song fills the early morning air, baby animals abound. Life everywhere seems to be teeming, moving, and busy. If I close my eyes and think about all this activity as a whole, I can almost see the high tide of life swelling upward toward a high-water mark before receding again toward autumn. We partake of this tide with readying gardens, cutting the grass, putting in new flowers, spring cleaning, trying to get in a hike or two. And although we might not always see it, our activity is a necessary current in this rising tide, lapping up next to the animals and the plants and the earth that make up this green surge.

High tide

So ride the wave while it’s here!

A sea of dandelion parachutes

You can go home again (after rounding 3rd base)…

My youngest son, Nathaniel, age 9, just joined the rookie league of our town’s Little League program. I think having an older brother Rhys who loves the game accounts for Nathaniel’s baseball leanings. Besides games of catch, I know I wasn’t the catalyst. Honestly, I don’t know who won the last World Series. So we signed him up, got the necessary gear, he was given a uniform and the coolest hat – with a rattle snake on it because of the team’s name, the Diamondbacks. The ‘Garter Snakes’ would, I’m sure, not carry the intended impact. Nor would my suggestion that Nathaniel play some non-competitive baseball (?) with his friends.

Looking for home

Two nights ago the team had its first practice at our local field, located next to a busy railroad line, with all the tootings and screechings and clangings you can imagine. A busy road, treacherous to cross, intersects the tracks right there, horns, brakes and exhaust are common. Litter is strewn along the banks of the railroad tracks where a walking path runs alongside, and the small stream below the pedestrian bridge is also blanketed with litter. Very busy Route 59 is within easy earshot of the playing field, so you never lack for car and truck noise, and completing the scene is a bus station and big parking lot.

But despite all this, the two playing fields were green, fresh, and on this evening had eight children of varying abilities, running, laughing, catching, batting, having fun.         

The garter snakes?

So here I was, sitting in the bleachers, getting darker and colder, telling myself that I will get into this baseball thing, when I see something big glide to the top of a tall light pole, a red-tailed hawk. Then after 5 minutes, without a sound, the hawk flew toward third base to the top of another pole and hung around for a while longer. Perhaps scouting out a future meal in the form of some of the youngest, smaller players?! It felt that this bird of prey felt very comfortable here.

And then, just above the playing field, flew, with almost slow motion wing flaps, a blue heron, neck back in typical ‘S’ position, legs extended out and back, taking its time as players and coaches below were intent with the action on-field, unaware of what was flying silently 25 feet above the field. It landed in a by-then darkened area outside the fence, almost straight outward from second base.

I guess home plate on the field feels more home to me now. In quite a few ways.

Wow (with-out words) Moments

We just tapped our last maple trees for this season and the forecast calls for a continuation of the great sugaring weather we have had – cold nights and warmer days. This has been a wonderful year for collecting and boiling sap, and we’ve thoroughly enjoyed our tapping time here at camp and throughout our nearby communities.

Looking up at maples

Maple Sugaring is, by far, our most popular public program. Perhaps it is the getting out-of-doors after a long winter; participating in the seasonal rhythm and change; learning something you can do at home as a family; enjoying that ‘amber aristocrat of all sweets’ – maple syrup. The first part of our program is indoors, learning about the history and biology of maple trees and syrup, how to identify maples, tools needed, etc. Then with high expectations the whole group marches over to an untapped sugar maple. Surrounded by a very quiet circle of people of all ages, with drill in hand, I start to slowly drill at a slight upward angle and say to myself, “Oh, please let it have been cold enough last night and warm enough right now for the sap to drip!” That quiet hush is still over the crowd, and after about 10 seconds of drilling we notice the bark beneath the hole getting wet. It’s a dripping day! There is laughter, some chattering and then a deep silence again as I take the drill out and begin to hammer in the spout. Once it’s in one can feel the charge in the air as the crowd waits for that first ‘official’ drop of sap from the spout. It comes slowly down the spout, seems to wait an extra second hanging at the spout’s edge and then falls to the ground. There is an audible gasp from the crowd. And many exclamations of ‘wow!’.

The first drop

Sometimes there are no words to express what we are experiencing. We can’t find them or we feel they wouldn’t do justice to what is happening. I interpret ‘wow’ as ‘with-out words’. Words are symbols, not the real thing or event, and words sometimes only lessen the experience of reality. Rumi says that “words are like fingers pointing to the moon and we think that they are the moon.”

Along the same line, Vincent Van Gogh said, “It is not the language of painters but the language of flowers which one should listen to, the feelings for the things themselves, for reality is more important than the feelings for pictures.”

Still-Hunting this past summer (without words)

At The Nature Place we fervently believe in providing opportunities for children and adults to experience many ‘wow’ moments, magic moments, and the world of nature is certainly teeming with wonder for us all.

So we go from Rumi to Van Gogh and now to Calvin and Hobbes:

We look into Calvin and Hobbes trudging, sled in hand, through newly fallen snow.

Calvin: Wow, it really snowed last night! Isn’t it wonderful?
Hobbes: Everything familiar has disappeared! The world looks brand-new!
Calvin: A new year.. a fresh clean start!
Hobbes: It’s like having a big white sheet of paper to draw on!
Calvin: A day full of possibilities!
Calvin: It’s a magical world Hobbes, ol’ Buddy…

… and as they both are sitting on the sled, going down a hill, Calvin says, “…lets’ go exploring!”

And I invite you all to come exploring with us.

The ‘official’ word is that the groundhog did not see his shadow on February 2. But here in Chestnut Ridge where I live, a mile from camp, it was sunny in the morning so shadows would definitely abound if the groundhog ever did come out of the ground. Does that mean that here at camp we’re in for 6 more weeks of winter while everyone else enjoys an early spring?

While I am writing this I can look out the office window and see my first crocus flowers of the season. They always surprise me because I just don’t expect them with snow still on the ground. Seeing them also tells me that if I go back to our swamp and move some snow around with my foot I will probably find the flowers of the skunk cabbage. And then my mind goes to other expectations, like the return from the south of flocks of male red-winged blackbirds. I guess I’m experiencing a bit of very early spring fever; but there is one annual activity that always keeps me grounded, busy and in the moment: it’s maple syrup time! Cold nights and warmer days call us out to our sugar maple trees to tap them, collect the sap and boil it down to maple syrup. Forty gallons of sap will make 1 (only one!) gallon of syrup, so you can imagine how much boiling is necessary.

Hopefully all this talk of sap and syrup has got you pining (mapleing?) for a maple sugaring experience of your very own. If so, you’re in luck, and can join us as we tap our maples on March 2nd. See details about our maple sugaring program here.

Beginnings

Camp beginning

Our new calendars by now hang on our walls and announce when we see January prominently displayed that it is the beginning of a new year. I wonder if all those who have diced and sliced pieces of time in the past and who have come up with this system would be surprised that most of us have agreed that this is how we will divide up time? There are so many ways to look at time. Many who are tuned-in to nature’s cycles will proclaim that the vernal equinox, the first day of spring, is really the beginning of the year, agriculturally speaking. And there are many of us who feel that September, with the start of a new school year (a 10 month year!) is more of a beginning because much of our daily rhythms revolve around our children’s school lives.

I know many kids who think of the first day of camp as their beginning of the most wonder-full time of their year.

And the baseball fans among us – is spring training their beginning?

Or could it be birthdays? Or college graduation day? Or a wedding day?

And then we come to what I call ‘the zeros’, numbers so high that I can’t put my brain around them, i.e. the age of the universe, when the earth was first formed, when life first appeared.

There are beginnings everywhere when you come to think of it. Our New Year’s resolutions, the beginnings (sort of) of a new you; puddles evaporating, the beginning of new clouds, new rain, new spring flowers.

However you measure time, however you see beginnings, we at The Nature Place want to wish you a happy and joyful beginning.

And believe it or not, camp does begin soon.