#NewThisDay Writing From My Photo Stream
Red Maple Wings, June-Dried
Homecoming, to the river and woods, the dogs and everything that has bloomed or browned since I left a week ago. All spring, I have followed the red maple wings, marveling at their complex beauty, rosy fresh glow, the promise and serendipity of their fanciful landings on plants and earth – wherever they please. And, this morning, as I walk and walk and walk, reconnecting with this land I love near the Charles River, I find this pair of wings, dangling from a branch, past its peak, browned and even more beautiful than it was when fresh and new, rosy pink and riding the wind. A little sunlight through seed is enlightenment.
Having been in the hands of a master storyteller all week, I miss the entrancing engine of Martin Shaw's voice in my ears. I find a podcast interview recording, and listen, for a very small part of my walk. It's too much. He's saying so much with every sentence I cannot take it all in and hold it all at once. Instead, I turn it off, I keep walking, I keep meeting all the life and death and promise and failure of these woods, this river, and I let my soul be still and satisfied, grateful and engorged.
“Myth is not much to do with the past, but a kind of magical present that can flood our lives when the conditions are just so. It is not just the neurosis of us humans trying to fathom our place on earth, but sometimes the earth actually speaking back to us. That’s why some stories can be hard to approach, they are not necessarily formed from a human point of view.”
Suzi & Charlie in the Meadow
All photos and text copyright Kelly DuMar 2017 unless otherwise attributed