I heard from Ruffles.
"These are the days," she said.
And she reminded me not to forget that this is a time of corn festivals, the time of
the Loaf, the bright leaf
Bright flower & fruit time known as FIRST HARVEST...
A really bountiful time.
Threshold dates of its beginning: AUGUST 1 -7th.
In the Celtic tradition, a time of making a keep sake promise for ‘A year & a day.’
I do think of it as a threshold time--like a bridge between summer and autumn. A time to turn toward harvests and the moon.
She also sent photos from her magical garden
Dittany of Crete
--Greek Oregano, A Romaine lettuce bundle gone to puffs, Yerba Buena , Spearmint Flowering to puffs--
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I love to imagine Ruffles in her garden.
A few days ago, she texted this:
Wonderful to think isn’t it About Virgil, the poet/writer of Epics~~Aenead That people of more ancient times read his GEORGICS, the praise & love & care of the land, of earth & tending farm.... CRAZY, but I felt that about ALL the many families that I visited when in Montana ~~ Haying season, after all. I woke up one morning at 4 am to wind & light rain really making the branches of a pine tree dance outside my window ... & a long summer day ahead! I had to laugh, because I was thinking about Virgil! I think there must be a ‘convening’ of energies From times present & past ...about love of land, those energies gather when you are in nature.... so many songs, paintings, writings, journals kept , gardens of all sizes tended, conservancies . Just now The bird songs are so crisp & fresh in the pepper tree.
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We are heading up to Montana ourselves. Actually Wyoming. Utah and and Idaho. Yosemite.
I just finished Terry Tempest Williams, The Hour of Land: A Personal Topography of America's National Parks.
Like her friend, the poet Jorie Graham, she is such a national treasure. Like Ruffles, she believes that this is the hour of the land.
For Terry Tempest Williams the land--and the preservation of our parks-- is an ecology of humility --one that leads into an ecology of awe. We are not protecting grizzlies from extinction --it is the grizzlies that are protecting us from extinction of the experience of the world beyond ourselves. She says so beautifully that our stewardship is the privilege of our imagination.
Restoration as a homecoming (like Odysseus' second task, after he had finally come home) I agree with her it is a test of human imagination, like Richter's re-composition of Vivaldi's four seasons... re-imagining and a renewal.
Like Ruffles in her garden.
And she ends her book with a discussion of the words removed from the Oxford Junior dictionary... words like hazelnut and bramble; tulip and turnip..
Whaaaaat?
And in their place? Chatroom and celebrity; vandalism and voicemail...
These are the days.
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