Flowers and photographs may fade, but digital files, for the moment, seem to last a little longer.

That’s why I take so many photos and save them to a storage drive.

They can’t evoke the scents or the tactile features, and they can only approximate the feeling, but there will come a time when they are all we have. Memories fade too, sometimes quicker than photos.

Is healing just another kind of forgetting?

“We were once enwombed in the earth and the silence of the body remembers that dark, inner longing. Fashioned from clay, we carry the memory of the earth. Ancient, forgotten things stir within our hearts, memories from the time before the mind was born. Within us are depths that keep watch. These are depths that no words can trawl or light unriddle.” – John O’Donohue

“The beauty of the imagination is that it can discover such magnificent vastness inside a tiny space. Our culture is dominated by quantity. Even those who have plenty hunger for more and more. Everywhere around us, the reign of quantity extends and multiplies. Sadly the voyage of greed has all the urgency but no sense of destination. Desire becomes inflated and loses all sense of vision and proportion. When beauty becomes an acquisition it brings no delight.” – John O’Donohue

“In the light of beauty, the strategies of the ego melt like a web against a candle.” – John O’Donohue

“THE BEAUTY OF THE EARTH IS THE FIRST BEAUTY.

Millions of years before us the earth lived in wild elegance. Landscape is the first-born of creation. Sculpted with huge patience over millennia, landscape has enormous diversity of shape, presence and memory.” ~ John O’Donohue

“Our neon times have neglected and evaded the depth-kingdoms of interiority in favour of the ghost realms of cyberspace. Our world becomes reduced to intense but transient foreground. We have unlearned the patience and attention of lingering at the thresholds where the unknown awaits us. We have become haunted pilgrims addicted to distraction and driven by the speed and colour of images.” ~ John O’Donohue

There are some weeks you don’t really want to remember, weeks that are filled with sadness and strife, loss and suffering, or just thunder and rain. You don’t want to remember those weeks, but you know you must, if only to feel better about other ones. This past week we lost Andy’s Dad, so if postings have been a little slim, you’ll understand why. [Here is the online obituary from the Times Union.]

The peonies stole most of the show, and we were grateful for their beauty.

A sunny coreopsis.

A shady nook.

The bashful and the beautiful.

Black and white.

A voyage.

Father’s Day.

NO VOYAGE

By Mary Oliver

I wake earlier, now that the birds have come
And sing in the unfailing trees.
On a cot by an open window
I lie like land used up, while spring unfolds.

Now of all voyagers I remember, who among them
Did not board ship with grief among their maps?—
Till it seemed men never go somewhere, they only leave
Wherever they are, when the dying begins.

For myself, I find my wanting life
Implores no novelty and no disguise of distance;
Where, in what country, might I put down these thoughts,
Who still am citizen of this fallen city?

On a cot by an open window, I lie and remember
While the birds in the trees sing of the circle of time.
Let the dying go on, and let me, if I can,
Inherit from disaster before I move.

O, I go to see the great ships ride from harbor,
And my wounds leap with impatience; yet I turn back
To sort the weeping ruins of my house:
Here or nowhere I will make peace with the fact.

A butterfly in black and white peruses one of the Chinese dogwoods in our backyard. Its wings flutter slightly, almost in slow-motion. The effect is magical. Calming. It is a much smaller thing than these photos might make it appear. I barely noticed it.

When you stop to look closer at the world, it opens up to receive you.

After the ride home from Boston, a badly-needed dip in the pool was just what was needed. The only problem was that with the removal of a decent-sized cherry tree that once provided a shaded corner, the entire pool is now wide open to the sun (and in just under an hour I had already gained a minor burn on my shoulders for being out for the first time in months).

I improvised with a colorful umbrella, a leftover from last year’s absence of a proper canopy. Now that we have the latter, the extra bit of portable shade could be moved closer to the pool, where I hung myself on the edge, dangled my body into the water, and graciously gave thanks for the smaller charms of a hot afternoon.