Friday haiku ("Fri-ku"? Bwaha)

Friday night, I glimpse
the stars: holes in the lid of
a firefly jar.

A World Studded with Pennies

Sculpture by Ellen Schroeder

"It is still the first week in January and I've got great plans. I've been thinking about seeing. There are lots of things to see, unwrapped gifts and free surprises. The world is fairly studded and strewn with pennies cast broadside from a generous hand. But -- and this is the point -- who gets excited by a mere penny? If you follow one arrow, if you crouch motionless on a bank to watch a tremulous ripple thrill on the water and are rewarded with the site of a muskrat kit paddling from its den, will you ount that sight a chip of copper only, and go your rueful way? It is dire poverty indeed when a man is so malnourished and fatigued he won't stoop to pick up a penny. But if you cultivate a healthy poverty and simplicity, so that finding a penny will literally make your day, then, since the world is in fact planted in pennies, you have with your poverty bought a lifetime of days. It is that simple. What you see is what you get." -Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

Solidarity

Photo and Drawing by Ellen Schroeder



This past May, I spent some vacation time in Colorado, hiking amongst the Rocky Mountains. During my time there, I was moved by the aspen trees— their unique white and lime green coloring, their scars from animals that covered the lower trunks, their branches at the top that reached for the heavens in such a stunning way. But I was also fascinated by the fact that they always came together—in groves scattered over the hillside—never alone, never too beautiful to be seen with others. And indeed, those groves are really one organism underground. We look at aspens and see individual trees, when they are all connected in a web of solidarity with one another.

"We are caught in an inescapable web of mutuality." Martin Luther King, Jr.

From Wikipedia: "All of the aspens (including the White Poplar) typically grow in large clonal colonies derived from a single seedling, and spreading by means of root suckers; new stems in the colony may appear at up to 30–40 meters from the parent tree. Each individual tree can live for 40–150 years above ground, but the root system of the colony is long-lived. In some cases, this is for thousands of years, sending up new trunks as the older trunks die off above ground. For this reason it is considered to be an indicator of ancient woodlands. One such colony in Utah, given the nickname of "Pando", is claimed to be 80,000 years old, making it possibly the oldest living colony of aspens. Some aspen colonies become very large with time, spreading about a meter per year, eventually covering many hectares. They are able to survive forest fires, since the roots are below the heat of the fire, with new sprouts growing after the fire burns out."