a winters hike

"That all the jarring notes of life

Seem blending in a psalm

And the angles of its strife

Slow rounding into calm.

And so the shadows fall apart,

And so the west-winds play;

And all the windows of my heart

I open to the day."

John Greenleaf Whittier, 1919

Gratitude for bees...

“The careful insect 'midst his works I view, Now from the flowers exhaust the fragrant dew, With golden treasures load his little thighs, And steer his distant journey through the skies.”  John Gay

emerging spring...

blueberry blossoms

Yesterday the twig was brown and bare

To-day the glint of green is there

Tomorrow will be leaflets spare
I know no thing so wondrous fair,
No miracle so strangely rare.
I wonder what will next be there!
L.H. Bailey

Daffodils

I wandered lonely as a cloud

   That floats on high o'er vales and hills,

When all at once I saw a crowd,

   A host, of golden daffodils;

Beside the lake, beneath the trees,

Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.

Continuous as the stars that shine

   And twinkle on the Milky Way,

They stretched in never-ending line

   Along the margin of a bay:

Ten thousand saw I at a glance,

Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.

The waves beside them danced, but they

   Out-did the sparkling leaves in glee:

A Poet could not but be gay,

   In such a jocund company:

I gazed—and gazed—but little thought

What wealth the show to me had brought:

 For oft, when on my couch I lie

In vacant or in pensive mood,

They flash upon that inward eye

   Which is the bliss of solitude;

And then my heart with pleasure fills,

And dances with the daffodils.

~William Wordswort

Loveliest of trees, the cherry now

Is hung with bloom along the bough,

And stands about the woodland ride

Wearing white for Eastertide.

Now, of my threescore years and ten,

Twenty will not come again,

And take from seventy springs a score,

It only leaves me fifty more.

And since to look at things in bloom

Fifty springs are little room,

About the woodlands I will go

To see the cherry hung with snow A.E. Housman

The Sound of the Sea

The Sound of the Sea

a poem by Henry Longfellow

The sea awoke at midnight from its sleep,

And round the pebbly beaches far and wide

I heard the first wave of the rising tide

Rush onward with uninterrupted sweep;

A voice out of the silence of the deep,

A sound mysteriously multiplied

As of a cataract from the mountain's side,

Or roar of winds upon a wooded steep.

So comes to us at times, from the unknown

And inaccessible solitudes of being,

The rushing of the sea-tides of the soul;

And inspirations, that we deem our own,

Are some divine of foreshadowing and foreseeing

Of things beyond our reason or control

hummingbirds

Within my Garden, rides a Bird
a poem by Emily Dickinson

Within my Garden, rides a Bird
Upon a single Wheel --
Whose spokes a dizzy Music make
As 'twere a travelling Mill --

He never stops, but slackens
Above the Ripest Rose --
Partakes without alighting
And praises as he goes,

Till every spice is tasted --
And then his Fairy Gig
Reels in remoter atmospheres --
And I rejoin my Dog,

And He and I, perplex us,
If positive, 'twere we --
Or bore the Garden in the Brain
This Curiosity --

But He, the best Logician,
Refers my clumsy eye --
To just vibrating Blossoms!
An Exquisite Reply!