Beauty – Light Morning

Seasonal Images: Autumn 2021

Glimpses of Light Morning’s homesteading lifestyle in autumn.
Links to photos from earlier seasons are here.
(Click on any image to enter slideshow mode.)

A 47-year-old summer tradition at Light Morning:
Canning tomatoes on a wood cook-stove.
Over 100 quarts so far this year.
Links to photos from earlier seasons are here.
(Click on any image to enter slideshow mode.)

Seasonal Images: Winter 2020

The winter of 2020-21 at Light Morning.
Links to photos from earlier seasons are here.
(Click on any image to enter slideshow mode.)

Seasonal Images: Autumn 2020

Glimpses of Autumn at Light Morning and down the road.
The photos from Spring and Summer are here and here.
(Click on any image to enter slideshow mode.)

Befriending Dangerous Neighbors

How do we learn to live with those who might do us harm? What if some of our neighbors are dangerous? Why wouldn’t we simply move away; or cause them to move away; or try to do them in? How do we balance caution with compassion?

Very occasionally an all-too-human friend or neighbor has become sufficiently unhinged to be dangerous. More often, however, it’s been one of the other-than-human creatures with whom we share this land who has tested our willingness to be neighborly. When the path that Dorothy, the Tin Man, and the Scarecrow are following leads into a dark wood — in the film version of Frank Baum’s The Wizard of Oz — their fears run away with them.

“Lions and tigers and bears, oh my!” they exclaim. “Lions and tigers and bears!”

We’ve never seen, outside of our dreams, any tigers at Light Morning. By slightly paraphrasing Dorothy’s fearful refrain, though, we can easily relate to it: “Lions and serpents and bears, oh my! Lions and serpents and bears!” Stories about our encounters with mountain lions and black bears may be shared later. This story is about learning to live with venomous serpents.

Seasonal Images: Summer 2020

This week’s post continues a tradition of looking at the season gone by through the lens of my iPhone 8 camera. (The Spring 2020 seasonal images are here.) The photos are from the two-mile walks that Joyce and I take along the gravel road that leads to and from Light Morning; or from the garden that Ron and Joyce and I tend; or from elsewhere on the land. Now and then the images will be clues to those who lived here before we first fell in love with the land in 1973.

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Seasonal Images: Spring 2020

Most of the following photos are from the morning walks that Joyce and I take along the gravel road that leads to Light Morning. Now and then I’ll pause to use my cell phone camera to honor strange neighbors, easily overlooked beauty, and scattered remnants of the families who farmed this land long before we arrived on the scene.

(Click on any image to enter slideshow mode.)

The Gift of Beauty

Joyce and I are walking down a North Carolina beach at dawn. It’s mid-September. The twilit sky is pale blue-gray, with shadings of mauve and orange. We pause, moved by the muted colors and the soft background murmur of surf.

Then, without warning, we are overtaken from behind by a flight of brown pelicans, eight or nine of them, gliding low overhead in perfect formation. Their watchful eyes are serene, their elegantly angular bodies motionless, as they suddenly come into our field of vision.

The beauty of the moment strikes us with an intensity edging on anguish. Joyce feels her fuses being blown, as though only a small dose of such high-voltage beauty can be safely taken in before some self-protective mechanism goes into shut-down mode.

Category: Beauty