Tag Archives: Woody

1337. Of winter’s lifeless world each tree now seems a perfect part; yet each one holds spring’s secret deep down within its heart. ~Edited quote by Charles G. Stater

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Now winter nights enlarge
The number of their hours;
And clouds their storms discharge
Upon the airy towers…
~Thomas Campion

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Gray, foggy dreariness
ushered in the day;
A mist, a cold, frigid drizzle,
fell from on high;
Bare, starkly austere, lay everything
I could see; and
Silence, a stilled quietude, blanketed
my wintry garden.
Bleakly naked, towered tall trees that
stood above all else,
But underneath them from the secret place
murmured a voice,
The sacred, almost indistinguishable, faint
whisper emerged amid
The fog and fine rain to go forward undetected
past the woody sentinels
To allow its utterances to break into morn’s reverie
to tell of signs, longed for signs
Of tiny sparks of life that are preparing to push up
despite the gloominess
And ‘twas this message that stirred embers in my spirit
to keep their glimmer from
Becoming far too dim to continue sustaining my hope,
expectations, and “joie de vie.”

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Don’t think the garden loses its ecstasy in winter.
It’s quiet, but the roots are down there riotous.
~Rumi

The tempest comes out from its chamber, the cold from the driving winds. ~Job 37:9 ✝

**Both photos taken by Natalie

297. Hand in hand, with fairy grace, will we sing, and bless this place. ~William Shakespeare, English poet and playwright

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No child but must remember laying his head in the grass,
staring into the infinitesimal forest
and seeing it grow populous with fairy armies.
~Robert Louis Stevenson, Scottish poet

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Digitalis, from the Latin Digitabulum, a thimble, derives its common name from the shape of its flowers that resemble the finger of a glove.  It’s a flower we call Foxglove, which delights to grow in deep hollows and woody dells.  However, it was originally called Folksglove because that’s where they, fairies or “good folk,” were thought to live.  Folksglove is one of the oldest names for Digitalis (Foxglove) and is mentioned in a list of plants as old as the time of Edward III.  The earliest known form of the word is the Anglo-Saxon foxes glofa (the glove of the fox, and the Norwegian name Revbielde that translates to Foxbell alludes to the Fox.  It is a name which may have come about from a northern legend about bad fairies who supposedly gave the blossoms of Digitalis to foxes to be put upon their toes so as to soften their tread when prowling amongst the roosts.

I adore Foxglove and believe no other flower in the garden lends itself better to stories of fairies and elves than it does.  Its dangling thimbles or gloves or bells or fingers or whatever one might call them look like enchanted, magical places where children would naturally look for the “wee folk” to lurk.  Nor is it surprising that there have been suppositions claiming the mottling in the flowers mark, like the spots on butterfly wings and on the tails of peacocks and pheasants, where elves have placed their fingers.  Though no longer a child, I have to agree in part with the writer Charles de Lint who penned, “We call them faerie.  We don’t believe in them.  Our loss.”  Sometimes, it does one a world of good to remember what it was like to be an imaginative child, full of awe and wonder and given to flights of fantasy.

Happy is he who still loves
something he loved in the nursery:
He has not been broken in two by time;
he is not two men, but one,
and he has saved not only his soul but his life.
~G. K. Chesterton, English writer, poet,
and lay theologian

If we opened our mind with enjoyment, we might
find tranquil pleasures spread about us on every side.
We might live with the angels that visit us on every sunbeam,
and sit with the fairies who wait on every flower.
~Samuel Smiles, Scottish author

May the Lord give you increase, both you and your children.  May you be blessed by the Lord, who made heaven and earth.  ~Psalm 115:14-15   ✝

199. Every leaf speaks bliss to me, fluttering down from the autumn tree… ~Emily Brontë

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How silently they tumble down
And come to rest upon the ground
To lay a carpet, rich and rare,
Beneath the trees without a care,
Content to sleep, their work well done,
Colors gleaming in the sun.
~Elsie N. Brady

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Pat.  Pat, pat.  Pat, pat, pat.  Pat.  Pat, pat.  Pat.  Pat, pat, pat.  “Listen to the falling rain; listen to it fall.”  A remembered lyric from an old José Feliciano song ran through my mind.  But wait, I didn’t feel anything wet and the afternoon sun was shining in a cloudless sky.  So if it wasn’t rain, what on earth had I heard behind me.  As I turned to investigate, I saw that it was indeed raining, but not in the way I expected.  November’s gusting winds were letting loose hundreds of colored leaves from their woody perches.  The ones not already brought down by the rains of recent days were not tumbling down silently as Brady suggests; they were pelting the shed, the greenhouse, the birdbaths, and the ground so forcefully that they sounded like huge raindrops.  So it was pouring all right; it was raining leaf after leaf after leaf, pretty autumn tinted leaves, and the air in which they were dancing was made gold and red and ripe.

For You make me glad by Your deeds, Lord; I sing for joy at what Your hands have done.  ~Psalm 92:4  ✝