Heron Walk

Just your average Great Blue Heron moving deliberately toward the shore catching fish (didn't get that picture) and trying to get out of the camera's view. No music, just the heron. Taken with a digital SLR and a zoom lens.

A Family Scene At Home

I wanted to title this one, the family that sits together, but I thought better of it.


Anyway, stopped by Lebanon Hills Regional Park in Eagan on Friday and took a short walk at Jensen Lake. I came across this laid-back group just sitting. They could have cared less than I was there. I got a tired eye, but I guess they knew I was friendly. And just a few feet away sat the fourth of the family, I assume.

Not far away were these trees, 

still with the greens of summer,

but soon to fade, I'm sad to say.

On a sign nearby, this wondrous quote.

A Primeval Place

The park, Ravensburg State Park, was one of many Civilian Conservation Corps projects of the late depression-era. As if the waterway and rocks were not enough, the CCC architecture has earned the park a place on the National Register of Historic Places.

The park sits in the gorge created over the millennia by Rauchtown Creek. The creek along with the freezing and thawing in the sandstone created the spires known as Castle Rocks. They are back there, behind the picnic area and the CCC dam-created swimming hole. I never remember exploring them when young. Dry, dull sandstone doesn’t have the attraction of the water and rocks of the run.


But there was something about The Rocks that made them more than a babbling book. I remember standing by the falls made by the dam and listening. I had no words for it. I couldn’t describe it. It just felt real. True. Something to depend on; something that would always be there.



Odd, isn’t it, to speak of water in those terms? Maybe it was the ancient mountains and rocks that helped. Maybe it was the primal knowledge that these rocks and this water path had been around for a long time. The Rocks is green and mossy and alive. It provides life and food and sustenance. It is off the beaten path- alive only briefly- but what an explosion of life. There are dense stands of trees along the Run. Only the dam area is in the “open,” a necessity of construction no doubt. A few yards up- or down-stream the sun is shaded, the temperature drops noticeably and the sound of the water increases.



Some places are holy for various reasons for various people. What draws some of us to parched deserts and others to the prodigal wildness of places like The Rocks? Why do some have a constant irresistible pull from an invisible God in a visible universe while others look at you like you’re speaking a foreign language?

Headwaters

At the Headwaters of the Mississippi:

To trace the history of a river or a raindrop . . . is also to trace the history of the soul, the history of the mind descending and arising in the body. In both, we constantly seek and stumble upon divinity, which like feeding the lake, and the spring becoming a waterfall, feeds, spills, falls, and feeds itself all over again. — (Gretel Ehrlich, Islands, The Universe, Home)

Wisdom from a Seneca Elder

Life was like water; it flowed on like a river and then entered a great sea and mingled in a vast pool of life.

Old age was like a tree whose branches had been broken by storms and whose trunk had become weather-beaten and decayed.

Good words were like flowers that bloomed and bore seed that lived on after the flowers had withered.

--Seneca archaeologist Arthur Caswell Parker, in his biography of Chief Red Jacket

Inspire to Action

Iron rusts from disuse,

stagnant water loses its purity and

in cold weather becomes frozen:

even so does inaction sap the vigor

of the mind.

-Leonardo da Vinci

Sky Over Sky

Gulf Shores, AL

February 7, 2014

Reflection

It is life, I think, to watch the water.

A man can learn so many things.

--Nicholas Sparks

Pondering Deep Roots

A passage from the remarkable book, The Telling Room by Michael Paterniti. Paterniti is responding to a transcendent moment in Spain, speaking of the life of the cheese maker he's been following. He reflects on the ancient life on the Spanish meseta where the cheese maker has always lived:

Divinity, Not Machines

I craved divinity. I was thinking about how Ambrosio [the cheese maker] had said he spoke to animals, as if they were close friends, confiding in them. ... I wanted to live in a realm where I could talk to animals, where all the generations of my family had once resided, where I might take daily strength in them, and where I'd live antlered by meaning and mysticism.

For me that resonated with my growing up in the West Branch Valley of north central Pennsylvania. Where Pine Creek joined the Susquehanna River I was rooted and grounded. A few years ago I started reflecting on that childhood homeland. That has been the early stirrings of writing that I hope to spend significant time working on when I move toward retirement in December. Paterniti's description spoke to me of my own roots in that land in Pennsylvania.

It is what pulled me there over five years ago to ride the Pine Creek Rail Trail for my 60 miles for 60 years 60th birthday ride. It's what moves and inspires me when I look at that picture above this post on the banner of this blog. It is what stirs me when I think of the Bald Eagle Mountain on the southern boundary of the Valley or the Depression Era park I always called The Rocks. It may even be what so smoothly directed me to a church denomination that knew that area while still inhabited by the natives who called the Creek Tiadaghton.

It is the pull of water and trees;
Green hills and
Bald Eagles.

It is the mountains known as
Endless
But in the end were, for me,
Too limiting.

Yet they remain to define the
deepest places of my soul.

My soul, still,
decades after becoming a Midwesterner,
is solidly growing from the
rich geology, geography, river soil and
grandeur of that Valley.

Time will tell if I can tell that story. It is one of the dreams of what will become my Third Career starting in 2014. It will not be retirement; it will be a time of digging into that soil, pruning branches, examining the roots- and branches- that are fed by the memory of those mountains and waters.

The Rushing Waters

“Hark!” she said; “I hear a rushing,
Hear a roaring and a rushing,
Hear the Falls of Minnehaha
Calling to me from a distance!

Lazy Day in Door County

Ephraim, WI

Scan from slide

Date unknown

A Spring Stroll

Bridge at Silver Lake

Rochester, MN

5/15/11

Having Fun After the Picture is Taken

I can't resist trying to be artistic. Here is the original, slightly edited for sharpness and contrast only.:

Here's my first edit of it using Paint Shop Pro. It has two layers with blending, opacity, finding some edges and highlighting them etc:

Now, here's the second edit. Same  two layers with some differences in clarity, etc.:

And finally, number 3 edit. This one adds a third layer using Paint Shop Pro's brush strokes to give  it more of a painting look:

Original picture taken in Gulf Shores, AL, last week.

Shadows and Silhouettes

Mississippi River

Memphis, TN

2/17/2003

At the Heart of Winter

Whitewater State Park, MN

January 2, 2011

A Picture for (and from) Today

The Mississippi River at St. Paul from the Wabasha St. Bridge

October 30, 2012

Fun- But True

Sunset Pondering

Apostle Islands,WI

August, 2005

Sacred Waters 4

Pine Creek

Cammal, PA

Sacred Waters 3

West Branch Susquehanna River

Lock Haven, PA