The Summer Rains

This is always my favorite season in which to photograph the little house on the high desert.
So much personality and panache.

Zoë's Find

Yup, there he is. All coiled and politely warning all passersby that he is not happy; no, not at all. Kids found him and had a bit of a time keeping silly Zoë from harassing him into striking.
Long story short, he was too close to home and had to be culled from the herd, ending up in the skillet. Not a task to be taken lightly no matter the species or temperature of blood, he fell swiftly to a .38 shot shell. Better he than my children or their dogs.
A bit of red wine and butter, a coating of salt and flour, and a little searing heat went far in creating a little treat of the creature. Enjoyed and respected by all, if his brothers find themselves in the same area, he serves warning that they might find themselves digested into the same circles of life...

Changes

Long summer day. Hot and dry, but things are changing and clouds are forming...

A bit of a fire above Spring City..

An ash just landed in my hand as I was sitting here at the cabin about six miles away from the fire that started just a couple of hours ago.

For the July Reading, Today

Subsumption

I

An act of volition

subsumed in a translucent, viscous relationship,

a love begetting futures like honey 

in a tree-trunk hive.

Altogether a brightening morn with dew moist grass,

sky promising rain to those flowers 

from whence comes the love of honey 

every long day.

II

As such, the emotional connection is a fluid promise

between communities of two, three, four, and so many more than 

seven-

as children of the mind and sea,

heart and valley,

belly and massif,

soul and gorge.

Repetitive and underground in the midst of a prototype global economy,

parasitic, predatory, socially scientific;

fissures naturally swell in the doors of perception 

as sinewy, ravenous rakes sweat out the harvest again.

III

Thanks again to a future begotten

in a tree hive with blackening storm clouds

closing fast,

loam and gut digesting the verge as do male and female in their own way;

Crest and trough, 

Peak and valley 

the snapping beak and shrewd eye of a raptor sweeping that same harvest field

near to the tree

where the bees make their honey 

and we plan that they will for a long while  yet.

Another Walk on the Mountain

H.D.T.

One hundred and ninety six years ago, the author of Walden, friend and pupil to Ralph Waldo Emerson, and fellow ideologue and spiritual cousin of Walt Whitman, Henry David Thoreau was born in Concord, Massachusetts.
Truly a man with a mission.