A Phone Gallery Full of Beauty

Sometimes I look through my camera gallery and am totally wowed that the world is this beautiful and all we have to do to witness it all is plant a native plant or hike in a prairie or walk down the road or open a window. I want to take you into our world for a moment. Is this your world too?

Elm Argid Sawfly larvae eating the leaf of an American Elm:

Gray Hairstreak butterfly nectaring on Rattlesnake Master:

Saddleback caterpillars dining on Patchouli. This is a houseplant we put on the porch for the summer and we learned saddlebacks eat many different kinds of plants including many ornamentals. I became aware of their presence by picking off dead leaves and getting stung. ha! It's not the worst sting I've ever had by any measure and we were so excited they hosted right on the porch. Our first couple of finds were years ago on beech tree trunks. 

Wetland vegetation at Ohio Bird Sanctuary. Add in knowledge of the beaver dam and you have a positively swoon worthy environment.

A sunny reservoir where we swam and soaked up the rays this summer and early fall, but also...

witnessed White-rumped Sandpipers co-mingling with a flock of Killdeer. Look at those last few sentences...astonishing! Wondrous! Jim McCormac's book, Birds of Ohio, is such a delightful reference for tidbits of natural history like this. Spending time during migration at big bodies of water offers a big sky and a big beach...both offering views of nonhuman (& human) beings living their lives. 

The beauty of prairie eliciting smiles, always. I'm glad to scroll my camera gallery and see smiles on our faces. Kamama Praire, Ohio: 

A shelter made from grass seeds and silk. Who might live here? How exquisite. 

Wavy-lined Emerald. That green! How we love that green. Host plants: aster, coneflower, goldenrod, ragweed and more. Resting on oak.

There were DOZENS of Tawny-edged Skippers on Blue Mistflower a few weeks ago in Highland County, OH. It was totally enchanting and also interesting to note their host plant are grasses. Native and non-native. 

Pennsylvania Leatherwings on Goldenrod. There were HUNDREDS. How important must these plants be to them?

We adore people working so hard to support other lives. This prairie patch is not only gorgeous, but was hopping with bumble bees in a place without many other wildflowers. The purple martins flew overhead in great numbers thanks to a carefully cared for nesting system provided for them. Biking to get here made it even better. Human powered.

Reminders of who lived before. Past, present and future are always comingled. We find relentless learning and observation to be the way of understanding and forward thinking & motion. 

This Figwort (always a favorite!) grows in a low spot roadside. Other plants tell the story of a fairly intact native plant community; one that is exciting and that should be respected and encouraged. The for sale sign and access driveway tell the tale of another way. Which will it be? At this point in time, humans get to decide. And to decide well, we must know. We must observe. We must learn. We must appreciate lives other than our own.

Choosing co-habitation with nonhuman life at our house, we live in a mixture of inside and outside, frequently with open windows and open doors. How else can we hear the whole world? Camping is a natural extension of our everyday life, but simpler. This time is precious to us; in fact it's probably quite likely essential given how we feel while doing so and for a time afterward. 

The hikes in big, big, big open spaces are different than much of our homeland, but they renew us and continue to become more crucial for renewal.

Sheyenne National Grassland: 

Badlands in North Dakota:

Red Velvet Ant (actually a wasp!) in all her magnificence.

Lichens making soil. 

Cactus seeds preparing to make more cacti.

Hope in people. Hope in non-profits. How grateful we are for you!

Hoary Vervain:

One moment I don't have a picture for, but that remains in the gallery of my mind is the unseen, but yipping coyote. I sat in my chair in Morrow County, OH watching the sky for diurnal migrating raptors and monarchs (with much success) and all of a sudden, about 20' away near a huge brush pile (hidden by tall native plants) came one series of yips. Only one series, but unmistakable. The smile spread huge on my face then and appears even now as I write. Steve and I share space with so many lives, with as much of the real world as can live here and I still cannot believe how many said yes to our invitation. Coyotes don't live long around here due to misinformed people, but she or he was there, right near me. I know they knew I was there and what they said I do not know. Maybe just a friendly hello because they know how very much they mean to me. 

What a gift to pay attention....and to feel LOVE.

Soundtracks:

Greta Van Fleet: Age of Man

Hozier: Take Me to Church

Vince Staples: Cotton

Bebe Stockwell & Wesley Schultz: Ant Farm

Kevin Morby: Badlands

Videos to wow you:

Bird Migration

Caterpillars (password: Milkweed)

Our YouTube Channel:

The Common Milkweed

Home and Away

We are not settled people. Dreamers. Thinkers. Readers. Adventurers. Rewilders. That's us. Challenging beliefs. Challenging ways to live. Challenging ourselves. Maybe returning to where we began?

Unsettler #1:

Unsettler #2:

We are home amongst the plants and the birds and the rivers, so home is many places and many places seem to be what we require for happiness. 

Sweet Pinkster Azalea, Rhododendron canescens:

Purple Thistle, Cirsium horridulum:

Common Sweetleaf, Symplocos tinctoria:

Rainbow Scarab Dung Beetle working a dog poop pile:

Wolf Spider:

Gopher Tortoise:

Clear, clear, clear water:

Home and away with away also being home...it's not the easiest place to live from, but it is a beautiful and exciting place to live from. 

Our feet need to move. 

Our eyes need to see new landscapes. 

Our noses want to smell new smells. 

Our skins crave new winds. Hot. Cold. Anything but the same.

Our hands want new soil to touch. New plants. New rocks. New becomes familiar. New becomes home.

Silk moth cocoons greet us everywhere. We've never seen so many! We aren't sure of the species on this one, but...

we also find passed-on luna moths everywhere. 

Steve embraces new landscapes like it's air. He requires them to live. How lucky we are to have found one another!

Steve can't hold tight as well as this lizard, but he tries. 

Our minds quiet. Our spirits settle. This will always be us. Both. Nomadic with a jumping off point. Our presence, a safety check for the land that said yes in Morrow County, Ohio. The land that grows plants we planted. That shelters and welcomes insects and birds with these plants. We are the barrier from the cutter downers. The mowers. The non-acknowledgers of the human place in the world - in the natural world. 

The unisexual ambystomid salamander eggs are safe in their handmade vernal pool:

The rewilded and protected land shelters out of range birds every winter for the last three winters. A gray catbird and an American robin both drink water in a wildly frozen and snow covered land. Both find fruiting staghorn berries to eat so they might survive.

Coyotes pass through this land unharassed and with shelter from the harassers. 

We live here and we live away and living away allows us to live here. It settles us here, too, and when we start to get grouchy and restless, we know it's time to go and so we do. 

We see interesting things everywhere and we learn from people who know. It's remarkable what humans can do and learn and share. From my Pops: "Jennifer Anne that is a very old high pressure pump probably used in the oil wells. It’s too old to have been used in fracking! The pipe flanges are common for high pressure. We had pumps similar to that at Foamex. The pumps were for moving a slurry resin with a great deal of solids. The pump rotor is like a very coarse pitch screw and the housing is mated to the pitch but female."

We hike 50 miles between Suwannee River State Park and Stephen Foster Folk Culture Center State Park. We camp in the sand and exfoliate ourselves for days. 

New friends are old friends. I can't write how much this delights us. Old friends, right next to our tent. 

American Persimmon:

We sweat. A lot. And then we dip in the Suwannee River. We feel the watery relief envelop us and we think we've never felt anything so good.

We get dirty and the simplicity of the days makes us not care. We walk endlessly. We eat when we can. We pick off ticks, itch chigger bites, blacken a toenail (Jennifer, always). We find gifts everywhere. Dumped ice from a work crew becomes our saving grace at the end of a very hot, 17 miler day. We suck ice, walk and zone out. Present.

A picnic shelter from a friendly Florida Trail neighbor offers a perfect place to dry our gear from the prior night's thunderstorm. To sit at a table feels regal. A plug present offers juice for our phones, but we didn't bring our plug so we stay on airplane mode. A gift in itself.

We are aware of the difference in wildlife species and seasonality from our sticks and brick home. The northern parulas sing along with the yellow-throated warblers, pine warblers, blue-gray gnatcatchers, yellow-throated and blue-headed vireos. Alligators live in the water. Sandhill cranes sing and hunt with the great-blue herons and great egrets. The cricket frogs tap, tap, tap. Just like marbles. 

We acknowledge the labor of humans in the past hoping for a similar program for the humans now.

When we get off the trail, we sleep out of the back of our truck. Everything has a place. The ledges. The pouches. The wood drawer. Another home. We feel comfort. We sit up cozy and snug reading.

The cats call our names home, but we tell them soon. We must recharge. We must be in our other home. We must become whole. We must become ourselves. And to do that, we must be home AND away. 

Home and away. We can't be one thing because then we become not us. What a gift to know this. 

We travel home to unsettled weather. How fitting! 

Skunk cabbage flowers and leafs out, resilient in the frozen temperatures:

Wanderers. The both of us. Where can we go next? What are the trails?

Photo: Michelle Stitzlein 

Playlist:

The Talking Heads - This Must be the Place

the Bakers Basement - Come to Terms with Going Ghost

Kathleen Edwards - Little Red Ranger

Kishi Bashi - Chiba Funk

Capercaillee - S' Och A' Dhomhnaill Oig Ghaolaich