Walk with me. At 7:00 this morning, along the river, in a park where there are dedications to the poet William Stafford. Vultures circling,
fake coyotes unimpressed.
The river glassy and still at the beginning. Reflections that seemed cheerful.
Then the breeze picked up, reflections now undulating, flowing into the waters that opened.
Made me think of William Stafford’s poem that suggests same, for our lives.
Here is Debussy with Reflets dans l’eau. Stay cool this weekend!
Well, I really meant to write bioaesthetics, but since today’s musings relate entirely to bees, we might as well go with bee aesthetics. Bioaesthetics is the scientific field that seeks to understand how humans develop an appreciation of art, derived from their interaction with the environment. Bees have been a large part of these explorations, with scientists particularly interested in the fact that humans depicted bees since art’s beginnings, long before we all became so worried about their potential extinction.
Most of what I am presenting today I learned from an international team of ecologists led by an Australian researcher who calls her self Bee Babette – how can you not love that name…. Kit S. Prendergast and her colleagues looked at representations of all kinds of bees and bumblebees across history, starting with cave drawings, and ending with contemporary film and video games, with everything in between.
They, like so many of us, are concerned with the fact that bees are on the decline due to a variety of factors including natural habitat fragmentation, urbanization, climate change, and pesticide use in agriculture. But they also observed that bee’s gifts to humanity – their pollination, their honey, their wax, made them important throughout the ages. I will leave out the discussions of “neuro-aesthetic appreciation of art in a biologically plausible evolutionary framework … (researchers) thus evaluate how early forms of meaningful communication may utilise existing neural mechanisms and enable contemporary aesthetic art appreciation.” Instead I’ll focus on forms of representation, interspersed with the photographs of (bumble)bees I took in the fields. (You’re welcome….)
The importance of bees is clearly in evidence cross-culturally, and found its way into the arts of many diverse population groups across time. You see bees in 8000-year-old Egyptian hieroglyphs, in European cave art in Spain and on ancient Greek coins, and in religious or spiritual representations across the globe. Bees were symbolized in the Americas long before the colonialists arrived, integrated into Mayan ceremonies. First Nations people in Australia have used the motif of bees for over 65.000 years, found in their oral histories, ceremonies and construction of didgeridoos and their rock art. Bees became an important design feature during the Napoleon era in France, the imperial bee symbolizing the higher-level hardworking goals Napoleon wanted the republic to achieve. Jewelry across the world has represented bees in various configurations.
You find paintings of bees in China even before the Ming Dynasty, 1368–1644. Architecture has used the structure of the beehive from domed Celtic huts, south African Bantu dwellings, Gaudi’s parabolic arches, to Frank Lloyd Wright’s Hanna-Honeycomb House. Buckminster Fuller’s geodesic domes are modeled after bee habitats and found hexagonal heirs in the Eden Project Biomes by Grimshaw Architects (Cornwall, England; 2000–2001), and the world’s largest open air geodesic dome which serves as the headquarters of the American Society for Metals (ASM) International by John Terrence Kelly (Ohio; 1958). (Again, all this can be found in incredible detail with image sources here.)
Renaissance painters used the bee motif in landscape and religious paintings ubiquitously. Fast forward to the 20th century, Joseph Beuys was an ardent admirer of bees and incorporated them into his art practice in multiple ways, using bees wax as well as honey for his paintings and installations. In his wake, multiple artists across Europe started interactive installations with live bees and sculpture combined. One of the most integrated shows is now on view in Liverpool’s World Museum. Wolfgang Buttress’ Bees: A Story of Survival. The video clip show some of the audio-visual experiences that takes you right into the sight and sounds of the bees’ world. One of his previous installations, The Hive at Kew Gardens, is a favorite of mine.
Photo credit: architectsjournal.co.uk
The Hive’s mesh frame is constructed from 170,000 aluminium parts and 1,000 LED lights, which light up according to the vibrations of the bees in the surrounding wildflower meadows. In turn, it activates musical notes in the key of C – the key bees buzz in – with you standing inside this 17 meters high structure, as if in a hive. Check it out, next you visit! It’s awe- inspiring.
And if you can’t travel, the beauty of bees is all around you – easily observed in the late summer fields.
Music today is Schubert’s bee. And for good measure my favorite flight of the bumble bee version from the movie Shine.
This time of year. Perhaps you were even waiting for them. Another go-around with the main characters of the late summer fields: the sun flowers.
I took the images with one of those obscure settings on my iPhone, called mono stage lighting. It brings out the gorgeous architectural structure and patterns of these plants, but it also seemed fitting given the symbolism of the sunflower for Ukraine – times are dark and not getting any lighter for David defending itself against a Goliath.
I can no longer count the number of text messages and emails I get these days asking for donations towards the Presidential election campaign. The one ask I complied with this week came from a different source and about a different need: Historian Timothy Snyder and actor Mark Hamill are raising funds to provide mine sweeping robots for Ukraines regions that are contaminated with explosive ordinances.
It is not just the danger to life and limb, estimated to last for at least a decade even if the war stopped tomorrow. It is also about food security – if you cannot plant the fields because of the mines, you cannot plant the necessary crops to feed your – and other – people.
Hunger has been a weapon of war or political oppression in that region as much as anywhere else in the world. Stalin’s imposed starvation of Ukrainians in the early 1930s cost the lives of almost 4 million people. And contemporary hunger is not restricted to their own country. Millions of people across the world are dependent on Ukrainian food exports and now lacking. These are often the same people who are experiencing starvation tactics in their own recent or current conflicts in Ethiopia, Mali, Myanmar, Nigeria, South Sudan, Syria, Yemen and now Gaza.
“In 1998 the International Criminal Court Statute codified starvation methods as a war crime in international armed conflicts. A 2019 amendment expanded this doctrine to cover non-international armed conflicts – conflicts between states and organized armed groups, or between organized armed groups. In addition to food, the legal definition of starvation also includes deprivation of water, shelter and medical care. A few months back, the United Nations’ human rights chief said in an official statement that Israel’s policies regarding aid in Gaza might amount to a war crime.” (Ref.) Russia is believed of doing the same to Ukraine. Investigative reports by international human rights lawyers are right now presented to the International Criminal Court. (Ref.)
Russia is accused of
“… having engaged in an ever-lengthening list of starvation tactics, besieging entrapped populations, attacking grocery stores and agricultural areas and granaries, deploying land mines on agricultural land, blocking wheat-laden ships from leaving Ukrainian harbors and destroying a critical grain export terminal in Mykolaiv. Moreover, although the U.S. and E.U. exempted fertilizers from sanctions (Russia and Belarus are two of the world’s largest producers), Russia has decided to withhold fertilizers from the market.” (Ref.)
And here I thought to escape doom and gloom in the sunflower field…. but there is still hope. I have a cache of color photographs that radiate yellow optimism! Let’s include one.
And here is the Second Piano Rhapsody on Ukrainian themes (1877) by Mykola Lysenko.
Yesterday I was surrounded by blue beauty – purplish and silvery hues as well, next to riotous oranges and yellows, an absolutely astounding summer garden. I was surprised by so much blue, associating it more with spring, but here it beckoned in all hues and shapes.
Fragmentary Blue
By Robert Frost
I think Frost was onto something here, even for the non-religious. The absence of constraint in that wide space, the promise of fair weather days, the warmth of sun associated with blue skies, the illusion of easy living – all contained in sky blue. Smoke haze, storm clouds, tornadoes, hurricanes, for now kept at bay.
Enjoy the flowers. I will be taking a bit of a break, working on an art project that fully demands my brain and looking forwards to family visiting. Will resume by mid-August.
Music today by Schubert.
Walk with me. Midmorning in the wetlands before the heat rises once again. Yellow meadows, blue skies, make me think suddenly of Ukraine and guilt-infused gratitude rises that here I have the luxury of peaceful meanderings, when others fight for their life. This week has been hard, with all the news in our own country as well, and the inability to decide on what might be the right path forward. When did we even last think about Ukraine, or Gaza for that matter, with our national horror show unfolding?
I chose this walk to leave politics behind me, just watch the birds, but can’t easily let go of so much I read across the last days. Here is a remarkable piece on J.D.Vance from a year ago, that might raise the stakes, if that is even possible. Ukraine will be left in the dust. Well, focus, Heuer. You came out here to recharge, not ruminate.
The bugs are out. So are the bees, legs thickly coated with pollen.
Finches waking up and breakfasting on early elderberries. Bushtits prefer mites on the oak leaves. A pair of kestrels hanging out. Bald eagle observing from on high.
Closer to the water, with slowly drying ponds, hungry nutria. Kingfisher high on his perch. Turtle taking a sun bath.
Some late ducklings, lots of shore birds, the killdeer looking like s/he has a glass eye.
Herons and egrets everywhere, eying each other, herding the geese until some fly off in annoyance.
And then, out of the blue sky, come the pelicans, diving down right in front of me, circling me, eventually coming to rest in the water and starting to preen. These infrequent sightings still make my heart race. In a good way, in this instance.
Gratitude descends. About nature. About the privilege to have access to it and the mobility to enjoy it. About a world in which so, so many people engage in trying to preserve it.
Here are words by William Stafford from over 60 years ago:
Let’s all try to meet the rage without with the wing within.
Listening, I think that’s what Scriabin says…..
Walk with me. A sedate stroll on Sauvie Island, easing us into a week where I will be working on a longer writing project and thus not posting across the 4th of July holiday.
Nature put on a show. Then again, when does it not?
Bloom and setting of fruit happening simultaneously for the black berries.
Oregon grapes already basically ripe,
while Hawthorne berries showed only a hint of the red that will later attract birds and squirrels alike when reaching full saturation.
Oak galls galore, a consequence of chemical injections by wasps who benefit from these growths.
Flowers in the meadows competing for my breathless mutterings – Oh, beauty!
Rufus Towhee hopping around, distracting me away from their nest, while ground squirrels watched with amusement.
Water levels high at the lake, serene at the canals, and small clouds lightening the grey skies.
The ospreys reliably resettled their nest that I visit every year.
If you stand close by, quietly, long enough, there will be coming and going, with lunch provided for those who wait long enough and screech loud enough.
Nature, relying on us to preserve it, since we have stressed it already so close to the limits. Preservation that will be made infinitely harder with the abominal Supreme Court Chevron decision last week which, as Zoe Schlanger at The Atlantic put it, shoved American environmentalism into legal purgatory. Read it and weep. The kneecapping of federal regulators will, of course, not just harm the environment, but also have huge implications for consumer protection.
This implies not just safety for what you eat and drink, or cars and planes, or warnings about chemical agents that might be harmful. It fully embraces the issue of pharmacological treatments, their safety and access granted to them, including the long sought prohibition of oral abortifacients. It also implies that a judge or a panel of judges can make decisions on the availability or necessity of vaccines. Think of another pandemic rolling around, and the judiciary, filled with anti-vaxxers, decides that vaccination is illegal. It will affect labor regulations, from workplace safety to pay requirements to the sales of goods no longer considered fairly made.
We cannot even conceive of the extent of the consequences this decision will have for the American people. Protection blown to the winds like grass seeds.
Justice Kagan’s dissent in Loper Bright Enterprises vs Raimondo is worth contemplating.
“A rule of judicial humility, gives way to a rule of judicial hubris. In one fell swoop, the majority today gives itself exclusive power over every open issue—no matter how expertise-driven or policy-laden—involving the meaning of regulatory law. As if it did not have enough on its plate, the majority turns itself into the country’s administrative czar.”
Regarding stare decisis, the respect for previously made decisions:
“It barely tries to advance the usual factors this Court invokes for overruling precedent. Its justification comes down, in the end, to this: courts must have more say over regulation—over the provision of health care, the protection of the environment, the safety of consumer products, the efficacy of transportation systems, and so on. A longstanding precedent at the crux of administrative governance thus falls victim to a bald assertion of judicial authority. The majority disdains restraint, and grasps for power.“
Mullein has the symbolism attached that it opens channels of communication with a higher power. Man, do we need that…..anybody out there????
Well, so much for sending you off to a holiday week. Enjoy your fireworks while they are still safely regulated in defiance of profiteering at all cost.
Music today is the Prelude to Bach’s Cello Suite # 2 in D-Minor. You can read darkness into it, or, as I do, a moment of hope. Preludes are beginnings – and we can always begin anew, putting things right. Eventually. Hopefully.
Rather than spend time reading today, I encourage you to listen. Classical composer Lisa Illean creates music that is often serene, able to soften the knots in your stomach, head, back, or soul – wherever the pain currently resides.
If you want to read nonetheless and need to know a little bit more about the focus of her work, here are the composer’s words describing it.
Although most of the movements are inspired by oceans and waves, I picked the album for today’s photographs of caterpillars on common ragwort, who, too, are arcing, stilling, bending and gathering. They are cinnabar caterpillars who will molt into cinnabar moths, which play a key role in successfully controlling ragwort, a toxic weed poisonous to livestock.
They use nature’s tricks well. Newly hatched larvae feed from the underneath of ragwort leaves and absorb toxic and bitter tasting alkaloid substances from the food plants, becoming unpalatable themselves. The bright colors of both the larvae and the moths act as warning signs, so they are seldom eaten by predators, other than cuckoos! Not too many of those around here.
Here is the music.
Ragwort patch
One of those weeks. Between the heat and a body with its own intentions I had to cancel all planned outings, miffed and distraught. As luck would have it, a friend sent out a poem that shut me up and set me right. It converts disappointment into the insight that all moments matter. They all contain their very own history, asking us to value what is, not what has been or might come along. We are embedded in a timeline, each moment of its own importance.
“So it happens that I am and look.” Which is what I did. At a single plant on my balcony, a blue salvia visited by the occasional humming bird, the bees preferring its neighboring lavender and the yellow zinnias (this year’s color scheme in solidarity with Ukraine. Much good it will do, other than reminding me to be a witness. But I digress.)
No Title Required
It has come to this: I’m sitting under a tree
beside a river
on a sunny morning.
It’s an insignificant event
and won’t go down in history.
It’s not battles and pacts,
where motives are scrutinized,
or noteworthy tyrannicides.
And yet I’m sitting by this river, that’s a fact.
And since I’m here
I must have come from somewhere,
and before that
I must have turned up in many other places,
exactly like the conquerors of nations
before setting sail.
Even a passing moment has its fertile past,
its Friday before Saturday,
its May before June.
Its horizons are no less real
than those that a marshal’s field glasses might scan.
This tree is a poplar that’s been rooted here for years.
The river is the Raba; it didn’t spring up yesterday.
The path leading through the bushes
wasn’t beaten last week.
The wind had to blow the clouds here
before it could blow them away.
And though nothing much is going on nearby,
the world is no poorer in details for that.
It’s just as grounded, just as definite
as when migrating races held it captive.
Conspiracies aren’t the only things shrouded in silence.
Retinues of reasons don’t trail coronations alone.
Anniversaries of revolutions may roll around,
but so do oval pebbles encircling the bay.
The tapestry of circumstance is intricate and dense.
Ants stitching in the grass.
The grass sewn into the ground.
The pattern of a wave being needled by a twig.
So it happens that I am and look.
Above me a white butterfly is fluttering through the air
on wings that are its alone,
and a shadow skims through my hands
that is none other than itself, no one else’s but its own.
When I see such things, I’m no longer sure
that what’s important
is more important than what’s not.
By Wislawa Szymborska
From Poems New and Collected 1957-1997
Here is music about a summer garden.
If you like vistas, wildflowers and wondrous limestone ponds, come walk with me around a lake or two at the southern side of Mt. Hood.
If, on the other hand, you prefer your landscapes more accessibly packaged into paintings, go see the current show at Maryhill Museum on the northern side of the Columbia river. One of the artists, Erik Sandgren, is giving a talk about The Columbia River: Wallula to the Sea featuring works by Thomas Jefferson Kitts and Erik Sandgren this Saturday, June 15, 2024 from 2 – 4 pm. I will report on the work likely next week.
I had the fortune to explore Trillium Lake on a day with perfect weather, wispy clouds in a blue sky, snow-capped mountain brilliantly lit, green exploding all around me. Created in 1960 by the US Department of Fish and Wildlife by damming Mud Creek, a tributary to the Salmon River, the lake has become a favorite of day visitors, engaged in canoeing, kayaking, paddle boarding and angling. There is also a campground for longer stays.
The place is jumping, conveniently located less than a 2 hour drive from Portland, offering an easy, flat trail around its circumference with recently repaired boardwalk and bridges, and plenty of trout. The views were pretty, if crowded.
The wildflowers were abundant, many only now coming into bud.
Knotflower
Salmonberry, false Solomon seal, wind anemone, horn violets, monkey flower, skunk cabbage, shooting star primula, bear grass about to bloom and same for rhododendron.
Trillium on their last leg, wild strawberries and elderberry in full swing.
Bald eagles and other raptors circled overhead, dragon flies and butterflies rested here and there.
Marshes rimmed the lake and old growth forest contained quite a few campsites.
It was uplifting, but paled in comparison to the second stop of our June excursion, Little Crater Lake. It is a 45′ ft deep pond formed by dissolving limestone, fed by spring at the bottom and Little Crater Creek.
The water is crystal clear, with colors changing depending on where you look – overall it has a turquoise appearance where it is deep, at the rims there are orange shades where the water is less deep, covering the stone. Due to the properties of the aquifers it is 34 degrees cold year round (swimming – wisely – prohibited.)
You reach the lake by wandering through a pristine, mysterious meadow, clouds of yellow pine tree pollen wafting through the air. The path goes around the tiny lake – more of a pond – and eventually connects with the Pacific Crest National Scenic Trail.
I did not make it that far – too busy photographing the wondrous jewel from all angles, with light tinging both marsh, water edges and water with flecks of gold, setting off the bluish green with contrast. Submerged logs seemed in a state of suspension, the only movement coming from small ripples set in motion by the wind.
A silent spot, you could hear the pines, cedars and hemlocks sighing in the breeze, if you listened closely, occasionally interrupted by a screeching jay.
The meadows were damp, closer to marshes, rimmed with lupines in full bloom, stippled with camas and the occasional mountain bluebell, all softly merging with the greenest of green of fresh cordgrass.
It is late spring at the foot of the mountain. I hope for many returns during the months leading in and out of summer. These outings restore the soul. They also restore the body, if you don’t overdo it, because of the kind of stress relief that they provide: activating the parasympathetic nervous system, the one that handles physiological processes like digestion and breathing.
Lupines and Buttercups
I believe this is what many people overlook – we are so geared towards thinking that only meditation or some other mindfulness practice can relax us to the point where it restores balance to our overly busy systems, that it doesn’t dawn on us there are other ways to disconnect – doing something while doing not much of anything required.
Veratrum
In fact there are many, many people for whom a total disconnect as achieved in meditation, or sitting still and doing absolutely nothing, produces an enormous amount of anxiety or guilt: we are so trained to be productive or responsible for being on all the time to care for others’ needs, that disengagement has the paradoxical effect of making us panic. And then we feel the added shame that we are not accomplishing our meditation goals!
Engaging in focused activity that you enjoy, like cooking, gardening, reading to your kids, or ambling along a nature path, is indeed more healing for some people, particularly those with generalized anxiety, than completely disconnecting. (Ref.)
Walking in the woods around a lake, starting to listen to the wind or the waves instead of the inner voices of “you should!” or “have you?” is an acceptable alternative to meditation, partly because we consider connection to nature a positive, justifiable endeavor. Listening to the former sounds makes it easy not to listen to the latter inner voices, with no guilt attached.
Mountain Bluebell
Mindfulness, in other words, does not need to be disconnected from any old activity. You just need to find one that allows you to focus and that is sufficiently attention holding, that the old worries can be kept at bay. I recommend sitting under a tree at Little Carter Lake with a journal or a camera….
Music today honors the trouts – again….with a particularly poignant farewell recording.
Walk with me. Be warned, though, you need to bring your ear plugs. I, of course, had no clue that they would be needed. The one day last week that I was able to hike was also the day that the Oregon International Airshow opened. Officially it started in the evening, but planes were already practicing during the day, low in the skies over Hillsboro where I happened to make my way through the wetlands.
The noise was deafening, and since I didn’t know then that the air show was slated, my thoughts went immediately to images of training for war, or some kind of emergency. Catastrophic thinking seems to be on a hair trigger these days. I wonder why.
I have written fairly recently about the soundscape of war and its long lasting psychological implications, for people living through war and suffering from PTSD. (Link for new readers, below). So, today I’ll just be looking at the positive side of things and share with you the sights. It will distract me from the fact that only 20% or so of all Oregonians voted, and the candidates I favored were, with few exceptions, not elected. Apathy sure enables the march towards less progressive times.
Here is a link to a video from the airshow that provides a bit of the noise that visitors experience. I was immediately underneath the planes at the time during practice, as you can see from the photographs.
The rest of nature’s sounds were drowned out, particularly the soft twittering from the songbirds and swallows who I had come to photograph.
It was so beautiful to watch them loop around before they went into the nesting sites, or met with their mates on top of them, that I soon forgot the distraction and focused on shimmering cerulean blues and teals and whites instead.
Flora was ready to compete, pink swaths of mallows coloring the meadow, pink valerian (sea foam) dotting the grass, and pink bleeding hearts hiding in the underbrush. Coral bells just about to blush.
Mystery Pink
Bright yellow popped up here and there, with common toadflax, buttercups and thapsias.
There were blue lupines, purplish blue wild irises, and camassia.
Whites everywhere, a perfect match to the white clouds above, the white of the arrowheads, the blackberry blossoms, the cowslip, the dog roses in large clusters, you name it.
Piercy’s poem captures it to perfection, even though we are still in May, not June and the lilies still hesitant. The mood was matched – as long as you kept your hands over your ears, plugging them with your fingers.
The first lily of June opens its red mouth.
All over the sand road where we walk
multiflora rose climbs trees cascading
white or pink blossoms, simple, intense
the scene drifting like colored mist.
The arrowhead is spreading its creamy
clumps of flower and the blackberries
are blooming in the thickets. Season of
joy for the bee. The green will never
again be so green, so purely and lushly
new, grass lifting its wheaty seedheads
into the wind. Rich fresh wine
of June, we stagger into you smeared
with pollen, overcome as the turtle
laying her eggs in roadside sand.
BY MARGE PIERCY
Let’s have some cheerful music from a lovely debut album that brings warmer temperatures back into memory.
