Tag Archives: nature photography

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Metaphorical Mammoth…Trip Phase 2

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After two days in Shawnee, we struck camp and headed out south and east.  Steve suggested Mammoth Cave National Park as our next destination.  He’d never been there, and I hadn’t been there in over 40 years.   We took our time getting there, having decided that we would eschew interstate highways as much as possible.  Kentucky countryside in October really took our breath away and just about won us over.  We felt right at home…for a while.  Reminders of Wendell Berry and Barbara Kingsolver colored our interior landscape, but our exterior sightings began to speak urgently in other voices.  Every quarter mile or so, there was a Baptist Church with a slogan on its marquee or a Romney/Ryan sign in someone’s disheveled yard.  The National Park and National Forest boosted our faith.  The rangers were intelligent, articulate, and friendly.  Their awareness is broad-based; they can discuss archaeology, geology, history and the present with ease.  We stopped at two different public libraries to get information as well.  Scanning the “Kentucky Section”, we hit such landmarks as Bluegrass Music, Edgar Cayce, Muhlenberg County, Daniel Boone, and The Kentucky Derby.  As we drove along the Green River valley, I was singing in my head, “Daddy, won’t you take me back to Muhlenberg County/Down by the Green River, where Paradise lay?/ Well, I’m sorry my son, but you’re too late in askin’;/ Mr. Peabody’s coal train has hauled it away.”  Gas stations and barns had signs posted: “We Support Coal”.  Questions:  Why are we here?  What are we looking for?  What are we doing?  What do we want to learn on this trip?  More about that later.  For now, some photos of Kentucky…

The Green River, Kentucky
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A Flower’s Name and Nature

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I learned that the blue flower growing in my garden and all over the Wehr Nature Center woods is called scilla siberica (wood squill) and is native to southwestern Russia, the Caucasus and Turkey.  I am guessing that settlers brought it over here about a hundred years ago.  I’m tickled that we have parts of our name in common!  I am thinking more about the settlers and their way of life while I wait to hear about the outcome of my Old World Wisconsin interview.  What did they find different about the flora and fauna here?  What did they miss from the old country?  How does the emotional connection to land, a place, a “mother country” develop, and what did it feel like to venture out from there to an unknown place?

scilla siberica

Memories are sweet; what is here right now is also sweet. 

I find myself using more energy to be present with what is right in front of me.  When I retreat to my memories, I take that energy and shelter it deep within myself.  It feels like I’m hiding, in a way.  It’s not easy to allow anyone else to inhabit that place.  It’s slow and calm and secret.

I have a memory garden.  It blooms with the flowers of the old country: my babies, my husband, my house, my youth.  I like to visit it and inhale its familiar fragrance.  I am alone there. 

The world of the present is all around that secret garden.  It asks to be acknowledged, appreciated, and invited into my deep consciousness. 

I could call this my “settler’s mind”.   But there really is no division.  Here, there, then, now…it’s all fluid, connected, like the roots and rhizomes of wild flowers.

“One of the illusions of life is that the present hour is not the critical, decisive hour. Write it on your heart that every day is the best day of the year.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson

Every day is the best day, every place you are is the best place.