All posts by laurahinnj

Small truths, Snapshots, Wanderings

Without a map

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Along the northern shore of Lake Michigan… a pic taken at a stop along the way to somewhere else… a chance to stretch our legs and see what there was to see.

I was struck by the familiar… the feel of the wind in my hair and dunes dotted with tansies. I filled the pockets of my jeans with tiny purple mussels cast ashore and wondered at a sea without salt and waves without a tide.

Explorers believed the world had an edge and they could fall off if they went wrong.

I think they were right.

This world is full of edges and falls. That horizon might be a new world or it could be a cliff.

Still, this is true.

I look around me and find the horizon is only a line drawn in the sky… a kind of dare.

For navigating… there’s the fear map that directs me back to shore where it’s safe and dry and comfortable. But following that map means going backwards. And backwards causes my heart to sink, really.

Always, there’s the straight line, the *I know exactly where I mean to be* map. I keep thinking I can somehow convince myself of this, so long as I keep both hands on the wheel and don’t let my hair become undone.

Mostly I’ve given up on that, lately. My record at trying to control the world ain’t so great, plus it makes my shoulders hurt.

😉

Instead I find myself wandering willy-nilly, easily distracted and with too much play in the steering wheel as I look at the sky… my heart and my head in their own happy argument… an argument that’s sweetly wrong, but which pushes me into trouble at awkward times and which laughs me through disaster.

Who can deny it?

“Breathe,” I keep telling myself. Feel. See. It seems simple, but is so very, very hard.

I keep forgetting.

The sea reminds me. This sea. The waves pound it at me, each a different ride, each a different possibility of diving or floating, of swimming or drifting.

The world insists itself like a lover. “Take me. Take this moment… this, now.”

Snapshots, Wanderings

Naming the dragons

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“What’s the use of their having names,” the Gnat said, “if they won’t answer to them?”

“No use to them,” said Alice, “but it’s useful to the people that name them, I suppose.”

— Lewis Carrol

A person who goes traveling to far-flung places with the express purpose of seeing things should, I guess, be concerned with the naming of those things.

I rather enjoy the mystery, and the magic, of meeting these fierce-looking creatures in their own strange paradise of wet meadows and sunny paths through the forest without knowing much at all about them.

Their names don’t much matter when I find them basking in the sun on a weathered plank bridge or stunned with the chill off one of the Great Lakes. Theirs is a world entire and to be allowed entry, however briefly with the lens of my camera, is enough.

Mostly.

😉

Some are so beautiful, so otherworldly, their faces so expressive…

or their existence so threatened that even the shimmer of an iridescent wing is enough to inspire me to learn more.

For those of you Type A personalities that just HAVE TO KNOW (grin) each photo is tagged with a name, as best I can guess or remember. Click on each to enlarge.

Snapshots, Wanderings, Wildflowers

An orange hemiparasite and lily

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A beautiful Indian Paintbrush glimmers from damp sedgy meadows on the Door Penisula of Wisconsin. This gorgeous member of the figwort family is saddled with the rather ignominious rank of a hemiparasite. Oh! What is a hemiparasite you may ask… a hemiparasite is a plant that derives some of its sustenance from other plants. In the case of our beautiful paintbrush, it taps into the roots of various grasses.

Our orange flamer has a bit of Spanish flair to it… the genus name is Castilleja. This name honors the great Spanish botanist Domingo Castillejo, who plucked plants in the 18th century. The specific epithet is coccinea, which means scarlet – a fitting descriptor for our showy hemiparasite.

Many believe the brilliant orange floral parts to be flower petals. No, they are not. The eye-catching sprays of orange are in fact brightly colored bracts, which are modified leaves that subtend the true flowers. And it’s a good thing the paintbrush is adorned with those festive bracts, as the true flowers are greenish bits of nothingness.

Beads of water glisten like jewels on the tepals of a stunning Wood Lily. Uncommon and always a treat, these lilies glowed like beacons from the perennial gloom of a boreal forest edge in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. I think that orange flowers are especially attention grabbing. Perhaps this is because orange is not a particularly common color in nature. In any event, these plants, when in full bloom, hit the eye with the force of a barreling Mack truck.

Another reason that the Wood Lily is conspicuous is that it is our only native Lilium in which the flowers are held perfectly upright. All of the others droop or nod.

Suffer a spider bite lately? Native Americans would have you believe that this is the cure… they ground up Wood Lily plants and made a thick paste, which was then slathered onto the area affected by the spider bite.

The allure of lilies dates to the beginnings of the written word… witness this quote from the bible: “… Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin; and yet I say unto you, that even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these.” (Matthew 6:28-29)

Snapshots, Wanderings

Rocks with pictures worn

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Rising from stormy waters and crowned by old forests, the sandstone cliffs of Pictured Rocks stretch for 15 miles along Lake Superior’s southern shoreline.

Historically the land of the Ojibwa, the rugged beauty of Pictured Rocks makes it easy for one to imagine a world shaped by unseen spirits, when in fact the formations are a work of nature, carved by water and time.

A couple hour boat ride from the little marina in Munising is the way we saw them today and despite the choppy seas and cold temps (50 degrees!) – any discomfort was quickly forgotten once I had a cup of coffee in hand and stable ground underfoot.

The pics speak for themselves, I think. Michigan’s Upper Peninsula is remote, but breathtakingly beautiful in so many ways that make the trip worthwhile.

From the field, Small truths

The flower salesman

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I know the faces of most of the homeless in the town where I do my field work; many have sat across the desk from me at one time or another and others I just recognize from seeing them around town.

But I was caught by surprise with his flower-laden hands; the roses stolen, I’m nearly certain, from a streetside bush. “I love your hair!” he shouted at me as he crossed the street while I got in my car. Polite to a fault, I smiled and thanked him and closed the car door in his face.

Then I realized he meant to give me some of those flowers. Or so I thought.

😉

Inwardly cursing my good manners, I rolled down the window and smiled some more and listened to his story. Because there’s always at least one good long one. Something in my face brings out the storyteller in people.

Really, I think I must have *I’m a social worker. Tell me every last one of your troubles, please!” stamped across my forehead in ink that everyone but me can see.

Turns out he’s a Vet that lives in a tent in the woods beyond Deal Lake in Asbury. Has a small army of children that eat up the majority of his VA pension with child support. His mind is still mostly somewhere in Vietnam, as he referred over and over to what his Captain says, as if that weren’t forty-some years ago.

I’d guess it was about 10 minutes into our conversation, when he wanted money for the freely offered roses, that he regretted ever throwing a compliment my way.

Cast aside was the smiling white lady who might have money in exchange for a sad story. She was replaced by the social worker with suggestions for where he might find a place to stay for a while, a list of phone numbers and more unsolicited advice than he cared to listen to.

I left him finally with my business card, some change from the bucket I keep in the car for tolls and a bit of inside information that might just make some real difference in his life.

The application list for rental assistance opened in Asbury today. Only today. People wait for years on those lists, wait for decades for the list even to be open. Most people find out after the fact, when it’s too late. Many of the people who need rental assistance never read a newspaper where the announcement and application are published.

I told him to take the money I’d *paid* him for the flowers and buy himself today’s paper so he could submit the application right away and have it postmarked in time.

He thanked me and ambled away across the street, not realizing I was watching him from the intersection while I waited for the light to change. He crossed Main St. and went straight to the liquor store with my money in his pocket.

I’m hoping he bought today’s paper and not a bottle.

Answers come, I suspect, in the form of angels sent to us unaware. So often we’re upheld by giants of Kindness and Hope, by the kind of people who you pass on the street and feel sorry for because they are poor or uneducated or unable to speak much English. Together with the burden of all the sad stories I hear, I like to imagine the benefit of understanding and knowing deeply that true treasures wait here, that a certain kind of strength and confidence resides in the exact places and in the very people you’d least expect.

His rose, suspended in a small ceramic vase on the fridge, will remind me of that for the next couple days.

Whatever

Clouds

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All afternoon, Sir,
your ambassadors have been turning
into lakes and rivers.
At first they were just clouds, like any other.
Then they swelled and swirled; then they hung very still;
then they broke open. This is, I suppose,
just one of the common miracles,
a transformation, not a vision,
not an answer, not a proof, but I put it
there, close against my heart, where the need is, and it serves

the purpose. I go on, soaked through, my hair
slicked back;
like corn, or wheat, shining and useful.

Clouds by Mary Oliver

I wonder if it’d been raining for a month straight when Mary Oliver wrote this poem.

😉

The sky cleared early this evening and the light was just gorgeous the way it lit up the tips of the oak leaves, the white of the kingbird’s tail feathers, the sand at the edge of the ocean.

Whatever
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There will be a Father’s Day post, but right now it feels like pulling teeth.

😉

Hope it was happy for all and was spent in whatever way made you happiest.