The Truth About Maple Trees: This is how I see it

I took these photographs because what I was seeing 'caught my eye'.

The maple seeds at my feet spoke to me. I've labeled this series of photographs "Textures".

I found this encounter profound. (click on the photographs, they get bigger.)

You can begin to see why this is named "Textures".

These seeds caught my eye and made me think.


















And then there was this. These maple leaves are producing next years seeds, or did the seeds produce the maple tree? It's a puzzle isn't it?

In western culture this is an enigma. Which came first, the chicken or the egg. It's not a problem for me.

Things just seem to keep going.


So I'm just spending a lazy summer afternoon thinking on the back porch and not a worry on my mind.

If George W. Bush decides to destroy the world what does that mean? Well it means he's a fool, for one thing. And of course, from the preceding evidence, this world will not be destroyed. Life is to strong!! Even G.W. Bush cannot destroy reality! Like Hitler his concepts are just a distortion, another wave in the matrix of the space time continuum. He and his ilk suppose there is an end to things. How foolish they are.

The Buddhists have a concept of time more appropriate to what we can deduce here. It involves huge amounts of time which eclipses the 6000 years that others assign to the human experience and it corresponds more easily to science. We have 4 billion more years of sunlight available to us. Do you think G.W. Bush can keep the maple trees from growing forever?



http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kalpa_(time_unit)



We're lead to understand that the sun will explode in another 4 billion years and that we will all be extinguished.



http://www.frontiernet.net/~docbob/sun.htm



Then what? Well things seem to continue, as my photographs allude and here we are.

We're here to stay, and if we fail again, let's try again.

Let's do better next time.

That's how I see it.

Text and photographs Copyright 2008 David H. Roche

This Happened A few Minutes Ago: Now Something Else Is Happening

Along the hedge these beauties blossom.

(you can see them better if you click on the photographs.)

I don't know what they are, but my ex called them 'Wind Flowers'. I still call them that.


These are definitely tulips...

they and the wind flowers are some of the earliest spring flowers.

Busy stuff,
buzzy stuff










It seems that the blue attracts

more attention than the white

A crocus opens to the sun







Yellow is also a big part in April.

Daffodils appear for a few short weeks.



Dazzling!








Text and photographs Copyright 2008 David H. Roche

A Dog Named Boo

Click photos to enlarge.

The Two of Us

She has followed me quietly through the house,

halting a step behind me when I stop.

Looking down I find her gazing up placidly with brown eyes

that have taken me inside of her for 11 years now.

Bending I pet her head; speaking softly

while holding her graying muzzle in my palm.

She begins to wiggle like a puppy

and her eyes betray a light

that wasn't there a moment before.

There's something here for both of us.

Boo came into my life in the summer of 1996 when I rescued her from the pound.

In the first year or two of our time together I found a lump on her back which turned out to be cancerous. The vet removed it and no problem remained.

Winter or summer she loved to go out and sit on the hill overlooking the lake. Especially on Moby Dick, a mound of snow that would blow in around the car in the driveway and form what looked like a great white whale.

Sometimes she would charge down the hill to meet her pal who lived at the bottom of the hill. They would go sniffing around together, enjoying dog stuff.

Boo was a gentle spirit with soft, mellow brown eyes allowing me to look deep into her being. Seeing her soul in this way was a humbling experience, and I came to know she was a completely honest, guileless person.

One thing she loved to do was hunt. No rodent was safe if she knew it was there. Her sense of smell was acute, and on walks I would have to stop while she dug under a rock or board to get at a small creature that was burrowed there.

After her hunt, which was usually successful, one or two quick snaps of her head would stop the creature from wriggling. The sound of her crunching the animal in her mouth was disconcerting. But she had no malice in her at all. It was part of the process of life.

Then there was Lucky. Lucky was a stray kitten I picked up and he became Boo's closest buddy. He really misses Boo. I can tell because immediately after Boo was gone he began to spend his time with me.

Boo and Lucky were a genuine odd couple. It was Lucky, who sought out Boo for friendship. Boo's personality was so mild that she rarely showed what I would call emotion. But sometimes it was evident. (You can see the tumor that took her life on her hind leg. The vet said it was enormous. She died after having the leg amputated.)



I really miss Boo. She possessed a deep peace and a seeming acknowledgment of the completeness of her existence in the present. I came to understand this while looking deep into her eyes. It was all she had, and as far as I can tell it is all there is.


Text and Photographs Copyright 2008 by David H. Roche

Catching The Sun

Working nights has its benefits. Moments like these would be lost in the hurry to get to work and the fog of sleep. But coming home from work I'm wide awake and the coming of sunrise offers a tranquil way to slow the mind down.

What follows is the capture of a sunrise after a freezing rain in early March 2008. If you click on the photographs they will enlarge.



Colors appear in the East.
soft and muted through the thicket
on the hill.

Then the sun appears
on the hills
on the other side of the lake

and kindles in the tinder of branches
at the edge of my yard

setting them on fire.

Ice droplets
in the tree tops
sparkle in the morning sun
against a blue sky.

In the thicket below something else is happening.

A curtain of ice crystals sparkles.

It dazzles the eyes.














Becoming more

and more

intricate each moment.

Greater beauty emerges

everywhere.

Some of it

astonishing

giving something to reflect on.

Text and Photographs Copyright 2008 by David H. Roche

Content At Last

Finally I see...
this life is no more than moonlight
on the surface of a river;

or the trail birds leave in the sky.

Click photos to enlarge for detail.

The photos were taken within several hundred feet of each other at different times. The moon photo looking east, and the sunset looking west. The photo of the moon was taken 2/20/08 at moonrise, and the photo of the birds in the bronze sky were taken 6/11/07 at sunset by myself so they are Copyright material by David H. Roche in the year 2008.

Tulips

On February 14^th

she sent me flowers,

tulips pink.

Black Coffee Blues

Black Coffee Blues

Finding myself up well before the sun
stumbling through the confusion of darkness and silence
before consciousness tricks me into existence
with the accompaniment of a bitter cowboy ballad.

Black coffee and Gram Parsons at 5 o'clock;
as the lights come on inside
I sit shivering the first day of December
and begin to contemplate the blackness outside.

_______________

The darkness holds the potential of forms. It is full of them...
sometimes there is an escape ...



...and then things begin to happen!


Text and Photographs Copyright 2007 by David H. Roche