Category Archives: Photography

What a beautiful day for walking around White Rock Lake! The temperature was perfect, and all the wildflowers were coming off a couple of cool, moist days. They were ecstatic. With my smartphone, I listened to all of 1 Peter through Jude, backing up several times to listen more carefully to some intriguing passages.

By the end of the hike, I had in mind e.e. cummings’ poem:

*i thank You God for most this amazing

i thank You God for most this amazing
day:for the leaping greenly spirits of trees
and a blue true dream of sky; and for everything
which is natural which is infinite which is yes

(i who have died am alive again today,
and this is the sun’s birthday; this is the birth
day of life and of love and wings: and of the gay
great happening illimitably earth)

how should tasting touching hearing seeing
breathing any–lifted from the no
of all nothing–human merely being
doubt unimaginable You?

(now the ears of my ears awake and
now the eyes of my eyes are opened)

e.e. cummings
1894-1962

For an extra treat, check out this webpage, where cummings’ poetry is discussed, this poem is set to music, and cummings himself reads the poem!

There’s something irresistible about being INSIDE a tree. I knew that early. Reading My Side of the Mountain, I met my kindred spirit, Sam Gribley. At age twelve, Sam ran away from home and survived winter in the Catskill Mountains by living inside a giant hollowed-out hemlock.

My early reading also included Greek myths featuring un-kindred spirits. For instance, there were the Dryads, a form of nymph who lived inside trees. Even Christianly literature, like The Chronicles of Narnia, would harken back to the animation of trees. Mr. Tumnus warns Lucy about the Dryads: “The woods are full of her spies, even some of the trees are on her side.” And then, you have to admit… trees are pretty special in the Bible, from beginning to end.

For those reasons — and because I’m part Scottish (my excuse for strange excess) — when I see a giant hollowed-out tree, it still tugs at the little boy brain in my old man body. That happened yesterday. The question was inevitable: “Can I get inside?” One disturbing picture — that I’ll spare you — says, “Yes, I can get inside.” After removing my daypack, I was swallowed whole by an ancient tree at White Rock Lake.