August 30, 2012

Yesterday the wind visited every tree and blade of grass.  You don't realize how still it is usually until you have a windy day.  The sound of it is like an ocean of air, waves of it brushing over the earth, making of it a musical instrument, the notes made by everything it touches, leaves rubbing together, branches like the flexible bows of the earth's violin.  Wind moves everything differently, the lacy branches of the crepe myrtle shiver and flicker, the heavier leaves of the maple wave, and the stiff dark leaves of the bushes hardly move at all but the long branches bow to the wind's passing.  The most affected are the pines that sway in their own stately dance, their whole trunk at upper reaches bending gracefully, the arms of the branches embracing the wind.  And the cane, a thousand slender dancers tracing the path of each gust, ribbons of green fluttering, graceful bodies bend and coil around each other, an ensemble of graces.

Sometimes while we are just going about our daily business, walking the path, we come on something . . . suddenly green, suddenly joyful!

Green Frog at Roadstead, Wisconsin

It is the way of a pleasant path

To walk through white birch, fir,

And spruce on a limestone trail

Through the quiet, complacent time

Of summer when, suddenly, the frog jumps

And you jump after him, laughing,

Hopping, frog and woman, to show

The stationary world its flat ways.

Love is a Frog, I grin that greenly

To your green eyes and they leap

At me. Up, I will enter the Frog World

With you and try the leaping ways

Of the heart that we do not fail to find

The sunlit air full of leaping chances.

James Schevill

And the wind leaps through the greenly trees, and our little black frogs come out after a rain and make the most incredible sounds, and even the sunlight, leaping up from the horizon to bounce from every surface, brings to our eye all that beauty and does make the air filled with chances, the chance that we can escape from the world's flat ways and go leaping off into the Frog World and discover the leaping ways of the heart!