Foxglove seed heads

Foxglove seed heads...you can see the seeds inside! Digitalis purpurea

Help us to be the always
hopeful gardeners of the spirit
who knows that without
darkness nothing comes to
birth As without light
nothing flowers.

~May Sarton

Tall ships at Port Alberni

Rigging from the Russian Tall Ship Pallada.

A Community of the Spirit

There is a community of the spirit.
Join it, and feel the delight
of walking in the noisy street,
and being the noise.

Drink all your passion,
and be a disgrace.

Close both eyes
to see with the other eye.

Open your hands,
if you want to be held.

Sit down in this circle.

Quit acting like a wolf, and feel
the shepherd's love filling you.

At night, your beloved wanders.
Don't accept consolations.

Close your mouth against food.
Taste the lover's mouth in yours.

You moan, "She left me." "He left me."
Twenty more will come.

Be empty of worrying.
Think of who created thought!

Why do you stay in prison
when the door is so wide open?

Move outside the tangle of fear-thinking.
Live in silence.

Flow down and down in always
widening rings of being.

~ Rumi

Douglas Fir

Douglas fir - Pseudotsuga menziesii

This is the big one in the front yard.

Something we were withholding
Made us weak--
Until we learned
It was ourselves we were withholding
From this land of the living--
And thenceforth found salvation in surrender.
~Robert Frost

Fern with spores

Sword fern with spores.

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.

~from Wild Geese, Mary Oliver