A Summer Thunderstorm

Yesterday was another near summer day. Uneven heating cooked the cumulous cotton puffs into boiling storm clouds creating a perfect thunderstorm. Summer officially begins this Thursday and the weather patterns of the season and region are upon us.

                                                                    

A little while ago the dappled bright of a partly sunny day sprinkled my meadow and trees with a waving pattern of afternoon light. Slowly the skies became shrouded with a dark gray pall of thickening clouds. A fierce wind cut a path for an oncoming storm. It shook the Oaks and Maples awake to see the glory, if not the fleeting grandeur of a summer thunderstorm.

Darkness emerged. It was like a closed theatre curtain before the opening act. Then a snap of light and the curtain rose. It was an instant dazzling flash like a light bulb’s dying moment. A vivid brilliance flooded the field with intense light. A deafening crack of thunder shook the house announcing the storm just before a pelting rain sheeted my view of the lower meadow.

What a great storm!  

Intuition

I was driving and I watched a storm come closer. I heard the thunder in the distance then the skies darkened. A light sprinkle at firrst was the harbinger of a heavier pour.

When I was a youngster similar weather patterns would signal a thunder storm, but we would not know the severity or duration of the storm system. Today storm tracks are high tech. My smart phone and iPad alert me to severe weather in real time; colorful graphics show the intensity of rainfall and storm cell movement.

Our intuition is a lot like the modern high tech indicators. The problem is that most of us don't listen to the intuitive thoughts that move in and out of our awareness; they are our spiritual radar.

We lost the internal trust long ago of how to interpret our feelings, our gut instincts, our vibrations of something's wrong or not right and even sensing our hackles of danger. Our spiritual self however has not forgotten how to do it, only our mind has not remembered.

There is a way to tune into our spirit selves and remember what we think we've forgotten. Intention! Intention is the catalyst for atavistic sensing. Giving intent to be aware of our thoughts and their guidance under the aegis of free-will will connect us to our intuitive selves and then the mind can make the appropriate choices.

Cicada's Lament

My region has been inundated with a brood two Cicada hatching. Tens of thousands of these locust size bugs have covered bushes and limbs, pillars and posts, paths and roadways. They look like something out of a Men In Black movie.

Some animals eat them. They are supposedly called “the shrimp of the earth” and are protein rich insects. The Internet has recipes for fried and boiled Cicadas.

The sound they make in their mating call is deafening. It’s a constant high pitch screech that fades with dusk and starts in the morning with the warming sun.

Cicadas are not very good flyers. They’re slow in flight and seem to crash into leaves and brush clinging for a moment or two and then off to another tree seeking an amorous adventure and sounding their mating call.

Once they mate they die. The female drops her fertilized eggs and she dies. The little nymphs burrow into the ground live on tree roots for seventeen years and the process starts all over again.

Cicada’s Lament – a Haiku

© 2013 Rolland G. Smith

Seventeen years underground.

Burrow to the air.

Shed shell, fly, scream for sex, die.

Our Flag

Today is Flag Day. Of all the national things that we each hold sacred, our flag is at the top. If we each still believe in the ideals of this republic then our flag is the standard bearer of our beliefs and even though we are busy, and it's a weekday and the kids have homework and they need to get to soccer practice, we ought to remember this day.

There was a time in our history when our flag was empty of experience. It had the symbolism of a united people and the expectation of greatness, but we were a young country and as yet we had little collective history.

The United States wasn’t even a year old when Continental Congress adopted the flag design on June 14th, 1777. But now, centuries later we remember that our flag is much more than red and white cloth stripes and symbolic stars in blue.

It’s everything that’s ever happened to this country and everything we’ve ever done. It’s victory and defeat. It’s protests and pageantry. It’s honor with humility and shame with remorse. It’s living and dying for principle.

A nation is not its flag. Our flag is the collective body and history of our nation. It’s not only the rights we are constitutionally guaranteed, but it’s also the personal human rights we embrace and grant to others through courtesy and compassion and character.

Above all the flag is our waving symbol for the entire world to see our courage, our liberty, our freedom and our belief in the God we trust.

A Rock Wall of Words

If you are a daily reader of this blog, you know that I visited the inner woods cabin of naturalists John Burroughs over the weekend. It is called Slabsides and is located near the city of New Paltz in upstate New York.

That visit inspired me to read a number of Burroughs’ writings from his lifetime of literature from the mid-eighteen hundred until 1921.

Recently I walked the lower meadow of my property. It is bordered on one side by a rock wall. I understand in this part of my regions a rock wall is called Irish stone.

I guess it comes from the immigrant farmers and workers who farmed this land and built the rock walls long before I came here and bought this property.

Burroughs once wrote: “A stone wall with a good rock bottom will stand as long as a man lasts. Its only enemy is the frost, and it works so gently that it is not till after many years that its effect is perceptible….

Every line of fence has a history; the mark of his plow or his crowbar is upon the stones; the sweat of his early manhood put them in place; in fact, the long black line covered with lichens and it places tottering to the fail revives long-gone scenes and events in the life of the farm.”

What a powerful writer and now one of my favorites.