The birds have been super loud lately and it reminds me of the spring chorus. Frogs are still a ways behind.

Sounds like Spring: Bird Edition

The sound of snow is so soft and silencing. Had to take a listen to it durning breakfast.

It's Snowing!

From the snow comes the melt. This is water flowing off the science center towards the animal pens in back where it has excavated a hung under the snow channel.

Meltwaters

This morning Jeff, Chris, Joe Sullivan, Lori, DB, Sarah, Erika, Isabel, Carol, Robby and myself shovelled out the roll bars on the hoop house before putting the plastic on the hoop houses.

Sounds of Snow: Shoveling

The sap was really running today! Got about 7 gallons with Isabel, Robb6and Caroline in front of the house and over by the sugar shack.

Sappin Season

A few years ago I was at the Indigenous Farming Conference hosted near the White Earth Reservation. While there I had a conversation with an individual who told me a lot about traditional sap harvesting. The things that stood out to me the most were the stories of when the first crow was herd it was time to head to the sugar bush and then after the first big spring wind the sap would start running very fast. Listening to the slow sap tapping today I herd some crows amd though they've been around for a while, it made me reflect on that way of keeping time.

Indigenous Knowing

The sap is a foaming when pored from the 5 gallon collection pails into the holding tank.

Bubble, Bubble, Toil and Trouble

An introduction to the anthology “Amethyst and Agate: Poems of Lake Superior”

By Pamela Mittle Fehldt

GICHIGAMI. SWEET WATER SEA. Shining Big-Sea Water. Lake Superior. It is scavenging gull and mystery. Agate and driftwood. Sea smoke, memory, desire. It sings to us “in syllable/ of sapphire/ and silver,” as Meridel Kahl writes. In its ancient language we hear legend and story. It thunders. It is mute. Jane Graham George observes that the “mind imprints what it loves.” Lake Superior has been imprinted on mind and memory, in dreams and poems. 

We, the four editors of Amethyst and Agate, had completed two anthologies, Beloved on the Earth: 150 Poems of Grief and Gratitude and The Heart of All That Is: Reflections on Home, and were in search of a focus for a new anthology--one that would speak about place, that would honor our connection with this earth. We were moved by the Mother Earth Water Walkers and the Grandmothers on the Nibi/Water Walks, honoring the Anishinaabe belief that water is life and that the People are the keepers of the water. 

We wondered how poets listen and speak to water-- particularly the waters of Lake Superior. How are poets keepers of this water? We put out a call for poems about Lake Superior. The poems arrived in waves, from around the lake as well as from far away as New Zealand. They became Amethyst and Agate, solglimt, reflections on Lake Superior.

Amethyst and Agate

Manidoo Giizhikens: Spirit Little Cedar Tree

by Heid E. Erdrich


Who makes a shawl of her own arms


Who wraps herself up

holding the last warmth

of someone she loved once

one hundred or two hundred or seven hundred years since


We lift our faces to her many faces


Whose hair frights and stands into the wind

terrified or terrifying

we only know when close

how to take her pose

which changes as women change

day by day by day


We lift our faces to her many faces

We hold our bodies to her many bodies


Whose way with wind makes a call

we must answer must slip on tilting rocks

pass between a boulder portal

to her side her knees her waist


We lift our faces to her many faces

We hold our bodies to her many bodies

We give our voices to her many voices


We fall to her in our need

to breathe her astringency

her cleansing medicine


We lift our faces to her many faces

We hold our bodies to her many bodies

We give our voices to her many voices

We gift sweetgrass asema stones tokens


We take away no sureness of her

aware only that time whirls waves

makes bone-bleached sculptures of us all


We do not believe that she is small

she who brinks the greatness of creation,

the greatness of the lake while tied to rock

grown small in spirit maybe but no

she holds stone to stone she composes the cliff

We know her then we do not know her


We hold our bodies to her many bodies

We give our voices to her many voices


Whose tortured form twists

away at once and ever back

her pain an emblem of release

she gives over to the waves

waves that change as she changes

one day gray the next vivid as prism


We give our voices to her many voices

We gift sweetgrass asema stones tokens


Whose torso blown with holes

suffers no loss but fills  

her crevices sensual as pleasure

etched with florescence of lichen

She hides and shows at once

She chooses all and gives all away


We hold our bodies to her many bodies

We lift our faces to her many faces


And this is why the painter

addresses her for fifty years

sees her new in every light

Every hour on every day a year can make


We lift our faces to her many faces

she returns a thousand forms

and we have been every one of them


We lift our faces to her many faces and she remains

Photo Credit: https://i.pinimg.com/originals/6e/f9/6b/6ef96bcd5f45677c2cbf3929a2edb0be.jpg

Manidoo Giizhikens

Spirit Little Cedar

Grand Portage Reservation

Susan Deborah King

This poem is for Hazel Belvo whose painting is included above (note: she is not native but was married to an anishinaabe artist George Morrison).


Tree sacred to native people

I see in you myself

I too have grown up out of rock

with no visible nourishment

at my roots.

I twisted and turned gripping

what was hard, scold, unyielding--

all there was--

to straighten and raise

a modest, needled crown.

Struggle is ingrained in my sinews

as it is in your grooved ark.

While taller, ground-rooted trees

around you have been felled by storms, 

you, for centuries, on a point,

alone and vulnerable,

have prevailed.

That is why I come.

Teach me, for the days left me,

how, as you seem to, to embody

movement in a pose. 

Your trunk bends like river courses;

your branches lift like arms of one

dancing with abandon.

As you have been to many,

let me be a totem

for those who fear,

Because loss or lack, position or circumstance,

illness or harm done to them,

that they have no ground to stand on,

no conditions to encourage growth, 

let them read in my story,

so as not to lose heart,

the oldest of all truths:

The Nothing is our mother

and the hollow out of which 

all that has ever lived was born.

Spirit Little Cedar

This profile was created for a project of uploading soundbites from my day, every day. It focuses on sounds that I hear while being outdoors.

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