Dogwoods - Its Legends and Winters

I love to think of nature as an unlimited broadcasting station, through which God speaks to us every hour, if we will only tune in. ~George Washington Carver

If you are a regular here to my blog or on my Facebook page, you know I enjoy the woods and the fields, the flowers and the trees, and the birds and the deer. And of course, dogs and people too. :) So Earth Day seems like a good time to think about those gifts of nature. 

This time of the year, the dogwood trees are bursting into bloom everywhere around here. And we are having that cold snap we seem to always have when the dogwood bloom. We've already had redbud winter, so now it's dogwood winter with a chance for frost tonight. More winters will come our way before spring warms completely into summer.  

I only have one sick dogwood in my yard (I think it's got some kind of blight) and no beautiful pink ones like the one here. I took a picture of this one beside a church in Versailles. The white blooms up top were on a tree in a hay field fence row. I'll have to go walk around that field again before the week is done to see if it's blooming now. 

But have you heard the Legend of the Dogwood?  On Monday I let Jocie on her Heart of Hollyhill blog tell the Legend of the Dogwood as told to her by her Mama Mae. I don't remember who first told me when I was a young teen that the rusty looking stains on the four petals of the dogwood represented the blood of Jesus, but I do remember studying the blooms and thinking about the symbolism. 

However, I had never heard the rest of the legend or read the poem that some think began the legend or perhaps was written by an unknown author because he or she was told the legend. According to the legend, the cross Jesus was crucified on was a dogwood tree that at that time grew tall and big like an oak tree. But the tree was so distraught at being used in the death of Jesus that Jesus had pity on it. He made it grow small and twisty so that it could never be used in such a way again and then marked its beautiful blooms with the nail prints and bloodstains. Even the center has the symbolism of being the crown of thorns. 

Click here to read one version of the legend. It doesn't have any Biblical basis. The dogwood is not mentioned in the Bible. The type of tree the cross was from is not named. But that doesn't keep the story or legend from making a person look at the blooms and think about Jesus and his sacrifice on the cross. As the George Washington Carver up at the top of this post says, God speaks to us through nature all the time. We just have to tune in.

Had you ever heard the legend of the dogwood?

Do you have dogwood winters where you live?

As always, thanks for reading.

The Breaths of Nature

After all, I don’t see why I am always asking for private, individual, selfish miracles when every year there are miracles like white dogwood. ~Anne Morrow Lindbergh


Every year I love walking to an area on our farm to see some of those miracles of nature. I've already shared a few of the photos I took on my Facebook page. I just took my phone camera because I didn't really plan to go wildflower hunting when I started out. But the day was glorious. It was Easter, but my family had visited the day before and what better day to give yourself the gift of nature than on Easter. Hunting flowers was better than hunting candy filled Easter eggs. At least, for me. I'm sure my grandkids would have disagreed. :)

So, Oscar and I, along with the two little neighbor dogs, took a hike down the cliff. I found flowers alongside the creek bubbling over rocks. The sun glittered off the clear water and rocks. The dogs didn't pay much attention to the flowers, but they did enjoy all the interesting creature smells and dipping into the water for a cool down now and again. I managed not to dip more than my hands and an occasionally clumsy foot into the creek.

The human spirit needs places where nature has not been rearranged by the hand of man. ~Author Unknown

That's the kind of place this is. Not an easy place to get to, but one that renews my spirit. And I did find flowers. Trilliums, larkspur, bluebells, rue anemone, yellow violets, bellwort, Dutchman's breeches, woods' poppy, squirrel corn, ginger root, Jack-in-a-pulpit, and more. And then I went a little nuts and even took one of those selfies. The creek and me. :) The surprise is that I didn't delete it.

 Every time I get to walk down to the creek or on any of my walks, I feel blessed to still go hiking and to see the gifts of nature that abound all around us. 

You don't have to hike down into wilderness areas to see gifts of nature. They're all around us. The sun shining down through new leaves. Birds singing in the trees. Dandelions making sunspots in the grass. What gifts of nature do you love most?
 
Happiness flutters in the air whilst we rest among the breaths of nature. ~Kelly Sheaffer

Life's Simple Pleasures

 

Finding fun in simple ways makes the happiest days. (Unknown author)

Are you happy? I hear you. Some of you are out there saying nobody can be happy all the time, and of course, you're very right. But do you seek and find an underlying happiness that brings joy to life in many little ways? Like the fun of jumping into a pile of crunchy leaves with an abandon that doesn't worry about getting leaf crumbles down your shirt or landing on a spider or... Well, you get the idea. Maybe even more fun is being the grandmother raking up the leaves for the happy fun of watching the grandkids enjoy toys that only nature can make. I didn't jump in the leaves. I do realize that me landing on the ground in a pile of leaves is no longer one of life's simple pleasures. It would be a jarring ouch. I don't land as soft as the little grandkids. But I do get a lot of simple fun just walking through a layer of fallen leaves and seeing them stir around my feet, hearing their rustling crunch, and catching the scent of autumn. Simple pleasures.

The plaque above names over some other simple pleasures - all gifts of nature. Watching the sun set. The wind across a field of wheat or grass. The waves against the sand. The glitter of the stars when the city lights are far away. Sometimes we just need to get back to the basics of nature. 

At times nature can slam us with disasters the way the hurricane did last week and bring hard times that have no joy in them. So if you're suffering from the aftereffects of that, you might not be feeling too generous toward Mother Nature, but I hope there are still little blessings finding a way into your days. 

The real joy of life is in its play. Play is anything we do for the joy and love of doing it, apart from any profit, compulsion, or sense of duty. It is the real joy of living.  ~Walter Rauschbusch

May life bring you joy this week. And go kick around a few leaves before you get out the rakes or the leaf blowers. We'll have to do something with our leaves this weekend - probably mulch them with the mower. But my husband did leave them for the kids to play in at least one time because a kid and a leaf pile is definitely one of life's simple pleasures.

I'm going to have a writer's simple (or not so simple) pleasure this weekend and get to meet and talk with readers and other writers at the Kentucky Book Fair in Frankfort on Saturday. Over 150 authors and their books. A great place to do some Christmas shopping. If you're in the area and decide to come, please stop by my table and say hello. And then I can say, in person, thanks for reading!    

The Beauty of Nature

"Those who contemplate the beauty of the earth find reserves of strength that will endure as long as life lasts." --Rachel Carson

What a great time of the year to feast on the beauty of the world around us! I'm enjoying the sunshine and the crisp autumn air. It makes for some great walking weather. And I like bringing some of the beauty of nature home with me. In the spring and summer I pick a few wildflower blooms - if the plants are plentiful - to put in a vase on my desk. In the fall, I like bringing home a colorful leaf or two to brighten up my office. I like taking nature pictures and I'm thankful for a digital camera that lets me snap to my heart's content without having to think about wasting film.

But sometimes the very best way to bring home the beauty is in your memory. When I first started walking in the woods as a young teen, I remember stopping and taking mental pictures of different trees or creeks or beautiful places so that I would always have them in my memory bank. I'd read a story about a man who was a prisoner of war and had kept his sanity by building a house in his mind, imagining each board and each nail as he put the house together. When he got home, he built that house. Now it may seem a stretch from that to taking mental pictures of a beautiful oak tree flaming in the sun, but I was an impressionable youngster with an imagination that sometimes took me down dreary lanes of what ifs. I planned to store up my beauty images in case I someday found myself deprived of the opportunity to view beauty.

Thank goodness those dreary what ifs haven't happened. I've lived a blessed life, but I still have those images of beauty in my memory bank and I've added lots more. And not just nature shots, but personal images as well. The first sight of my babies. The first time I saw my husband to be. My daughter singing in a Junior Miss contest. My son receiving a scholarship. My other son telling me he was engaged. So many images of the joy of life and some of the sadness too with the nature ones intermingled to keep me grounded.

I like using nature in my books. In my first published book I used the fleeting shadow of a bird passing over the character to hint at trouble coming. In my Hollyhill books, I had locust blooms and lilacs, a tornado and a snowstorm that were important to the story lines. In The Outsider the weather was a major obstacle to the men fighting in the War of 1812. I didn't make that weather up. It was in the history accounts, but my characters had to deal with the heat and then the bitter cold and snow. In The Believer I have Hannah who loves the woods. At the book club I visited last week, some of the readers said that Hannah was one of their favorite characters. So maybe all those mental images I've been snapping of this or that nature scene are coming in handy after all. A writer has to use what she's given along with what she can imagine.

The Kentucky Book Fair is this Saturday. Come by and see me if you're there. I'm in the back row sitting at the same table as Jan Watson. We both love talking to readers. Of course those 200 other writers do, too. So if you come, plan to spend a couple of hours enjoying books. I'll be on a panel called "Fiction Writers Unite!" with Jan and Karen Robards and Mary Ann Taylor-Hall at 12:30 p.m. That should be fun. Last but not least, keep me in your thoughts and prayers on Friday morning as I'm going to be talking to three classes of high school kids. I'm looking forward to their questions. That's always my favorite part of any talk I do about writing. I'll try to remember their most interesting questions to share with you next week.

--Hope you have plenty of beauty in your lives this week.