November 2025

Chickweed is the most dazzling green. It's not quite lime, not quite neon. There are under shadows of indigo in its corners, and glossy, sea-glass veins, and when the light hits it just right, it is positively yellow. But mostly, it is green, living and vital in an autumnal world of gold and brown. I'm in a patch of chickweed at my Thoughtful Spot today, surrounded by clattering trees and a rusty haze of final leaves, home again. The earth was all trimmed in frost this morning, but the sun has had its hours to work, and is now leaving the world a warmer place. I've felt quite untethered these past weeks in an unfamiliar world of street lights and asphalt, but this patch of green is home, close against the earth and listening to the world of tiny living things. 

I feel my boots / trying to leave the ground,
I feel my heart / pumping hard.

I want to think again of dangerous and noble things.

-Mary Oliver, Starlings in Winter

A small pond is close by, a way point, at the moment, for migrating geese.  They are peaceful enough, no more haughty or tumultuous than an average flock of migrating geese deigning to stop for a while at your particular pond are generally wont to be. But a lone loon has found this pond as well. He has observed the newcomers from a distance. Now he has darted down, deep under water by the bank, and surfaced precisely in middle of the loud and lordly geese. The surprise appearance sends them flurrying into a cacophonous uproar of indignant honks.  The little loon slips away unnoticed. Only to repeat the show over and over again - I think he is quite enjoying himself. 

A very slow and chilly wasp has wandered across my page, a sad and gentle reminder that autumn is not always kind to tiny creatures. 

This Bird – observing others / When frosts too sharp became
Retire to other latitudes – / Quietly did the same –

-Emily Dickinson, All overgrown by cunning moss

There is lady's thumb, in this little patch of grass, clusters of bright pink buds that never fully open. They look like clusters of miniature tulips, bundled together on a single stem. Dusty deadnettle too, with downy leaves that have donned grey winter coats.  Decomposing black walnuts, half green, half brown, and a steadily growing layer of fallen leaves... The rust is all in the sky now, the trees all black and grey. The sky looks like a slice of a peach, magenta at the center, disrupted by the dark treeline, pale and paler yellow towards the clouds. 

Where are the songs of spring? Ay, Where are they?
   Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,--
While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day,
   And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue;
Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn
   Among the river sallows, borne aloft
      Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;
And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;
   Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft
   The red-breast whistles from a garden-croft;
      And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.

-John Keats, To Autumn