Nature’s Poetry in a Red Maple Tree!
Its a Poetry month! And though I am not a poet nor a writer, I enjoy poetic talks and penning down my flowing thoughts.
For that process, makes me flow rather then talk
Makes me dance rather then just walk
It helps organize, the scattered attention
Around one refined thought.
-Part of a diary page from 04/13/2022
My diary excerpts on this post span within 3-4 days. It was inspired by the ‘Poetrees’ time at local library and my Red Maple Tree.
Thanks to Elaine Bearden from Urbana Free Library for creating a beautiful ambience during ‘Poetrees’ event. And for Nature to share its immense joy and abundance with me!
These scribbles were chosen to be read with other local authors during ‘Pandemics as a Portal to Change’ virtual meet. it was a shared experience of revelations and insights into ‘We’ as a community facing common challenges. Thanks to Champaign Public Library for bringing us together!
Studying the textures of Red Maple bark and blossoms
Poetry might be a way of seeing things not just a genre of writing?
But these r just my thoughts.
For me, Nature is poetry
That always brings Awe
Whether in forest, cities
Or on side walks,
There’s always a wonder
And Drama
Happening interestingly
Continuously
Simultaneously
Miraculously
On every enchanting path.
There’s a Red Maple Tree in our front yard. It’s a housekeeper that welcomes us with smiles every time we enter or leave our driveway. While we have appreciated it all throughout the year, I feel this year in my 3rd season of its flowering, I actually felt an Awe
I who promote connection between ecology and arts, learning by observing, being in nature, blah blah, couldn’t find time to sketch flowers of something so close by and beautiful.
We get so busy with what we are doing that we lose sight of why we are doing; and if that doing can happen without even doing, so much time energy and resources are saved. Probably that what they call getting simpler? But we are not talking of Minimalism or growing our own food, it is more about mindfulness that can help each of us reach our own ways of simplifying life for ourselves.
Just sitting there under a Tree,
with wind dancing merrily
and sunshine spotlighting
every corner of Nature’s beauty
Reciting a poetry,
In textures and forms
patters and colors
of this blessed Maple tree
That connects me to the Cosmic energy
Its like a poetry happening Here and Now
Nature’s poetry always brings an Awe!
With the onset of Pandemic, we were pushed to explore virtual world.
My journey of virtual sharing began with a few poetic lines I had scribbled at the start of lockdown. And out of respect for the local call for Arts for ‘Pandemics as a Portal to Change’, I submitted those as a poem instead of my artwork (Pic on top right). The poem had shades of my guilt, for enjoying the Nature when the world was ablaze with sorrow and distress. We were at the mercy of some microscopic killer virus that even Alexander the Great would not be able to suppress had it gotten to his chest. What is ‘Great’ then, I had thought?
Its been a journey of 3 years now going through another mass destructive cycle on Earth with onset of War in one of the corners of this interesting celestial body, which humanoid creatures address as- Our/ Your Land
Whose land? Whose Earth? and what for?
Who’s ‘me’? And who means ‘they’?
All the might of global organizations
May it be UNO UNESCO or Peace corps,
Could not Stop
The the destruction
of the huge neighboring mass.
Yet, in this chaos
There peeps a call
From the blessed Nature
To my mind’s hall
Asking me to open up
To its beauty that perishes fast
Yet its effects persists for (sometimes) life long
Poetry is great
It pulls from the unknown depths of
my terrifying darker space
That which I cannot decipher
With what I can connect
It gathers the dispersed seeds
of many thoughts
Into one enclosed fruit
That my heart wants to taste
3 years now!
This how much the Pandemic completed
And also how much my association
With the Red Maple blossoming season going on.
So much has happened
Times ran fast, but with each step
One could see the milestones passed
Working diligently
On a thought that was revealed
In recent years past
About some connection between