One hundred million years ago the development of flowers changed our world. Like the spores and pinecone seeds, the first simple flowers were wind pollinated. The Cretaceous era's innovation was a seed within a flower fertilized by pollen—a seed that was already an "embryonic plant packed in a little enclosed box stuffed full of nutritious food." Not only could it be carried by the wind, it could attach itself to animals with hooks, or attract animals with its fruit.
Animals responded to this change. Insects fed on and pollinated the plants and the flowers grew larger and more complicated in turn. Grasslands expanded and herbivores replaced the dinosaurs while birds developed beaks instead of teeth. The quote was from The Immense Journey written by Loren Eiseley and first published by Random House and then by Time Incorporated in 1962.
0 Comments
"...so the youth of this spring all at once is over
it has come upon us again taking us once more by surprise just as we began to believe that those fields would always be green" The concluding lines of "Youth of Grass" by W. S. Merwin in The Shadows of Sirius published by Copper Canyon Press in 2009. "Late at night, the end of Summer, The Autumn constellations Glow in the arid heaven." Kenneth Rexroth from The Dragon and the Unicorn published by New Directions in 1952. Today we are likely to think of paradise as a tropical island, but medieval Europeans had a different concept of a Garden of Eden as a paradise still existing on earth but apart from it at the same time. Paradise was thought to be the perfect place for humans on earth as well as being a future heaven.
Medieval mapmakers were faced with the problem of where to place paradise on their maps. Often positioning it on the edge of their world maps, different mapmakers chose varied locations. One problem was finding an area at an altitude sufficient to have escaped the Flood during Noah's time. Over the centuries, scholars thought paradise might be located in the Middle East, Africa, the tropics, and even Armenia. At the end of the fifteenth century, paradise disappeared from the maps. Along with the scholars' inability to find a suitable location for paradise, reports from merchants and travelers of their discoveries contributed to its demise. Mapping Paradise was written by Alessandro Scafi and published by the University of Chicago in 2006. Greeks and Romans visited Delphi and other sacred places before the Christian tradition of going to the Holy Lands or to churches containing holy relics began. Christian pilgrims hoped to secure merit towards salvation, be cured of physical ailments or to atone for their sins. Jews traveled to the temple at Jerusalem, and in the New World, Our Lady of Guadalupe was a focus of devotion for its indigenous inhabitants.
Muslims try to travel to Mecca at least once in their lives. Many Hindus want to travel to Varanasi but there are many other sacred sites that they can visit, while Jains favor the place where a prophet was born or died. Initially Buddhist pilgrims went to India, but they eventually travelled to many areas throughout Asia. Shinto pilgrimages are popular activities in Japan. Pilgrimage can be a secular activity as well as a religious one. Many pilgrims travel the Camino de Santiago route or to Canterbury Cathedral because of their cultural significance or to escape the confines of modern life. Others, inspired by music, travel to Pere Lachaise Cemetery in Paris to visit Jim Morrison's grave or to the haunts of classical composers such as Bach or Mozart. Information about pilgrimages can be found at britannica.com. I saw you fall hard and straight to the ground--
harvested, we are told-- destined for the mill, to be stripped of your bark, but somehow you got away. You slipped from the ties that held you to ride on a foreign sea-- a Romany life for a creature once so firmly bound to the earth-- your growth rings brutally displayed. But it could not last forever, the tides brought you back again; I saw you on the gravel beach, pushed by every wave (allied in feeling that you did not belong) until you were quietly abandoned, immobile, to your fate. The last time I was there, you were propped up in the sand-- a plaything for humans on this strange Black Beauty journey of yours-- A driftwood structure on their playland shore. Nancy Christiansen "A Life" was written for a particular tree that had shaded me from the afternoon sun for years but was removed by a developer. I watched as it was cut down, accompanied by the howling of a chainsaw, there one moment and then abruptly gone.
My vision of an errant log adrift on the sea was fostered by the many logs that have washed up on the beaches of Deception Pass and often used by beachgoers for forts or sculptures. After writing the poem, I saw a photograph of a large raft of corralled logs being moved down Deception Pass to be processed. I composed this poem during a sleepless night. The fragment of the poem that came to me was from Philip Larkin's "An Arundel Tomb" recording his visit to Chichester Cathedral where he had seen the tomb of a royal couple who died in the fourteenth century.
The tomb was a sculpted stone memorial effigy of the Earl of Arundel and his second wife lying side-by-side. In the poem, he observed that the snow had fallen "undated" in the intervening centuries and that a "bright litter of birdcalls strewed the same bone-littered ground." (I was impressed that he managed to insert "strewed" and "litter" into the same phrase. A litter can refer to a stretcher used to carry a sick or wounded person, and flowers can be strewn over a grave.) Philip Larkin is one of the most popular modern English poets. Her body set in stone,
a medieval noblewoman sleeps for eternity-- awareness usurped by vacancy, all feeling gone-- a state far removed from mine for, without reason, I am awake. I deserve to be asleep (having walked eight miles) but stranded in limbo, the mind refuses, fretting when I should be dreaming. As a child, I would lie awake with pleasure, evading sleep with my thoughts as companions-- all in harmony. Was it that dodgy tuna sandwich (left in a hot car) or a surfeit of fruit (bounty of fall) that leaves me restless and queasy, spinning me round in my bed, trapped in a well-wrapped shroud? Nancy Christiansen Braiding a river, hanging a valley,
carving a landscape-- shearing, abrading, folding, faulting, uplifting, warping, erupting, Nature fashions herself into a buttercup. Nancy Christiansen |
AuthorI am a Northwest artist making collages from mulberry papers stamped by hand from original images that I have carved. Archives
April 2024
|