Again and again I am amazed by the world’s beauty — this week, this day — and every week, every day.

Since I last wrote to you — Deer. Once 2 does & 3 fawns grazing just outside our backdoor. Another time, 7 or 8 deer grazing on a nearby hill. Wary of our presence, they moved back towards the woods — the does hurrying a bit with an air of concern but their fawns leaping & leaping, obviously delighting in the recently discovered magic of muscles, sinew and bones. And I, too, enchanted, delighted by their delight.

I put up 2 bird feeders behind the house & soon the birds began to come. First, one female hummingbird and then at least one other have become frequent visitors to the nectar. Then other feeder — chickadees, goldfinches, titmice, and some sort of sparrow-like bird with a lovely rusty-rose breast. More magic as they perch on the feeder & then flit off into the trees and out of my sight.

On Tuesday we had just begun to eat dinner in the communal courtyard when a welcome rainstorm sent us back inside. Just as we got up to go out afterwards, I saw sunlight slanting through from the west, washing the tops of the buildings with gold. Stepping through the door, we were astonished by a beautiful double rainbow. What a gift! The 4 of us just came to a standstill. Colors so strong & vibrant [unlike those in these photos]! We gawked and marveled at the magic. I felt drenched through and through by the liquid colors & light. I didn’t even think of putting a lens between my eye & such glory. Cris did take a picture, so I can share it with you. Let your imagination fill in the colors & light that the lens could not capture. When we’d walked home, I did want to take an image of the rainbow with The Tree, but by then the inner rainbow was fading & the outer one dimmed to a glimmer so faint that I would have missed it if I hadn’t known it was there.

But isn’t its very evanescence part of the magical beauty of a rainbow? Its appearance and disappearance as light & moisture & our perspectives change…

I love the way something can flicker in & out of the range of my senses — rainbows, leaping deer, birds alighting then gone in a moment. None of this beauty can be captured or contained. Like the big spiderweb that appeared one morning in the corner of our back porch: I was standing there, just loving The Tree and the woods (full of their own invisible-to-me treasures), when something flickered in the corner of my vision. I turned to see, but there was nothing…….until…..it came again….and again…and I finally spotted a big spiderweb billowing in & out as the morning air currents moved it. Invisible, visible, then gone again, then back in a different configuration of glints. I tried to take a picture but was defeated by the ephemeral nature of the interaction — which was exactly what had taken my breath away & held me immobile for a long time. Not just the web but the dance….

Hummingbird wings, dancing deer, a brief flash of silk, colors across the sky — Elusive but not illusory, something moving that cannot be captured — or, if captured, would become something else entirely — no longer wild, a bird in a cage. Who knows? Maybe that’s one of the characteristics that draws me towards Trickster.

So much to love….

And then, the last day or so, some fibers and my hands beginning to converse… For several weeks I’ve been dwelling with green wools & silks — looking, touching, knowing them to be perfect just as they are. My hands wanted to interact with them, but…. The loose swoops of green in so many shades seemed to call for the open-ended possibilities of felting. At the same time I knew that, after the chaos of the last month, my spirit longed for a safe container in which to rest, a form, a focus. I finally found a sort of compromise. I’ve submitted myself to the gentle limits imposed by loom and warp, but left the weft fibers free, combed but unspun, unbound fibers sliding deliciously through my fingers and through the warp. I’m enjoying both the lively give & take of the conversation and the comforting over/under rhythm, both a sense of freedom and the focus I’ve craved. After a long pause, stepping over the threshold into the Unknown…. It just makes me happy!

And last, but by no means least, I’d like to thank you all for reading these posts — for just being there and for so often enriching them with comments & reflections of your own. It is one thing to toss words off into the Unknown and yet another to hear that some have landed, have been heard. It seems that the true creativity resides neither in the making nor in the seeing/reading/listening, but in that indefinable interaction where the two meet.

As water flows in when a well is dug,
as breath becomes song when the flute is carved,
I lay my words in the nests you have made
of your patiently listening hearts.

Do you feel it?
Love is pecking from the inside out.
Shells are cracking open.
Look!  We all
are growing wings.  

                                                ~~~~ With gratitude, Margery