WW: Licorice fern

(Polypodium glycyrrhiza. Common fern of the North Pacific Coast, usually spotted as an epiphyte of broadleaf trees. When growing on a rock face, as here, you're looking at a site that gets above average rainfall. The common name reflects the use of its rhizomes as a "chaw" and tea mixing ingredient.)

Appearing also on My Corner of the World.

A Precept For The New Year

"Here’s my new year’s wish to all those of genuine good will and decency:

"May you have the strength and the courage to oppose what should be opposed."

Heidi Li Feldman

(To my sister's succinct and sufficient statement I would append that this be a precept to our enlightenment practice, a reaffirmation of the call to right action, for the impending year and those that follow.)


(Photo courtesy of Sneha Cecil and Unsplash.com.)

St. Stephen's Day Meditation

"I have learned silence from the talkative,
toleration from the intolerant,
and kindness from the unkind;
yet, strange, I am ungrateful to these teachers."

Attributed to St. Stephen, in honour of this his feast, 2024.






(Page from a mediævel manuscript on the martyrdom of St. Stephen courtesy of the J. Paul Getty Museum and Rawpixel.com.)

Three Paradoxical Truths

Funerals are for the living.
Graduation is for the parents.
Holidays are for the children.


(Photo of two children in Cambridge Bay standing next to a decorated inukshuk in their treeless homeland courtesy of Wikimedia Commons and a generous photographer.)

WW: Winter haws

(Fruit of the hawthorn [Crataegus], these often persist into winter, where they add needed colour to the soggy North Coast landscape. After the leaves fall, the tree's bare branches remain heavily decorated with thousands of these tiny scarlet apples, which, when fresh, are a welcome amendment to jams, jellies, wines, and cider.)

Appearing also on My Corner of the World.

Autumn Valediction

to passing autumn
the pampas grass waves
goodbye, goodbye

Shirao

WW: Beautiful feral holly

(English holly [Ilex aquifolium] is a favourite since childhood, though it's invasive here. Owing to sexual reproduction that demands a male and female tree in close proximity, and light requirements hard to meet in our woodlands, most feral North Pacific hollies either bear patchy, uninspiring fruit, or none at all.

But this grand girl grows right out in the open, near a forest well-invaded by others of her kind, and so sets memorable finery this time of year.

Her vibrant berries, scarlet against glossy, forest-green foliage, fairly pulsate in the dreich North Coast Christmastide.)

Appearing also on My Corner of the World.