Welcome to Day 5 of 31 Days of Kissing the Wounds, a month of posts about the beauty, longing, and soul inherent in our damaged selves; in the world’s brokenness; in the imperfection, incompleteness, and transience of all that we love; in our recognition of each other as the walking wounded; and in the jagged, messy, splintery, deformed, sullied, unhealed parts of me, you, the natural world, our communities, the culture. Each post will look at these ideas from its own vantage point, which may not obviously connect with the others.
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I joined a small group walking into and around Butterfield Pond, in Wilmot, NH, in mid-September. It’s known as a fishing pond, with fish flown in by helicopter in spring (can’t imagine what they think as they plummet through the air), and since the walk-in to the pond is a half-mile, there are many canoes and jon boats tucked up along the shore in the woods.
While I didn’t go looking for damage, decay, and brokenness, there is plenty of it along any stretch of land anywhere, and this trail was no different. Below is a little photo journal. Enjoy!
fairy land of club moss (lycopodium) with strobilirock wall in the woodsbear claw marks on a beech treerock with quartz veingreenish rock and fern
Trees and rocks clinging together:
yellow birch hugging boulder, hanging ontree making do
Damaged leaves, and otherwise:
leafcutter-eaten striped maple leavesdamaged red oak leavesmaple leaf turningfall leaves in lighttrillium leaves
Fruits, berries, and such:
false Solomon’s seal berrieswintergreen (Gaultheria procumben) with white flowers that look more like berriesClintonia borealis (blue-bead lily)black berries of Indian cucumber rootfaded Indian cucumber root
Hobblebush (Viburnum lantanoides):
fall hobblebush leavesberries on hobblebushhobblebush buds
Fungi and moss:
fungi on log enddark mushroom with an inner lightshelf fungus — maybe Fomitopsis pinicola (red-belt conk)context: Fomitopsis cajanderi fungus on log (aka rosy conk, a kind of bracket fungus)closer: Fomitopsis cajanderi fungus on log (aka rosy conk, a kind of bracket fungus)moss on logmossy log
Flowers:
whorled astercalico asteraster peeking outorange-belted bumblebee on goldenrod
Around the pond, in the brook:
St. John’s-worta winterberryanother, different looking winterberrytiny little pipewort (Eriocaulon), an aquatic plantlots of pipewort at edge of lakepond view through treesLysimachia terrestris (aka swamp candles aka yellow loosestrife)pondpond viewwater strider in Kimpton BrookKimpton Brook view
Beech drops (Epifagus virginiana): – there are large colonies of this parasitic plant here; they don’t have any chlorophyll but get nutrients by tapping into the roots of the American beech tree, their host.
beech drops – they are hard to photograph!beech drops, close
Etcetera:
dappled light on trailhazelutshemlock and maple treesmossy log bridgewolf tree … one that’s been around a while, left for shade when the rest was cut down to pastureboulder (maybe a glacial erratic), trees, sunlightrocky mossy trailevidence of a blowdownferns along trailoil beetle on leaf
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Thanks for checking in. Be sure to see what the other 31 Dayers are writing about.
Welcome to Day 5 of 31 Days of Kissing the Wounds, a month of posts about the beauty, longing, and soul inherent in our damaged selves; in the world’s brokenness; in the imperfection, incompleteness, and transience of all that we love; in our recognition of each other as the walking wounded; and in the jagged, messy, splintery, deformed, sullied, unhealed parts of me, you, the natural world, our communities, the culture. Each post will look at these ideas from its own vantage point, which may not obviously connect with the others.
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