A PRIVATE GUEST COTTAGE NEAR SEQUOIA NATIONAL PARK IN THREE RIVERS, CALIFORNIA
The lovely cool rainstorms we have been having, are keeping the wildflowers very happy. Here are photos from a walk up the hills just at my back door. We’ll start with a rainbow that shows you the hills that are welcome for walking.
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more of the foot paths and views from the BLM land above the cottage…
:: here are the hills above the cottage….more flowers are coming ::
Maybe it’s time for a visit to Cort Cottage Bed and Breakfast.
Spring has begun……
Fiddleneck are everywhere….some shallow people call them weeds.
Wild lilac or Ceonothus AKA Buck Brush bushes are budding out,
their wild scent–my favorite– is coming to intoxicate the air.
(Native Peoples used to prune these, to have them grow straight for arrows.)
The wildflower palette will be exploding over the next 2 months.
I’ll keep you posted.
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You can see my new wildflower cards at my art studio,
on the Three Rivers Artists’ STUDIO TOUR 9 coming March 19-20-21.
Spring has officially arrived because the wild lilac (ceonothus) has begun to bloom. Fiddleneck is everywhere, making the hills yelllow-orange. I’ll say it again–Spring is THE best time to come to Three Rivers.
I’ve been very busy getting ready for the Three Rivers Artists’ STUDIO TOUR 9 coming up on March 19-20-21.
This week I am writing profiles on each of the 21 artists for the Studio Tour Blog.
new digital collage in Square One Series
I am watching the wild turkeys fly from the roof of my house up to the high branches of the sycamores along the creek. They are tucking themselves in for the night. Light is fading so no photos of their graceful, yes graceful, gliding in the air with their huge wings spread wide. They are native to North America and now found in Three Rivers, frequently on the meadow below the cottage.
“The turkey is sometimes called the earth eagle. It has a long history of association with spirituality and the honoring of the Earth Mother. It is the symbol of all the blessings that the Earth contains, along with the ability to use them to their greatest advantage. The turkey can live to be twelve years old. Twelve is a significant number in that the earth revolves around the sun in twelve months, reflecting a tie between the turkey and the honoring life cycle of the earth.” from Animal Speaks by Ted Andrews
Snow dusting Case Mountain, view from Cort Cottage.
Coming soon….an archive of all the guest book entries for the last 25 years.
There is a kind of lull here, some of the trees are dropping leaves, the Chinese pistache trees planted almost 30 years ago. I’ve just learned that the female trees have red berries that turn blue, and so the tree that was planted by birds or winds or serendipity at the edge of cottage deck is telling me of her nature…
The leaves are almost gone, a short window of autumn…unless you pay attention to buckeye trees, here long before houses and human planted trees near front doors of green metal roofed abodes. The buckeyes are the trees that are in a hurry to meet each new season, so they can slow way down and wait for the rest of us to catch up with them.
They lose their leaves half way through summer, and many people think they are dead (yes, I know I have written about this before in this 7-year almanac. It’s possible, almost necessary, to fall in love with trees over and over again.)
This place is full of nuance and life, change, mountain, sky, bigness and smallness and tree-friends that teach of letting go and waiting.
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Break open your personal self
to taste the story of the nutmeat soul.
These voices come from that
rattling against the outer shell.
The nut and the oil inside
have voices that can only be heard
with another kind of listening.
If it weren’t for the sweetness of the nut,
the inner talking, who would ever shake a walnut?
We listen to words
so we can silently
reach into the other.
Let the ear and mouth get quiet,
so this taste can come to the lip.
Too long we’ve been saying poetry,
talking discourses, explaining the mystery
outloud. Let’s try a dumb experiment.
(from The Essential Rumi, translations by Coleman Barks with John Moyne, new expanded edition 2004, originally published in 1995.)
It’s raining! I know for those folks who live on the East Coast, this is really passe. Every year when the first rain returns after the long, hot, and very dry summer, it’s such a relief. The earth is soaking it up. I have hope again that Spring will return once more. I know it’s Autumn, but rain means green to me, and green means breakthrough from the ground up, and wildflowers are not far behind.
The season changes here in just one day. Monday it’s summer with 100 degrees, the next day it’s 85 degrees, then the next day down to the high 70’s. It is always such a relief to have the Fall show up. The weather is so perfect these days. Please excuse the mundane, trite nature of the posting. I am just so glad to feel the change in temperature.
The cottage has several weekends open in October…..call for a reservation.
(photo by Elsah)
♥ Cort Cottage