The Color Landscape of a place

Inside certain plants, there is a color stickiness.

If you care to document the colors of a place.

It means what it meant at the Amazon Lodge, when someone gestured and out of nothing seen, there was a bird.

What does it mean that after a lifetime of looking at flowers, my stepfather picks up cosmos and sees that its petals might also tint washed-white wool.

Toxic red berries that previously didn't exist to us have a name. Pokeberries. They turn the pot a blood red.

We put the vinegar in first.

Pokeberries from Eudora, Kansas

Farm crown

You can wear a crown made from vines from your father's farm.
Why?
Because all of it is yours, too.

All the natural dyes from the plants.

All of the sumac leaves, goldenrods, osage oranges and black walnut.
In the words of David Whyte, everything is waiting for you.
Wear the crown.

Stranger than fiction

A friend just told me that as a little kid, he climbed trees and howled like a werewolf. At five years old, he believed he was one. During full moons, he went out and climbed the tree.

Another friend described eating banana bread on the back of a motorcycle during a bike trip in Peru.

Who puts such things together? And yet these combinations are everywhere.

The more I let them enter my dreams, the more I consider: none of this could be scripted. Life is stranger than what I could generate with my own mind — if we permit ourselves to be as weird as we actually are.