Still loving June and trying to say yes every chance I get, soaking up every precious day. Spent a lovely morning with my friend Alix sketching at Chautauqua Park and lunching in the old grand dame of a dining hall - a retreat to a bygone time. Meanwhile back in the studio I fleshed out my sketches to capture the very first day, of my very favorite month in this journal spread. Mary Oliver captures the essence of the month for me in this beautiful poem entitled Writing Poems:
This morning I watched
the pale green cones of the rhododendrons
opening their small pink and red blouses –
the bodies of the flowers
were instantly beautiful to the bees, they hurried
out of that dark place in the thick tree
one after another, an invisible line
upon which their iridescence caught fire
as the sun caught them, sliding down.
Is there anything more important
than hunger and happiness? Each bee entered
the frills of a flower to find
the sticky fountain, and if some dust
spilled on the walkways of the petals
and caught onto their bodies, I don’t know
if the bees know that otherwise death
is everywhere, even in the red swamp
of a flower. But they did this
with no small amount of desperation – you might say: love.
And the flowers, as daft as mud, poured out their honey.
