The end of summer, the inception of fall is always a sad time for me.  I will miss the radiance of long days, the heat which enables the tomato vines to produce, and the festivals of music.  As the days shorten, become cooler, bees become more active gathering supplies for the severe months, and the wild flowers begin to fade, their energy spent.

I received five photographs yesterday from Michael.  Michael spent some time at the Chicago Botanical Garden.  The photos capture with God’s-eye-detail the sculpted form and spectral glory of monarch butterfly, a giant sunflower blossom, and several glowing water lily blossoms.  Dale Chihuly’s glass is but a poor imitation of the elegance found in a water lily.  Michael’s photos remind me of how ineffable, absolutely beyond description are the expressions of Nature.  There is a mode of wordless address in those photos.  It is as if your name and mine, is being called.  We are being called into being by Mother Nature.

T.S. Eliot in the first of his four quartet poems, Burnt Norton speaks of roses.

……..for the roses
Had the look of flowers that are looked at.
There they were as our guests, accepted and accepting.
So we moved, and they, in a formal pattern…

I include here a few recent photos of my own.  All of these with the exception of the bee were taken by Kraklauer Creek along route 45 in Mundelein.  The final two photos are symbolic of the passage of time, the temporary, dimension-of-passing for everything that lives.  Yet, the hopeful note is found in the assurance that the glory is recurring.  There is a recurring pattern.  The pattern is embedded, stable.  We are surrounded by solicitude.

Again Eliot in Burnt Norton.

The dance along the artery
The circulation of the lymph
Are figured in the drift of the stars
Ascend to summer in the tree
We move above the moving tree
In light upon the figured leaf
And hear upon the sodden floor
Below, the boarhound and the boar
Pursue their pattern as before
But reconciled among the stars.