Susan Palmer's Exquisite Now

Stuff gets done here

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  • The patient artist

    Nature took a while to render this sculpture. It’s a fine piece of work just off the Clear Lake Trail in the Willamette National Forest a few miles before Highway 126 and Highway 22 converge right before Santiam Junction.

    I don’t know why trees with the spiraling grain pattern catch my attention. Like a coiled spring, the grain reveals energy in the structure waiting to fling itself apart at the right prompt.

    I went looking for more information on spiral grain in trees and stumbled on the best rabbit-hole website ever: The Gymnosperm Database. It’s been around so long, it grabbed the conifers.org web address, no problem. That’s my guess anyway.

    Created, maintained, written by Christopher J. Earle, who clearly is a lover of trees, he built a place I happily wandered around in (Am I in a place that doesn’t physically exist? Yeah, I am, like I’m in a good book and don’t wanna come out.) to discover there are lots of scientists writing about that spiral, how and why and where it forms. Earle’s article on the subject sits at the hairy edge of my ability to follow. Cells grow a certain way, then they grow another certain way. A helix forms. That’s a corkscrew kind of spiral, a shape I love—a thing circling endlessly around a moving point it never quite touches.

    Tree, time and weather did this thing. When I saw it, nestled there among the young ones, I felt stilled inside, the way the best art comes and fills me.

    Photo by Susan Palmer

  • A hallowed place

    A hallowed place

    The McKenzie River in Oregon flows from snowmelt filtered through the unique volcanic aquifer of the Cascades into icy springs that feed Clear Lake. To walk the trail around that lake, to see clear water that flows out of the lake to become the river that provides Eugene with its drinking water, that’s an experience. Maybe somebody has the words. Beyond a sense of awe, I can’t say more. Here are pictures.

    View from the bridge where Clear Lake flows out to become the McKenzie..
    In case you wondered if the trees surrounding the lake are big.

    Icy water bubbles up from this spring to flow into the lake.

    A fairyland of wildflowers

    Photos by Susan Palmer

  • Around the bend, an old friend and a new one

    Around the bend, an old friend and a new one

    First it was the rugosa roses. If you don’t know them, that’s a joy in store. The first time you inhale the aroma, you just sigh and say, “Now that’s a rose!” They are unique, with new plants shooting up from the roots and forming rangy beds (not everybody likes this; they do roam). The wrinkly leaves, the dense thorns. They aren’t finicky. They don’t get black spots. Perfect for the dilettante gardener.

    Last year, the day before starting our walking tour of the Stockholm Archipelago Trail, we knocked around Sodermalm, one of the island neighborhoods that make up Stockholm. It’s the best part of traveling, having no preconceived notion of what we’ll see and then stumbling onto a gem.

    I smelled the roses before I saw them. Came around a corner smiling, then stopped in wonder at the Sofia Church, surrounded by rugosa blooms. Sofia Church was built in 1906, “striking Neo-Gothic” according to a Stockholm museum website. I don’t claim to know what that means. To me it was graceful in the quiet way of a great beauty. It beckoned us in and we were lucky to arrive when a singer, pianist and bassist were practicing a lovely simple soaring song.

    This kind of serendipity resonates. I’ve encountered practicing musicians in three churches in three countries while banging around in an unscheduled way. The first time, an organist filled a mostly empty cathedral with big deep bass notes in Clermont-Ferrand, a city in the heart of the Massif Central region of France. The second time, another organist danced over the higher notes in Bologna Italy’s complex, stunning and deeply old Basilica di San Petronio, my favorite of the religious edifices I’ve wandered through. That’s a blog, or maybe a full memoir, for another day.

    We went on from the city and the Sofia Church to six days of hiking a trail across the archipelago, one that connects the disparate island sections via ferry.

    It’s a year since that trip. Going back isn’t off the table.

    Photos by Susan Palmer