Now, in addition to my blog, I have an author website. For anyone thinking about building such a beast, I honor you and I also say, if you’ve got cash to throw at it, let somebody else build it. That’s about a month of my life I will never get back.
That website (the link is in the caption) is where details about my upcoming book launch and events will land. It’s also where you can subscribe to my newsletter, The Way In.
As for this blog, it’ll keep rolling along, the place where close noticing and play with words remain the order of the day.
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.
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.
Susan Palmer's Exquisite Now 