Detail

Homesteading life is all about the little details for me. I've been considered air headed at times, childlike at others - mostly for the ability to shut down my analytical mind and float in wonder at a pretty flower or a passing bird, completely dropping conversations or more typical human foci.

After some recent reading I'm coming to realize that this particular ability is a great thing, and may even place me a few steps closer to learning to really listen to my land base.

So slow down! Ogle that flower, feel its velvety petals, gleefully share your wonder with another. For me, that's the stuff of life, the stuff that keeps the world spinning and humans smiling.

Here are a few things I've wondered at lately.

These tiny dark flowers had been hiding - who knows how long - under big, nondescript green leaves right by a gooseberry bush in camp. I was getting close to get a good shot of a ripening gooseberry when I realized these beautiful little flowers were blooming under cover. It was a great surprise after all the white and yellow flowers I'm seeing these days.


Wild Yarrow - great for a medicinal tea and a dynamic accumulator that we'll employ in our forest garden. It grows all over here, has ferny, soft leaves, and pulls vital nutrients up from deep in the soil to help out other plants. Not to mention its attractive umbels of tiny, perfect flowers.


This! This tiny blue flower, Stunning in its particular details and refreshing in its reflection of a prairie sky, is now found scattered low among the grasses. What a delight from a simple blade of grass!


Ox-eye daisy looks like an old friend, nodding from fields by all our paths, brightening the hot humid days. The petals taste exactly what you'd expect a daisy to taste like, the yellow disk reminds me of the only time we're taught about nature in math class, and the dainty, serrated leaves are great in a salad.


If you're ever wandering around on hands and knees near a pepper plant, glance up underneath the leaves. That's where I found this blossom hiding, demurely bowing under the afternoon sun, promising luscious fruit in weeks to come. So graceful, this common food plant.


And a rabbit! They wander all around our camp, and I've just realized one of the reasons they stick around - nitrogen. I've specifically seen several rabbits returning to places where I Pee! Now, most folks might get disgusted and turn their attentions aside. But wildlife is mesmerizing to me, and so I sat around and watched this pretty creature for awhile, appreciating the patterns in its fur, the opportunity to take its life as a source of food, fabric, and fiber, and its actions closing the cycle, taking up my waste nutrients as something that helped to nourish it.

I'm glad I can sit still long enough to realize how awesome all of this really is. In every little thing, there is magic.

Comments

I LIKE this post! And the blue eggs is a sweet pic.
Judy T said…
Those little dark flowers are beautiful! I recognize all the others but not those, do you know what they are? I used to carry my wildflower book almost everywhere with me but it's already been moved to the new house.
I hope you are staying dry with all this rain.
Judy
Danny said…
I am loving that blue flower.