It's All Too Beautiful

Many years ago in a land far, far away a rock and roll band called Small Faces sang about a place called Itchycoo Park. The simple story speaks about someone who goes to a park and cries because what they see is too beautiful. I always found it interesting that the songwriter chose “too” beautiful for the lyrics. They could have said “so” beautiful but they didn’t-they said too beautiful. Can something be too beautiful? Here are a few things that I think come close to fitting that description.

I took a picture of some ice on a stream and when I got home and looked at the picture I found an exceptionally clear window through the ice that let me see directly to the stream bed.

 

The bright yellow of this common gold speck lichen against the dark slate made me stop and marvel at the unexpected beauty that nature puts in our path. Sometimes you have to look closely to see it though; this lichen thread was less than half as long as the average fingernail.

 

The geometric pattern on this pine cone was amazing. I think it is from a red pine (Pinus resinosa.)

 

A while ago I found a dead staghorn sumac tree (Rhus typhina) with peeling bark. The color of the inner bark was so attractive that I’ve been drawn back to it again and again. Now it has white patches on it. What they are and where they come from, I don’t know. I’ve been around this tree my entire life and have never noticed this.

 

 How this stream ice became so folded and wrinkled is unknown to me, but it looks as if it is made of melted plastic that has wrinkled and then cooled. The brown and green colors are the stream bed seen through the ice. Things like this make me think that anything is possible in nature-even that which seems impossible.

If someone had seen me circling around and around these leaves, taking picture after picture, they might have thought that I’d been in the woods just a little too long, but the deep orangey brown against the white snow stopped me in my tracks.

 

There is a big old white pine tree (Pinus strobus) outside my office window and sometimes I find myself lost in contemplating its bark without knowing how long I’ve been doing so. Up close, it is even more amazing.

Readers might be getting sick of seeing turkey tails (Trametes versicolor) on this blog, but they are very special because they offer one of the few spots of color found in the winter forest. I never get tired of seeing their different colors and growth habits. They have secrets that they don’t give up easily.

These ice beads at the edge of a stream looked like frozen bubbles. Created by drops of splashing water falling in the same places over and over.

You might recognize this photo from my last post, but here it has been cropped to better show the fascinating colors and movement of this river water.  I find the deep green, slightly off center “mound of water” rising up out of the deep blue trough to be especially beautiful. Quite by accident the camera caught it just before it crashed in on itself.

The moment one gives close attention to anything, even a blade of grass, it becomes a mysterious, awesome, indescribably magnificent world in itself. ~Henry Miller

Thanks for coming by.

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