September 3 - 10, 2024 - New Moon & First Quarter of the Full Corn Moon
Since the New Moon began on September 3, my walks around our property are making it clear summer is shifting towards autumn. The coneflowers are mostly dead and drying out. The black eyed susan petals have all but disappeared, leaving round, black seed heads. The pods on the milkweed patch by the vegetable garden, just weeks ago (or maybe it just seems that way) covered with blossoms and bees, have dried out and are bursting open, their delicate, lacy seeds emerging to be scattered by the winds.
Old me mostly experienced nature from behind car windshields, hurriedly climbing in and out of the car to drive on major thoroughfares at high speeds. I was too busy trying to be successful as an artist to slow down and consider the other beings who inhabit this earth with me.
New me now savors slowness. I spend more time watching the natural world shift and change around me. I'm still very active creatively, but now my days revolve around building a more caring relationship to all living beings, including myself, and trying to pay closer attention to moving with the natural cycles of the earth rather than against them.
A question that has emerged for me in the past few years is: what would my life look like if I was fully connected and in harmony with the cycles and shifts of the seasons? I'd like to explore that and write about it, so expect to hear more about this as I try to combine my art practice with my love of the natural world and its inhabitants.
Since the world has changed so dramatically in the past four years, I have felt a strong pull to create positive change in the world. I looked around at where I live and what I could build on right here in my own back yard. I began reading about "rewilding" property, decreasing the amount of grass (which puts absolutely no nutrients back into the soil), increasing native plants and herbs and wildflowers, and creating habitats of native plants, bushes and trees to help pollinators find food and shelter. I started to reclaim my old, abandoned perennial garden and expand it to build a pollinator haven with native plants and bushes.
I knew little to nothing about what plants are native to this area. I did a lot of online research, found some great organizations like Wild Ones, https://wildones.org and read as much as possible about the most beneficial plants. The more I learned, the more my motivation grew. This entire summer felt like opening a beautiful gift each time a new type of plant I had planted this or the year before finally bloomed. It seemed to take forever, but the wait was well worth it.
For the first time in my life, I saw monarch caterpillars chewing their way through leaves of the milkweed plants, getting ready to find a sheltered hiding spot to make cocoons before morphing into butterflies (I had thought they did this under a leaf of the milkweed, but they crawl away and attach to well-hidden spots when they are ready to make their cocoons).
This is the first year I saw beautiful monarch and swallowtail butterflies. I saw my very first bumblebee moth at our hummingbird feeder, also called a snowberry clearwing, and oh how amazing it was to experience that.
Now that summer is ending, all my new native plants are still healthy and alive. A few, like the New England asters and one of the Virginia Waterleaf plants, got chewed repeatedly in early summer by the baby rabbits and possibly deer until they were just stubs above the soil, but they seem to have come back. While they didn't bloom, I learned there are fragrant plants the rabbits and deer dislike the smell of, so I added lavender and zinnias near those - and next year will plant lots of marigolds - as deterrents.
I expect the same learning curve with my pollinator efforts that I have with my other creative practices. I am always learning, always improving, and always encountering new problems and challenges that I have to figure out how to solve, work around - sometimes just accept and pivot to a new option.
The exhilaration and satisfaction come not in creating the perfect yard or pollinator haven, but in moving the ideas forward, bit by bit, staying with the vision and celebrating each small step towards what I envision as a haven for my little friends. In my studio and outside in the yard, I am learning how to see, how to listen to and care for these vital beings in our eco-system. As a result, I now feel connected to nature in a way I never did before. That means a lot to me at a time in human history when the natural world is being destroyed so carelessly and rampantly.
At first I felt what I wanted to contribute was too little, but now I feel my commitment to take positive action right where I live links me with thousands of others practicing acts of stewardship and compassion. As an optimist, I can't help but see the cumulative actions of individuals as a monumental force for good and I believe now, as I have my whole adult life, that loving-kindness and goodness will always ultimately prevail.
The gardens still have a lot of filling in to do, so I am already excited to see what happens next year as these plants mature. I planted in increments this season; about 32 shade, part-shade and full sun perennials, then about 22 more full-sun perennials. After the thrill of seeing both monarch butterflies and caterpillars, I planted five more milkweed plants! We have a patch of common milkweeds by the vegetable garden as well - they are invasives so I picked off all the seed pods, but the bees and butterflies loved them!
