My lavender is in full bloom with lots of pollinators. This bumblebee and skipper are super cute 🙂
in seeking sweetness
you find each little blossom
lavender lovers
~ Raven Ariana Simons ©2017
Bright Bee and Butterfly blessings, Namu Amida Butsu, Namaste
~ Raven
Variable weather allowed me to take these photos of geum aka avens at my neighbors’. I happened to see a bumblebee visiting, too.
little bumblebee
taking a sip from avens
gathering pollen
~ Raven Ariana Simon ©2017
Namaste, Namu Amida Butsu, Bright Bee Blessings
Our hearts give thanks for the Grace in the Universe!~Raven
I hope you are having or had a most beautiful Mother’s Day. Mine was lovely. The sun, flowers, bees, and other creatures came out to play in the yard.
I think that this fuzzy fly is a member of Genus Lordotus. I have been teasingly calling it a teddy bear fly but it looks like it might actually be a type of bee-fly.
Here’s another look at a snowball bush blossom. I’m grateful to get photos before they
done blooming.
This is crane’s bill geranium.
such sweet mystery
who is visiting flowers?
tiny bumblebee
~ ©Raven Ariana Simons 5/14/17
Bright Bee Blessings
Namaste
Namu Amida Butsu
Our Hearts Give Thanks For the Grace in the Universe!
~ Raven
Flashback Wednesday, August 29, 2012 – This is my pick photo for today and it stars the early fall color coming on in the Wasatch Mountains up East Canyon. Some maples are starting to turn red as well as other plants.
Flashback Thursday, August 29, 2013 – This is my pick photo for today and it stars a skipper butterfly and one of my ladies (maybe) on the butterfly bush that grows right outside my back door. Everyone is very hungry right now because we need more plants that bloom at this time of the year and caretakers making sure they have enough water.
Friday, August 29, 2014 – Today was mostly sunny and there were quite a few datura blossoms waiting to bloom this evening. I also have a bumblebee in a neighbor’s ground cover as well as a honeybee in my garlic chives.
“I’ve been absolutely terrified every moment of my life and I’ve never let it keep me from doing a single thing that I wanted to do.”
~ Georgia O’Keeffe
“If you take a flower in your hand and really look at it, it’s your world for a moment.”
~ Georgia O’Keeffe
Our hearts give thanks for the Grace in the Universe!
Bright Bee Blessings and Namaste ~ Raven
Flashback Monday, August 13, 2012 – I love the soft colors and focus in this picture of Greek oregano blossoms and volunteer cosmos. This is my pick photo for today 🙂
Flashback Tuesday, August 13, 2013 – This is my pick photo for today and it stars a young robin taking an adult posture as it gets ready to go for some Oregon grape.
Wednesday, August 13, 2014 – It is so cute to see the little bees bedding down in the sunflowers right before the sun sets. We have a beetle, too 🙂
“Hope is not about proving anything. It’s about choosing to believe this one thing, that love is bigger than any grim, bleak shit anyone can throw at us.”
~ Anne Lamott
“I think joy and sweetness and affection are a spiritual path. We’re here to know God, to love and serve God, and to be blown away by the beauty and miracle of nature. You just have to get rid of so much baggage to be light enough to dance, to sing, to play. You don’t have time to carry grudges; you don’t have time to cling to the need to be right.”
~ Anne Lamott
“I do not understand the mystery of grace — only that it meets us where we are and does not leave us where it found us.”
~ Anne Lamott
Our hearts give thanks for the Grace in the Universe!
Bright Bee Blessings and Namaste ~ Raven
Flashback Sunday, August 12, 2012 – This is this morning’s datura bloom after its debut last night. It is still beautiful and my pick photo for today.
Flashback Monday, August 12, 2013 – This is today’s pick photo of the day and it stars the pair of baby/young doves that are being raised in my yard. It’s really cute the way they chase their parents around. Yesterday’s pick also starred one of them and today I got them both on the same fence. They seem to really like this fence and I could get quite close while they gave me dubious looks 🙂
Tuesday, August 12, 2014 – Today I have a couple types of wasp, bees and a little flower fly.
“For behind all seen things lies something vaster; everything is but a path, a portal, or a window opening on something other than itself.”
~ Antoine de St. Exupery
“Simply let experience take place very freely, so that our open heart is suffused with the tenderness of true compassion.”
~ Tsokniy Rinpoche II
Our hearts give thanks for the Grace in the Universe!
Bright Bee Blessings and Namaste ~ Raven
Flashback Friday, August 10, 2012 – Details of my first datura blossom star in today’s pick photo.
Flashback Saturday, August 10, 2013 – This is my pick photo for today and it stars one of the group of hummingbirds that are sharing my yard 🙂
Sunday, August 10, 2014 – Today is the second Supermoon in a series of three this year. Good times! Here are some magical creatures and a few shots of today’s super moon as it rose to go along with any magic you may have brewing in your cauldron this evening! Blessing to you all and extra special supermoon energy to all of those on my prayer list! You know who you are 🙂
“You have to take seriously the notion that understanding the universe is your responsibility, because the only understanding of the universe that will be useful to you is your own understanding.”
~ Terence McKenna
“This is why the shaman is the remote ancestor of the poet and artist. Our need to feel part of the world seems to demand that we express ourselves through creative activity. The ultimate wellsprings of this creativity are hidden in the mystery of language. Shamanic ecstasy is an act of surrender that authenticates both the individual self and that which is surrendered to, the mystery of being. Because our maps of reality are determined by our present circumstances, we tend to lose awareness of the larger patterns of time and space. Only by gaining access to the Transcendent Other can those patterns of time and space and our role in them be glimpsed.”
~ Terence McKenn
“It is the imagination that argues for the Divine Spark within human beings. It is literally a decent of the World’s Soul into all of us.”
~ Terence McKenna
Our hearts give thanks for the Grace in the Universe!
Bright Bee Blessings and Namaste ~ Raven
Flashback Wednesday, August 8, 2012 – My pick photo for today shows the very odd late afternoon sky with weird oranges and blues with the clouds. The light was strange, too, and I wish I had been able to get out and take some of my photos before the sun was covered as the light had a very orange cast to it. I’m thinking that there must be forest fires burning quite close to cause this.
Flashback Thursday, August 8, 2013 – This is my pick photo for today and it stars a cute little squirrel visiting my backyard 🙂
Friday, August 8, 2014 – I was up before the sunrise and saw the pollinators out and about when it was barely light. I then visited them mid day and again at dusk. If you look carefully at the bottom middle of the 2nd to last photo, you’ll see a hummingbird winging away towards the waxing gibbous super moon, 2 days before it’s full.
“There are, it seems, two muses: the Muse of Inspiration, who gives us inarticulate visions and desires, and the Muse of Realization, who returns again and again to say “It is yet more difficult than you thought.” This is the muse of form. It may be then that form serves us best when it works as an obstruction, to baffle us and deflect our intended course. It may be that when we no longer know what to do, we have come to our real work and when we no longer know which way to go, we have begun our real journey. The mind that is not baffled is not employed. The impeded stream is the one that sings.”
~ Wendell Berry
“The care of the Earth is our most ancient and most worthy, and after all our most pleasing responsibility. To cherish what remains of it and to foster its renewal is our only hope.”
~ Wendell Berry
“When despair for the world grows in me and I wake in the night at the least sound in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be, I go and lie down where the wood drake rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds. I come into the peace of wild things who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief. I come into the presence of still water. And I feel above me the day-blind stars waiting with their light. For a time I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.”
~ Wendell Berry
Our hearts give thanks for the Grace in the Universe!
Bright Bee Blessings and Namaste ~ Raven
Flashback Tuesday, August 7, 2012 – My datura plants are just starting to develop their blooms. This is my pick photo for yesterday. I really love how this photo looks velvety (and this is an illusion as the plant is actually smooth to feel).
Flashback Wednesday, August 7, 2013 – This is today’s pick photo for today and it stars one of my local hummingbirds in flight.
Thursday, August 7, 2014 – Today we have a metallic green sweat bee (Agapostemon) and a young, vocal scrub jay.
“Kindness in words creates confidence. Kindness in thinking creates profoundness. Kindness in giving creates love.”
~ Lao Tzu
“Practice kindness – particularly when you feel irritated or things are not going well. Kindness hardly ever goes wrong.”
~ Lewis Richmond
“There is no small act of kindness.
Every compassionate act makes large the world.”
~ Mary Anne Radmacher
Our hearts give thanks for the Grace in the Universe!
Bright Bee Blessings and Namaste ~ Raven
Flashback Sunday, August 5, 2012 – Here is a close up of the pomegranate blossom that I shared yesterday. A bee is happily gathering pollen. This is my pick photo for today and I wonder if I will see any other flowers on it this year.
Flashback Monday, August 5, 2013 – This is my pick photo for today and it stars a native bee (one I call “sunflower bees” for their love of sunflowers) very nicely illuminated by the sun. What is special about this picture is that the bees blend in with the sunflower centers so well it is difficult to get a nice look where they stand out!
Tuesday, August 5, 2014 – The hummingbirds are active in my front and back yards and the bees of all kinds are loving the sunflowers, buddleia, and other plants that are in bloom!
“Thousands of tired, nerve-shaken, over-civilized people are beginning to find out going to the mountains is going home; that wilderness is a necessity…”
~ John Muir
“As long as I live, I’ll hear waterfalls and birds and winds sing. I’ll interpret the rocks, learn the language of flood, storm, and the avalanche. I’ll acquaint myself with the glaciers and wild gardens, and get as near the heart of the world as I can.”
~ John Muir
Our hearts give thanks for the Grace in the Universe!
Bright Bee Blessings and Namaste ~ Raven
Grace and Mystery 