Thank you Winnie for your support, it means a lot to me, having you here. And everyone else, Welcome! I would like to have an adventure, lets walk down a trail and see what magic we can find, want to? There may be portals between the hedgerows and the corn fields so keep a good eye open. Whichever path we take let's keep nature close by our side and our hearts tuned to the divine, shall we? I have a feeling it's going to be grand. I'll meet you here by the blue door.
Thursday, April 28, 2005
Hanging On
by Trendle Ellwood
Oaks are such a sturdy rugged tree. Some of them hold their leaves into the winters. They are never in a hurry to jump into spring, they clasp their buds tight and wait patiently until the days are sure to be warm before they gallop out to play. In this way they have always seemed old and mature to me, able to keep their silence. Not running off with every little notion of spring, but waiting for the real thing. Mature, dignified, that is how Oaks always seemed to me.
I have always noted with interest a large old oak that I pass by on 22.
This tree appears by its size and it’s gnarled bark to be quite old. Some times an old oak tree will be left standing in a field and it is so neat when they do because they get so big and present such an awesome presence. This certain Oak Tree has something else about it, which makes it noteworthy, and that is the fact that it has a serious lean.
No matter from which direction you look at it, it cannot be missed the tree is topping over.
When my daughter and I drove by it for the first time after the rains this spring we exclaimed how much more bent over it seemed to be then ever. Although we were on a destination we slowed down and looked hard for signs of new growth on the tree and we were happy when we saw, Yes! little green-yellow leaves unfurling all over the huge tree.
I got out to visit with the tree a bit and I was greeted with a wave,
It seemed to me that in it's own silent way the tree had so much to say.
I walked up to the tree and I looked up into it's hollow and I took this picture.
Do you see the spirits and the faces that I see there?
(0) comments
Oaks are such a sturdy rugged tree. Some of them hold their leaves into the winters. They are never in a hurry to jump into spring, they clasp their buds tight and wait patiently until the days are sure to be warm before they gallop out to play. In this way they have always seemed old and mature to me, able to keep their silence. Not running off with every little notion of spring, but waiting for the real thing. Mature, dignified, that is how Oaks always seemed to me.
I have always noted with interest a large old oak that I pass by on 22.
This tree appears by its size and it’s gnarled bark to be quite old. Some times an old oak tree will be left standing in a field and it is so neat when they do because they get so big and present such an awesome presence. This certain Oak Tree has something else about it, which makes it noteworthy, and that is the fact that it has a serious lean.
No matter from which direction you look at it, it cannot be missed the tree is topping over.
When my daughter and I drove by it for the first time after the rains this spring we exclaimed how much more bent over it seemed to be then ever. Although we were on a destination we slowed down and looked hard for signs of new growth on the tree and we were happy when we saw, Yes! little green-yellow leaves unfurling all over the huge tree.
I got out to visit with the tree a bit and I was greeted with a wave,
It seemed to me that in it's own silent way the tree had so much to say.
I walked up to the tree and I looked up into it's hollow and I took this picture.
Do you see the spirits and the faces that I see there?
Sunday, April 17, 2005
The Green of Spring
by Trendle Ellwood
The fields are emerald green now. It is as if my world is blushing with hope. The hope that is eternal. The hope that swells within young birds hearts and persuades them that they should sing the song of spring. The hope that makes the flowers rise from the darkness of the ground. The hope that makes them forget their winter.
The old brick house that sits in my view to the north in the winter is removed from my sight now with the first blush of the trees. All that can be seen is her white barn which glows when the sun sets. Oh how can I describe how joyful the trees look with their light, still shy colors of new growth.
The apple trees and the grape vines are blooming although the average last frost is not until May 8th and so we pray that we will be lucky. It is nice for this that we reside up on a hill as the cold fingers of the frost does not always reach up from the valleys to us.
I cannot get over how beautiful and purple are the berries that will turn into cones and are sprouting all over the spruce trees. And then the redbud branches swish against them continuing the same color theme.
The new rhododendron blooms by my front steps as Calie Button runs about and playing with the fairy flowers who only she can see.
(0) comments
The fields are emerald green now. It is as if my world is blushing with hope. The hope that is eternal. The hope that swells within young birds hearts and persuades them that they should sing the song of spring. The hope that makes the flowers rise from the darkness of the ground. The hope that makes them forget their winter.
The old brick house that sits in my view to the north in the winter is removed from my sight now with the first blush of the trees. All that can be seen is her white barn which glows when the sun sets. Oh how can I describe how joyful the trees look with their light, still shy colors of new growth.
The apple trees and the grape vines are blooming although the average last frost is not until May 8th and so we pray that we will be lucky. It is nice for this that we reside up on a hill as the cold fingers of the frost does not always reach up from the valleys to us.
I cannot get over how beautiful and purple are the berries that will turn into cones and are sprouting all over the spruce trees. And then the redbud branches swish against them continuing the same color theme.
The new rhododendron blooms by my front steps as Calie Button runs about and playing with the fairy flowers who only she can see.
Wednesday, April 06, 2005
Two Portraits
by Trendle Ellwood
My friend Edwina Peterson Cross, more affectionately known as Winnie, created a picture for me once of a girl looking out over the hills enjoying nature. When I first saw it I was surprised at how it resembled another painting that I had once seen.
When we were still renting, before we had found our homestead my husband and I were taking a little holiday in a town south of here. And so we were roaming about the town when we walked through a restaurant that had a local artist’s paintings on display. There was one painting that so struck my heart. A girl was standing on her homestead, the farm, the meadow, the creek and the woods swept towards the horizon behind her. But in front of her loomed the skyline of a city. She held a long rifle in her arms and pointed it across the cornfield and towards the steadily approaching monster of commerce.
Winnie’s picture reminds me of this painting because they both have the same hills, and the same girl with the same soul looking out over them.
I live outside of town where farmhouses, fields and woods dot the land just like in the pictures. The city and a lot of population are in front of me, just yet out of view across the cornfield and down the road. Behind me you can take country roads down into the hills and away.
I like to go where I need to in ever-growing city by skirting around the edges of the metro. It is there, skimming around the edges of the material world that I see more and more farm/wood land just plain disappearing.
The beautiful little creeks that used to be so lovely are ploughed over and forced into drainage ditches. There is no place left for a tree to cast its full shadow down the hill of a green field. Don’t they know that our eyes need this? Mine do! I just don’t understand, how much farther will they build? Will they ever stop? Will it keep on going until every field and woods is subdivision?
Today I drove through where there are rolling fields of an especially knobby kind. I have always loved driving there and thinking how magical those little hills are. Now I see that they are destroying this place for more subdivision. As I was driving through I saw three deer silhouetted against the sunset. They posed in hesitation between two new subdivisions.
It so struck my heart how their home had been stolen.
Animals have a code in their hearts that connects them to the land that they were born on. When people move in taking up more then their fair share, the deer stay and they try to travel the old pathways that the genes of their forefathers taught them to travel. They do not understand when we build a highway over their trails and expect them to go someplace else. My heart so went out to those deer and I cried. I felt like the Native American still watching the greed of the new comers. I felt like the Lemurian who hated Atlantis.
The earth is a spiritual being, will we wake up and be aware of this?
The earth needs to honored again. We act as if the earth should honor us; well it is the other way around.
I feel like the girl in the picture that Winnie created standing in awe of the God given beauty. I also feel like the girl in the painting that Winnie’s picture reminds me of, the girl with the rifle standing ready. Because the city threatens to come towards my little piece of hollowed ground and I would like to pick up my rifle and chase it away.
But I reckon when the day comes that the material world starts to swallow up this little spot of mine that I will just have to pack up my bags and leave and find some, more country, place to dwell. God I pray that this so called progress will come to a halt before there is no country quiet place left to go to. For where would my soul gather then?
(0) comments
My friend Edwina Peterson Cross, more affectionately known as Winnie, created a picture for me once of a girl looking out over the hills enjoying nature. When I first saw it I was surprised at how it resembled another painting that I had once seen.
When we were still renting, before we had found our homestead my husband and I were taking a little holiday in a town south of here. And so we were roaming about the town when we walked through a restaurant that had a local artist’s paintings on display. There was one painting that so struck my heart. A girl was standing on her homestead, the farm, the meadow, the creek and the woods swept towards the horizon behind her. But in front of her loomed the skyline of a city. She held a long rifle in her arms and pointed it across the cornfield and towards the steadily approaching monster of commerce.
Winnie’s picture reminds me of this painting because they both have the same hills, and the same girl with the same soul looking out over them.
I live outside of town where farmhouses, fields and woods dot the land just like in the pictures. The city and a lot of population are in front of me, just yet out of view across the cornfield and down the road. Behind me you can take country roads down into the hills and away.
I like to go where I need to in ever-growing city by skirting around the edges of the metro. It is there, skimming around the edges of the material world that I see more and more farm/wood land just plain disappearing.
The beautiful little creeks that used to be so lovely are ploughed over and forced into drainage ditches. There is no place left for a tree to cast its full shadow down the hill of a green field. Don’t they know that our eyes need this? Mine do! I just don’t understand, how much farther will they build? Will they ever stop? Will it keep on going until every field and woods is subdivision?
Today I drove through where there are rolling fields of an especially knobby kind. I have always loved driving there and thinking how magical those little hills are. Now I see that they are destroying this place for more subdivision. As I was driving through I saw three deer silhouetted against the sunset. They posed in hesitation between two new subdivisions.
It so struck my heart how their home had been stolen.
Animals have a code in their hearts that connects them to the land that they were born on. When people move in taking up more then their fair share, the deer stay and they try to travel the old pathways that the genes of their forefathers taught them to travel. They do not understand when we build a highway over their trails and expect them to go someplace else. My heart so went out to those deer and I cried. I felt like the Native American still watching the greed of the new comers. I felt like the Lemurian who hated Atlantis.
The earth is a spiritual being, will we wake up and be aware of this?
The earth needs to honored again. We act as if the earth should honor us; well it is the other way around.
I feel like the girl in the picture that Winnie created standing in awe of the God given beauty. I also feel like the girl in the painting that Winnie’s picture reminds me of, the girl with the rifle standing ready. Because the city threatens to come towards my little piece of hollowed ground and I would like to pick up my rifle and chase it away.
But I reckon when the day comes that the material world starts to swallow up this little spot of mine that I will just have to pack up my bags and leave and find some, more country, place to dwell. God I pray that this so called progress will come to a halt before there is no country quiet place left to go to. For where would my soul gather then?
Friday, April 01, 2005
April
(1) comments
Wednesday, March 23, 2005
Lemuria Awakens
by Trendle Ellwood
I couldn’t believe that I was hearing what I was hearing but there it was. I listened intently and between the passing of cars and the sighs of the winds, there it was, loud and clear last evening as I went out into the darkness of the porch to gather more wood for the fire, the Spring Peepers, peeping! It seems impossible because it has been cold and dreary without much sun. How dare the peepers declare that it is spring! Their biological clock runs in rhythm with something other then the temperature of the air. And so does the clock of the daffodils because they are coming up through snow and bursting with yellow-green.
Snowdrops
My Little Buddy in His Cave
Winter is so pretty sometimes. I am not sure that I have had enough. But when it snows now it cannot be taken seriously and is as harmless as whipped cream on pumpkin pie.
(0) comments
I couldn’t believe that I was hearing what I was hearing but there it was. I listened intently and between the passing of cars and the sighs of the winds, there it was, loud and clear last evening as I went out into the darkness of the porch to gather more wood for the fire, the Spring Peepers, peeping! It seems impossible because it has been cold and dreary without much sun. How dare the peepers declare that it is spring! Their biological clock runs in rhythm with something other then the temperature of the air. And so does the clock of the daffodils because they are coming up through snow and bursting with yellow-green.
Snowdrops
My Little Buddy in His Cave
Winter is so pretty sometimes. I am not sure that I have had enough. But when it snows now it cannot be taken seriously and is as harmless as whipped cream on pumpkin pie.
Thursday, January 20, 2005
Earth Cleansing
by Trendle Ellwood
I shared this on the forums but thought I would also like to share it here.
One morning last week as I was coming from my dreams I was in my car and God was washing the window over my dashboard, all at once everything was clearer, and I could see better where I was going.
I got up and went to see a friend of mine and we got to talking about things, the tsunami, and how it seemed like everything has changed and it is the end and the collapsing of so many things.
Then she told me about something that she said she kept thinking about and that was how people all over the world are reaching out and helping the people where this earth movement happened. And it reminded my friend of the blackout that happened in NYC and how people helped each other and there was less crime during that time period than unusual.
We talked about what I read that people got to sit outside and look at the stars in the sky for the first time in their lives ever, during that blackout. People talked to their neighbors for the first time. We felt that everything that was not aligned with love was coming to the service and being washed out. Our rivers and streams here in Ohio have spilled up and over their banks many times this winter and flooding surrounds us. Great big house are washing down the Ohio river, it is like the dam broke loose.
It seems that suddenly nothing can be hidden; any leaves stuck on old logs are getting stirred up and washed on down the river. And the debris created by `the wave` is getting carried back out to the sea. Everyone’s lives have dramatically changed or are changing.
We were talking about this when my friends ex came by bringing over little Job. Job is an enchanting mix of wisdom and innocence wrapped up in his sparkling eyed, two-year-old self. Job showed me his new toy while his Daddy joined his mothers and mine conversation, His Daddy declared that we were in the Apocalypse. Patty and I agreed that we were living it now. It was no longer in the future but the scales had been tipped and everything was sliding into the pot now. The end of the earth, it is here.
Job’s father continued. “We were living in it, participants of the end.”
And then we asked him what he thought was next. The end, he replied.
“This it it, this is the end. “
And as it seemed that he just left it there,
We asked him, ”What do we do next? So where will our souls go then?
As Job’s father pondered his answer, little Job, unexpectedly and spontaneously piped in ,and in a voice which seemed to imply, don't you grownups know!?
He informed us,
“ WE GO HOME”
There was a hush in the room as we all withstood the impact of Job’s input.
And then we all laughed and said, Yes, Job got it right!
We go home! There is no place left to go but home.
As I drove home I had this big feeling that I was not living in the same world that I was living in yesterday but that the new world was superimposed over the old.
Another thing happened before I left my friend, her daughter called her on the phone and she shared that when she woke up this morning she felt like she was waking up for the very first time and seeing through brand new eyes.
Copyright © 2004, by Trendle Ellwood. All Rights Reserved.
(0) comments
I shared this on the forums but thought I would also like to share it here.
One morning last week as I was coming from my dreams I was in my car and God was washing the window over my dashboard, all at once everything was clearer, and I could see better where I was going.
I got up and went to see a friend of mine and we got to talking about things, the tsunami, and how it seemed like everything has changed and it is the end and the collapsing of so many things.
Then she told me about something that she said she kept thinking about and that was how people all over the world are reaching out and helping the people where this earth movement happened. And it reminded my friend of the blackout that happened in NYC and how people helped each other and there was less crime during that time period than unusual.
We talked about what I read that people got to sit outside and look at the stars in the sky for the first time in their lives ever, during that blackout. People talked to their neighbors for the first time. We felt that everything that was not aligned with love was coming to the service and being washed out. Our rivers and streams here in Ohio have spilled up and over their banks many times this winter and flooding surrounds us. Great big house are washing down the Ohio river, it is like the dam broke loose.
It seems that suddenly nothing can be hidden; any leaves stuck on old logs are getting stirred up and washed on down the river. And the debris created by `the wave` is getting carried back out to the sea. Everyone’s lives have dramatically changed or are changing.
We were talking about this when my friends ex came by bringing over little Job. Job is an enchanting mix of wisdom and innocence wrapped up in his sparkling eyed, two-year-old self. Job showed me his new toy while his Daddy joined his mothers and mine conversation, His Daddy declared that we were in the Apocalypse. Patty and I agreed that we were living it now. It was no longer in the future but the scales had been tipped and everything was sliding into the pot now. The end of the earth, it is here.
Job’s father continued. “We were living in it, participants of the end.”
And then we asked him what he thought was next. The end, he replied.
“This it it, this is the end. “
And as it seemed that he just left it there,
We asked him, ”What do we do next? So where will our souls go then?
As Job’s father pondered his answer, little Job, unexpectedly and spontaneously piped in ,and in a voice which seemed to imply, don't you grownups know!?
He informed us,
“ WE GO HOME”
There was a hush in the room as we all withstood the impact of Job’s input.
And then we all laughed and said, Yes, Job got it right!
We go home! There is no place left to go but home.
As I drove home I had this big feeling that I was not living in the same world that I was living in yesterday but that the new world was superimposed over the old.
Another thing happened before I left my friend, her daughter called her on the phone and she shared that when she woke up this morning she felt like she was waking up for the very first time and seeing through brand new eyes.
Copyright © 2004, by Trendle Ellwood. All Rights Reserved.
Sunday, October 24, 2004
One Winged Seed
by Trendle Ellwood
Once there was a winged seed who lived high up in a maple tree. She was so happy there, floating in the breeze. She thought that life could only get better and better. All her seed friends were giggling around her and she felt loved and content.
But then one day a big wind blew and that little winged seed lost her hold. She spun down from the tree, her one wing fluttering and being torn by the force. She then found herself upon the cold wet ground, her wing broken, her hopes shattered. The rain forced her deep into the mud of the earth and she hurt more then she had ever hurt before. Never had she known a cold so cold, nor a silence so deep.
As she lay there she lost all hope of ever seeing light again, because the sky seemed so far away. But after a time she discovered something, in the place where she had once worn her wing, there was something else. She was sprouting roots, roots which traveled deep into the earth and brought nourishment to her. And she was also sprouting arms, arms which she could reach up from the earth with and peek to the surface.
And then it began to dawn on her that she was not dying, that all hope was not lost. She was still filled with pain but she began to wonder at the signs that she was getting that the one winged seed that she used to be was becoming something else, something quite different from a seed. Something with roots growing deep in the depths of the earth and arms reaching up. And so she began to have hope that one day she would be touching that sky again, not as a seed but as a tree.
Copyright © 2004, by Trendle Ellwood. All Rights Reserved.
(0) comments
Once there was a winged seed who lived high up in a maple tree. She was so happy there, floating in the breeze. She thought that life could only get better and better. All her seed friends were giggling around her and she felt loved and content.
But then one day a big wind blew and that little winged seed lost her hold. She spun down from the tree, her one wing fluttering and being torn by the force. She then found herself upon the cold wet ground, her wing broken, her hopes shattered. The rain forced her deep into the mud of the earth and she hurt more then she had ever hurt before. Never had she known a cold so cold, nor a silence so deep.
As she lay there she lost all hope of ever seeing light again, because the sky seemed so far away. But after a time she discovered something, in the place where she had once worn her wing, there was something else. She was sprouting roots, roots which traveled deep into the earth and brought nourishment to her. And she was also sprouting arms, arms which she could reach up from the earth with and peek to the surface.
And then it began to dawn on her that she was not dying, that all hope was not lost. She was still filled with pain but she began to wonder at the signs that she was getting that the one winged seed that she used to be was becoming something else, something quite different from a seed. Something with roots growing deep in the depths of the earth and arms reaching up. And so she began to have hope that one day she would be touching that sky again, not as a seed but as a tree.
Copyright © 2004, by Trendle Ellwood. All Rights Reserved.
