on losing one’s mind, and finding it again

This is how most of this week month has been:

Out of focus. Meaning, the things that are actually deeply important to me? Uhhhhhhhh….

What are they again? I can’t see straight.

Basically, I have spent the past month or so working too hard, and not getting enough bliss time in. Hard to believe, when it’s only a part-time job, which, I do from home. Hard to believe when I have pretty decent self-maintenance habits: I eat pretty well (hardly any crap), I run several times a week, I give myself Reiki every day, and I do at least three to five Reiki treatments on other people every week (not counting Kevin – he gets Reiki every day). I don’t know how much of this is background stress (some pretty major things are up in the air in our lives, plus some loved ones are experiencing health issues), and how much is the changing of the seasons (the onset of fall, as I’ve gotten older, gets harder and harder…), and how much is just not really taking my needs seriously.

All I know is, Tuesday there may have been an episode of brain paralysis, followed by a minor emotional meltdown. There might have been another meltdown yesterday morning, followed by extra bonus meltdown in the afternoon. Two in one day! Excellent! Last night, Kevin gently suggested to me that I – brace yourselves – take breaks more often, and go outside with the camera. Today, I finally did so.

I went from this:

 

To this:

Oh. Okay.

 

Yeah.

I remember this.

Exhale.

 

Bees go all in for what they want.

Bluets don’t give up. September? “Fie!” they say.

Sumacs say, “Hold my beer and watch this shit.”

 

Asters got the memo that fall colors involve orange and red, and responded with an “oh yeah?”

“Sez who?”

 

The tall anemone follows suit, indulging in a little light purple…

…before saying “screw it” and exploding.

 

 

Only one eyeball left on the white baneberry.

And now, for yellow.

Oleander aphids on a milkweed pod…

…and stem.

 

 

As for the tree that fell at the base of our driveway: it’s in the burn pile now. In the background, on the edge of the field, lurks the feral bathtub.

spider harassment, goldenrods, exploding cattail, and run-on sentences

I told a friend the other day that we were down to goldenrods and asters up here (she’s from the tropics of Massachusetts), but today I was pleased to prove myself wrong:

We have a reprieve of black-eyed susans.


Or, from another perspective…


I had fun bugging the spider.
Next door, a neighboring susan was covered in aphids:


But it’s true: a lot of asters are still blooming. Next year, I’ll start to differentiate between them all. This one’s the “big purple kind”.


As for the goldenrod, we have the almost done cooking stage…


…and the done cooking stage.

Actually, look again: two of the clumps above haven’t opened because the tip-ends of flower stamens haven’t completely dried up and fallen off yet.
The cattails are engaged in a competition to see who can explode the most, the fastest. Current contenders include:

Bittersweet nightshade does this awesome thing.

The flowers, as you might recall, are purple. The leaves are normally green. By now the flowers are long gone. It’s as though the plant was like “oh wait – something needs to be purple here – you! leaves! turn purple, stat!”
We still have some soapwort (Saponara officinalis) blooming.

But a lot of them look like this now.

Can you see the bug hiding out in the post-bloom at lower left?
Something else still blooming: japanese knotweed, a roadside invasive the stalks of which are apparently edible.

Such teensy flowers. It’s curious: some plants get their flowers going first thing, before even generating leaves (think, coltsfoot. Flowers show up first thing in spring, and right around now, their huge leaves dominate roadside ditches). And this guy, the knotweed, isn’t bothering with flowers til the very end of the season. Hm. I wonder if the fact that japanese knotweed is apparently so good at propagating from even cuttings (to such an extent that I’ve been advised, should I be so brave as to eat it, not to put any of it into the compost pile unless I want the side of our hill to be taken over by knotweed) (end of sentence: coming soon) …that it can afford to do the seed game late in the season. There’s a study in here somewhere, probably.