I first heard Peter Mayer’s song “Holy Now” on a recording by the delicious trio of Ellen Epstein, Michael Cicone and Cindy Kallet.
It’s what I call a “gets me out of bed in the morning” song.
Inspiring.
Thought-provoking.
The sort of song I love to perform — and aspire to write.
I listened to it over and over again — and then went to Doug Hammer’s recording studio, where we recorded a few takes (the second one of which you can hear in the player at the top of this post…)
Every now and then I remember to bring a camera and take photos while I am traveling. Sometimes I even manage to upload them onto my laptop. And on very rare occasions I find the time to look at some of them.
The images in this post are from the summer of 2011 — and feel like they match the sprit of Peter Mayer’s song.
Chicory is a wonderful plant which grows all over the place — from farm fields to urban roadways. I love the flowers’ shade of blue, which reminds me of a clear summer sky.
I am also deeply reassured by the way it is able to take root, survive, and even bloom in what appear to be extremely inhospitable locations — with very little soil or access to water.
Hurrah for the resourcefulness of weeds!
Here is one of my nephews interacting with a toad next to Cayuga Lake in upstate New York. Ryder lives in southern California and will happily sing the entire song “Uptown Funk” (by Mick Ronson featuring Bruno Mars) if you ask him to.
This is my other nephew and my niece with my older sister (their mother) in the background by their garden in upstate New York.
They love each other very much.
Although originally from Detroit, MI, they have grown up on a farm.
I feel inordinately blessed to be the uncle of three such delightful human beings.
These are peaches growing on a little tree my mother and step father planted in Connecticut. I am astounded at how much fruit even a small tree can create — seemingly out of thin air!
Trees amaze me in so many ways.
I was looking at photos of the thousand year-old redwoods in California recently, trying to imagine what their sense of time might feel like…
I am impressed by how much patience and trust a plant has to have — that it will get enough rain, for example — since it cannot get up and move around the way we animals do.
And how generous they are to feed us with their fruit, their nuts, their berries — although it is hard to know whether they are generous because they want to be or because they have no other option…
Isn’t this Asian pear beautiful? How does the tree grow it?!
And let’s not forget our invaluable allies — the bees, bats and birds who pollinate different plants and — according to recent statistics I read in an article about bee health — are responsible for the cultivation of a third of the food we humans eat…
What an amazing system: beautiful flowers which delight our human eyes and attract (and perhaps also delight) billions of extremely hard-working and diligent pollinators whose diligent work leads to delicious, nutritious food for so many beings — many of them human — to eat.
And it’s powered by photons traveling through space from a nearby star.
And it’s assisted by water which falls from the sky, is sucked up by the plants’ roots, is incorporated into leaves and flowers and fruits and berries, and eventually evaporates back into the sky — only to begin the cycle again.
What a planet!
As Peter writes in his song, “The challenging thing becomes not to look for miracles — but finding where there isn’t one…”
Thank you for reading and listening to yet another blog post.
amusicalifeonplanetearth 