In the garden

No, not mine.  A local park of ours has a lovely English garden.  Most times I forget it’s there, because I’m usually attracted to the trail around the large pond.

But I was feeling the need to think, and walk, and it was a gray day, and they haven’t done any spring plantings…so there was not much going on by the pond, so instead, I went to visit the garden.  It wasn’t looking too bad today.

It’s not filled with flowers like it is in late summer, but it is peaceful and lovely anyway.

I adore ivy.

That bench would have been nice to sit on, were it not for the bees hanging out.

I pondered this Norwegian spruce a long time.  It made me think of a person dancing a little bit…

I marveled at the red pine cones.  I have never seen red pine cones in my life.  Until today.  And they eventually turn brown.

I snapped a photo of this elderly gentleman.

I could have walked onward.  But I made it a point to try and talk to one new person a month.  It’s not that I’m shy…or antisocial.  I’m just more selective these days.  Or more tired.  Not sure which.

I ended up spending about 25 minutes talking to him.  We talked about his late wife and birds – Canadian geese, loons, ducks, gulls, and the sandhill crane migration my husband and I witnessed not too long ago.  He told me that loons can dive 25-30 feet under the water to find fish.  We actually saw one in the pond.  He was right…they would appear in one part of the water, then dive down deep and come up in a different spot.  It was pretty neat.

We talked about how his children were studying abroad in Europe, but how some of the prettiest places on earth are right in our own backyards.  I couldn’t agree with him more.

He also told me that the building in the picture above reminds him of chateaus in Switzerland, which to me was kind of interesting, because I’m reading The Unbearable Lightness of Being, and two of the characters end up in Switzerland for a little while.

Some of my favorite quotes from the book –

“Without realizing it, the individual composes his life according to the laws of beauty even in times of greatest distress.”

 *

“The heaviest of burdens crushes us, we sink beneath it, it pins us to the ground. But in love poetry of every age, the woman longs to be weighed down by the man’s body.The heaviest of burdens is therefore simultaneously an image of life’s most intense fulfillment. The heavier the burden, the closer our lives come to the earth, the more real and truthful they become. Conversely, the absolute absence of burden causes man to be lighter than air, to soar into heights, take leave of the earth and his earthly being, and become only half real, his movements as free as they are insignificant. What then shall we choose? Weight or lightness?”

 

I adore the book (and no, it’s not a book for the puritanical).  I found out about the book because of the young blogger  at The Unbearable Lighteness of Being Me, who is, besides being well-read, is an absolutely wonderful photographer.  You can see more quotes if you click on her link.

I love when my internet life, my book reading life, and my real life intersect.  It’s a pretty wonderful thing.