September 23, 2019 by bardessdmdenton

Autumnal Sisterhood

Fall, leaves, fall; die, flowers, away;

Lengthen night and shorten day;

Every leaf speaks bliss to me

Fluttering from the autumn tree.

~ Emily Brontë

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September 22, 2018 by bardessdmdenton

Saturday Short: Autumnal Sisterhood

Fall, leaves, fall; die, flowers, away;

Lengthen night and shorten day;

Every leaf speaks bliss to me

Fluttering from the autumn tree.

~ Emily Brontë

“Wait but a little while,” she said,

“Till Summer’s burning days are fled;

And Autumn shall restore,

With golden riches of her own …”

~ Anne Brontë

On numerous evenings in the parlor the two of them worked on companion pieces, which excerpted read like a scripted dialogue between them.

Anne: “‘A younger boy was with me there, his hand upon my shoulder leant; his heart, like mine, was free from care …’”

Emily: “‘They had learnt from length of strife—of civil war and anarchy—to laugh at death and look on life with somewhat lighter sympathy.’”

Anne: “‘We had wandered far that day o’er that forbidden ground away—ground, to our rebel feet how dear. Danger and freedom both were there—’”

Emily: “‘It was the autumn of the year; the time to laboring peasants, dear: week after week, from noon to noon, September shone as bright as June.’”

Anne: “‘He bade me pause and breathe a while, but spoke it with a happy smile. His lips were parted to inhale the breeze that swept the ferny dale, and chased the clouds across the sky …’”

~ from Without the Veil Between, Anne Brontë: A Fine and Subtle Spirit
(quoted poetry from Emily Brontë’s Why ask to know the date—the Clime? and Anne Brontë’s Z_________’s Dream)

©Artwork and writing, unless otherwise indicated, are the property of Diane M Denton. Please request permission to reproduce or post elsewhere with a link back to bardessdmdenton. Thank you

September 23, 2015 by bardessdmdenton

The Habit of Being as if Never Before

We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.
~ Aristotle

How could I resist this quote for feeling better about repeating a post?

Well, it’s not exactly the same as before. Then what ever can be?

Autumn Crocuses in my garden in 2012

Now the light is more diffused, colors faded.

: Autumn Crocus in my garden two days ago

Another year of restlessness like standing still, growth from withdrawal and revealing in one way and another.

: Autumn Crocus in my garden this morning, the first day of Autumn

Survival in the habit of being as if never before.

There is a memory here, planted moments before it was too late.

It’s not what it seems. These are not the spring variety, waking from frigid dreams, wooed by what is to come, green showing warily yet buds often opening too soon.

These are not flowers fraught with anticipation. They’ve already been revealed, lost their clothes in the crowd, withdrawn to regrow and regroup before winter. These latent lilies are a law unto themselves, having done it all before, bending this way and that, exploding unashamed into sunshine and tears, inviting their withering surroundings to dance before the mystery of dying.

For here is immortality. Everywhere. And so the generous age offered a handful of corms for drilling into years she might or might not have ahead, too deep to be forgotten.

Writing note: The autumn crocus actually isn’t a crocus—it’s in the lily family (crocuses are in the iris family), flowering in the fall. Autumn crocuses send up their leaves in the spring but they die back by summer, the flower stalks rising and blooming quite indecently in fall. Some common names are: naked ladies and mysteria. Mine were given me many years ago by an older neighbor friend of my mom’s, Sue Drilling, a farmer’s wife, who was fiercely independent as well as extremely intelligent and artistic, living alone into her 80’s (no one knows for sure, as she would never tell her age…) in a large Frank Lloyd Wright style house where she had a very wild but wonderful perennial garden. The new owners have since dug it all up and replaced it too neatly with shrubs and lawns, less to care for and enjoy.

©Artwork and writing, unless otherwise indicated, are the property of Diane M Denton. Please request permission to reproduce or post elsewhere with a link back to bardessdmdenton. Thank you.