Angels in the woods
Of sassafras and pawpaw
Making promises


EPHEMERIS
The Cattail Moon continues to wax throughout the week, becoming completely full at 5:21 a.m. on July 7. A partial lunar eclipse will be visible when the full moon sets. Rising in the evening, setting before dawn most of the week, growing more gibbous every night, the moon will reach its most powerful position overhead near 12:00 a.m.

Aphelion, the Earth's position farthest from the sun, occurs on July 3 at 10:00 p.m. The sun moves to a declination 22 degrees, 16 minutes by July 9, reaching approximately 5 percent of the way to autumn equinox. The day shortened by 5 minutes last week; this week, the night grows by 4 minutes.

KENTUCKY RETREAT JOURNAL

Unlike simple geographical locations, which exist objectively, places do not exist until they are verbalized, first in thought and memory and then through the spoken or written word.

Kent Ryden

Monastery of Gethsemani, Trappist, Kentucky: I am used to being here in the fall. Today is so hot, the humidity so high. But I go for a walk before the sun gets higher and I get too tired.

A reading from Genesis at the service this morning: Abraham’s wife, Sarah, mocking the angels (disguised as travelers) who had promised her she would bear a son in her old age. Of course, against the odds, the child appeared.

I wander out into rolling hills, past freshly cut hay in great round bales, into patches of tall violet monarda and knapweed full of honeybees, bright orange butterfly bushes full of butterflies, white Queen Anne’s lace and yarrow, long drifts of daisy fleabane, the pathway lined with sky-blue chicory and vervain.

I ruminate about Kent Ryden’s assertion that place or landscape exists only as a projection of the mind, that the land is not only dependent on our perception but takes its nature, its characteristics from what we formulate its shapes to be. Place is structure that seems so distant but is actually inside us, constructed by us, an outcropping of our vision.

After an hour in the sun, I retreat into the dark and the shade of the forest. I accept the cool and the mosquitoes. The middle summer woods provide only fragments of color: a few avens a lost fleabane, one pale wild petunia, some small yellow sorrel, but sassafras, pawpaw, locust, walnut, yellow poplar, creeper, and sycamore offer me their protection.

I walk past the religious sculptures placed a long the walkway, every few hundred yards a Virgin Mary, a St. Francis, or other storied figure. I ponder the written requests placed at their feet, consider miracles. Then at the end, I come across three angels disguised as statues. Landscape as the figment of my mind, what will those three promise me?