To deliver oneself up, to hand oneself over, entrust oneself completely to the silence of a wide landscape of woods and hills, or sea, or desert; to sit still while the sun comes up over the land and fills its silences with light. To pray and work in the morning and to labor and rest in the afternoon, and to sit again in meditation in the evening when the night falls upon that land and when the silence fills itself with darkness and with stars….

Thomas Merton, Thoughts in Solitude

NOTES FOR THE THIRD WEEK OF EARLY SUMMER
THE TWENTY-NINTH WEEK OF THE NATURAL YEAR
WHEN THE PIE CHERRIES ARE RIPE
AND YUCCA BLOOMIS IN TOWN
AND GREAT MULLEIN AND WHITE SWEET CLOVER AND MEADOW RUE FLOWER IN THE FIELDS
AND LIZARD’S TAIL BLOSSOMS IN THE RIVERS AND PONDS

The Cherry Pie Moon enters its second quarter at 11:30 p.m. on June 18 and waxes throughout the week, becoming completely full on June 26 at 6:30 a.m. Rising in the afternoon and setting after midnight, the gibbous moon moves overhead in the evening.

THE LONGEST DAYS 

      At the end of early summer, the days are the longest of the year, and mulberries and black raspberries are sweetest.  Milkweed beetles look for milkweed flowers on the longest days; giant cecropia moths emerge.  The first monarch butterfly caterpillars eat the carrot tops. 
     Damselflies and daddy longlegs are everywhere when black raspberries come in.  Mosquitoes, chiggers, and ticks have reached their summer strength.  Giant black cricket hunters hunt crickets in the garden. 
Two out of three parsnips, angelicas, and hemlocks are going to seed.  Some multiflora roses and Japanese honeysuckles are dropping petals.  But wingstem and tall coneflower stalks are five feet high.  Virginia creeper is flowering.  Canadian thistles and nodding thistles are at their best.  Blackberries have set fruit.  The very first trumpet vines sport bright red-orange trumpets, and the first Deptford pink and first great mullein come into bloom. 
     Orchard grass is brown and old, English rye grass full bloom, exotic bottle grass late bloom, brome grass very late, some timothy still tender.  More Asiatic lilies are coming in now, first the orange, then the pink.  Yellow primroses, foxglove, pink and yellow achillea, late daisies, purple spiderwort and speedwell shine in the garden.  All across the nation’s midsection, there are hedges of white elderberry flowers, roadsides of violet crown vetch, great fields of gold and green wheat. 
     If you follow the Mississippi Valley south, you will find hemlocks and thistles all gone to seed near St. Louis, teasel twice as tall as it is in Chicago.  Sweet clover has almost disappeared by Memphis, and the blackberries are turning a little red.  In the Deep South, Queen Anne's lace blooms, wild lettuce and horseweed too, and elderberries set their fruit. 
    The wheat fields are bare in the Gulf States, the roadsides full of black-eyed Susans, pennywort, thin-leafed mountain mint and Mexican hat.  Deep in Central America, the sugar cane crop paces the sweet corn in Iowa.