Wearing a crown of wet feathers,
a soaked songbird fills the hole in the sky
left behind by a spring rain.
 

A spring morning begins with a dance,
a honey bee partnered with her shadow.

A mayfly from a long forgotten spring,
in some species the adults live only a few minutes.
 

“the weavers of some cloth of gold,
Or the fine pistons of some bright machine.”
 

A praying mantis nymph disappears in a miniature fantasia of seed clusters and crystal ball water droplets.

A faint wind and the spring begins.

The Michigan Beekeepers Association is holding their annual spring meeting in East Lansing at the Kellogg Center this weekend March 13h & 14th. I’ll be there.

Below, a worker bee heavy with a successful morning hunt hurries back to her hive.

Just after sunset this past spring, I tried to avoid the poison ivy and hope for enough light to make this image of an Ebony Jewelwing Damselfly, with the cool blue sky light contrasting with the green and brown meadow grasses.

Received a nice surprise today, the Winter Ant image I posted this past spring was chosen as one of the Best Insect Photos of 2008 by Alex Wild, on his Myrmecos blog.

Alex is probably the best ant photographer around, so I’m quite honored. He works as a biologist on insect evolution at the University of Illinois and is a wonderful resource for insect photography, always sharing his knowledge and insights.

Enjoy a guest post by writer Anne Harris.

Anne writes fantasy, science fiction and, as Jessica Freely, alternative romance. Her most recent publication, Hero, is available from Torquere Books. She also mentors graduate students in Seton Hill University’s Writing Popular Fiction program.

Read her blog Friskbiskit.

___________________________________________

Being Outside
by Anne Harris

It’s early spring in Michigan and I’m beginning to spend time outside
again.

Every winter, my world reduces to interior spaces. Oh, I still go outside,
of course. I still take a moment, here and there, to appreciated a network
of naked oak branches against a flat gray sky, or the reflection of the moon
on the snow on a clear winter night when the cold itself is a presence:
deadly, mysterious and seemingly eternal. I savor the sunny days any way I
can manage it. I try to take a walk in a snowy wood at least once each
season.

But, for the most part, I am indoors, and I don’t care for it very much. I
find there’s something stressful about being confronted with straight lines
and right angles at every turn. Perfection, precision, absoluteness. They
give a misleading impression of what life is like: either/or. And life is
manifestly both/and.

I don’t think the human eye is particularly suited to the carpentered
environment. The human heart either, for that matter. We are animals, after
all. At least, that’s the explanation I’ve come up with for why, when
winter finally breaks and I can once again sit outside in my back yard for
hours at a time, or take off for the lake for the day, my eyes are so
grateful. They are. They soak in the broken lines, the curves, the spikes,
the clumps and bumps, and I literally feel them relax. And then I relax.
Now, what’s outside matches what’s inside. All around me is reassuring
evidence that chaos, multiplicity and disorder are not only normal, but also
functional and beautiful. I feel better about myself and the world.

No living thing is a straight line. We are all bent, in one way or another,
and better for it.

Happy spring.