we are all alive

Ramadasa sp., family Noctuidae, Malaysia

This moth has no common name in English.

The hot, steamy days of summer have arrived, and on this particular Saturday a week of intermittent rain had transformed the verdant cove forest along Quarry and Clay Runs in Coopers Rock State Forest into a muggy, dripping wonderland. Hardly surprising - Appalachia's cove forests are temperate rainforests, absorbing and slowly releasing enormous amounts of rainfall and creating the conditions for moss, fungi and ferns to grow on anything and everything that doesn't move, living and non-living. Photos above are from the ever gorgeous Mont Chateau Trail, which features a thousand foot elevation change from Cheat Lake to Henry Clay Iron Furnace, bordered on one side by a steep ravine and on the other by beathtaking rock formations and sprawling rhododendron thickets.

Some flies from this week

24 hours in the Superstitions

A dousing of weekend rain illuminates the moss in the old growth hemlock forest along Little Laurel Run in Coopers Rock State Forest. The gifts of late May in Central Appalachia's old woods include false Solomon's seal (Maianthemum racemosum), Indian cucumber (Medeola virginiana), speckled wood lily (Clintonia umbellulata), and mapleleaf viburnum (Viburnum acerifolium).

sometimes reverence for land starts very simply:

learning the names of local plants. noticing where water gathers. thanking a tree before taking from it. picking up trash. leaving a place better than you found it. sitting quietly long enough to feel the mood of the land.

animism is not always spectacle.

sunbeams and dewdrops come to life