"Now only dogs will follow me"

It's like when I started learning more about plants and suddenly the world opened up even more than before, everywhere there were old friends and new things to learn and fields of flowers to remark on walking or driving by. Dozens of edible things even in an old yard, radically different than what I'd been sold in a grocery store. Edible petals and jams and fig leaf syrup.

Suddenly the bird songs dont all mesh into one, there's the high peep of the hummingbird, and the pebbles falling down a metal washboard of the always-calling towhee, and the little chirps and alarm calls of the robins and their nest full of babies. There's early morning nectar sipping of the scabiosa and primrose, and a mother perched in the oregon grapes picking them alongside me, and the bi-weekly fight between the red-tailed Hawks and juvenile bald eagle above. Nests in the garden entryway and the tree I take breaks in the shade under and the old ash limbs.

And it didnt happen all at once, its interests that were building and being engaged with in different ways and places, but sometimes it feels like there's a moment - like using Merlin to match songs to the birds singing them and suddenly hearing every individual voice in the chorus, or realizing half the weeds in your garden bed are also food - where you unlock a new level. And it makes the world bigger and closer and more familiar and more intriguing and you notice all the differences and you love them each! For what! They are!!!

Keep chasing curiosity!!! Keep trying to find out a little more or identify that new thing or check out a new place! Even in the darkest of times there are 1 million creatures and beings that have shared this earth with us for millenia living alongside us, and there is so much meaning and connection to be found there!

tagging for reach:

im going to stare at it

im going to grin like an idiot

i dont care if you think its bad or not

i love it