Eating Light

“There is a bench in the back of my garden shaded by Virginia creeper, climbing roses, and a white pine where I sit early in the morning and watch the action.  Light blue bells of a dwarf campanula drift over the rock garden just before my eyes.  Behind it, a three-foot stand of aconite is flowering now, each dark blue cowl-like corolla bowed for worship or intrigue:  thus its common name, monkshood.  Next to the aconite, black madonna lilies with their seductive Easter scent are just coming into bloom.  At the back of the garden, a hollow log, used in its glory days for a base to split kindling, now spills white cascade petunias and lobelia.

I can't get enough of watching the bees and trying to imagine how they experience the abundance of, say, a blue campanula blosssom, the dizzy light pulsing, every fiber of being immersed in the flower. 

 . . .

I would not call this meditation, sitting in the back garden. Maybe I would call it eating light.”

—Mary Rose O’Reilley, The Barn at the End of the World:  The Apprenticeship of a Quaker, Buddhist Shepherd

images: Campanula Rotundifolia, Plant World

Campanula poscharskyana, Great Plant Picks