Nature Notes: Dandelions

(Tares, woodblock print by Gustave Baumann, 1881-1971,
German-born American artist and puppeteer)

Friendship, that “luminous, tranquil, rational world of relationships freely chosen,” is a gift.

“I have no duty,” writes C. S. Lewis in The Four Loves, “to be anyone’s Friend and no man in the world has a duty to be mine. No claims, no shadows of necessity. Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art, like the universe itself (for God did not need to create). It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things which give value to survival.”

NATURE NOTES: DANDELIONS

Incorrigible, brash,
They brightened the cinder path of my childhood.
Unsubtle, the opposite of primroses,
But, unlike primroses, capable
Of growing anywhere, railway track, pierhead,
Like our extrovert friends who never
Make us fall in love, yet fill
The primroseless roseless gaps.

~ Louis MacNeice (1907-1963), Irish poet