Listening for Earth Songs and Star Songs on a June day in Minnesota

Seniors' gardens from summer 2010.

In preparing to host and facilitate yesterday’s session of my mindfulness meditation group, I was thinking about how Minnesotans were teased this week by about 48 hours of summer weather sandwiched in between cold, cloudy days reminiscent of March or early April. 

And yet I noted the existence of about 25 small garden plots next to my apartment building where seniors are once again rejoicing in the planting, weeding, and the anticipated harvesting of vegetables, while some are also beautifying the area with flowers.

With my mind on gardening, nature, and meditation, I stumbled on this quote by eight-year-old Opal Whitely from The Singing Creek where the Willows Grow - The Mystical Nature Diary of Opal Whiteley, Penguin, 1995:

"And all the times I was picking up potatoes, I did have conversations with them.  Too, I did have thinks of all their growing days there in the ground, and all the things they did hear.  Earth-voices are glad voices, and earth-songs come up from the ground through the plants; and in their flowering, and in the days before these days are come, they do tell the earth-songs to the wind ... I have thinks these potatoes growing here did have knowings of star-songs."

Further research on Opal’s book turned up this item:

Long before environmental consciousness became popular, a young nature writer named Opal Whitely {Whiteley} captured America's heart. Opal's childhood diary, published in 1902 {1920}, became an immediate bestseller, one of the most talked-about books of its time. Wistful, funny, and wise, it was described by an admirer as "the revelation of the ...life of a feminine Peter Pan of the Oregon wilderness ---- so innocent, so intimate, so haunting, that I should not know where in all literature to look for a counterpart". But the diary soon fell into disgrace. Condemning it as an adult-written hoax, skeptics stirred a scandal that drove the book into obscurity and shattered the frail spirit of its author. Discovering the diary by chance, bestselling author Benjamin Hoff set out to solve the longstanding mystery of its origin. His biography of Opal that accompanies the diary provides fascinating proof that the document is indeed authentic ---- the work of a magically gifted child, America's forgotten interpreter of nature.

Hoff was awarded the American Book Award in 1988 for The Singing Creek Where the Willows Grow: The Rediscovered Diary of Opal Whiteley.

Yesterday, in closing our session I invited members of my meditation group to join me in listening for Earth songs and star songs affirming the presence of divinity throughout the ecological web of relationships on the planet Earth and throughout the star-flung universe. Today, I invite my readers at Katalusis to share this joyful experience as well.