I had a change of perspective - literally - after discovering foxglove plants that were six to seven feet tall. I felt so little - which is how my (potential) readers must feel all the time. It was different than hiking among, say, redwood trees. I expect them to be huge. Flowers? Quite a surprise.
Note to self: to tell stories for children, remember to sit down. View the world from three feet above the earth. The scale is so different.
Hiking in a second-growth forest in British Columbia today, I ran across an abandoned piece of equipment called a Mechanical Donkey. This device, about the size of a compact car, was used to winch fallen trees up or down the very steep slopes upon which they had grown. Now rusted, with a frayed cable wrapped around the spool, this device was critical to the livelihoods of the first European settlers in my remote location.
A few hundred yards below me, there remains a small settlement of First...
Beneath the dock the seaweeds sway
In marching lines four times each day
Dark purple, green, and red display
Like banners on parade.
First north to south the water flows
Delights your dangling dock-based toes
From marsh to ocean, out it goes.
Slack tide: the pennants fade.
Now urchins, sea stars, otters meet
Among the silky leaves to eat
Delicious eel grass tasty treat
Before the currents turn.
And as the tide from far-off sea
returns, know that my love will be
as big and deep and wide and free
for you,...