It's too soft and green to have split open; perhaps some curious person opened it.
"Nothing yeildes more pleasure and content to the soule then when it findes that which it may love fervently; for to love and live beloved is the soule's paradise both here and in heaven."--John Winthrop, from his sermon "A City upon a Hill", written aboard the Arabella traveling from England to Massachusetts, 1630
I've been reading about the Puritans, because they were big into communications.
They're fascinating, but they ruined their lovely ideals with their cruelty toward imperfection.
The year after he wrote "A City...," Winthrop recorded in his journal that Philip Ratcliffe was whipped and had both his ears cut off for "most fould, scandalous invectives against our churches and government."
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(This poem doesn't really fit my photograph, but I like it.)
MILKWEED
James Wright
While I stood here, in the open, lost in myself,
I must have looked a long time
Down the corn rows, beyond grass,
The small house,
White walls, animals lumbering toward the barn.
I look down now. It is all changed.
Whatever it was I lost, whatever I wept for
Was a wild, gentle thing, the small dark eyes
Loving me in secret.
It is here. At a touch of my hand,
The air fills with delicate creatures
From the other world.
--by James Wright from The Branch Will Not Break, 1992