The enduring allure and mystique of Spanish moss in Daydreaming on the Porch

Deep shadows of a late afternoon sun followed me as I slowly ambled around, leisurely taking pictures of centuries-old live oaks scattered across the property.  I particularly like to catch the sun between the limbs and branches, backlighting the abundant Spanish moss…

From my journal Jan. 19, 2014

Walking along a mountain path
I find a sandal print in the moss, 
a billowy cloud low on the lake,
grasses growing up to a door,
a pine tree shimmering green,
a brook gurgling along from the mountain,
and as I mingle with truth among the flowers ,I have forgotten what to say.

Liu Chiang-Ch’ing

I love late afternoons at the nearby state park where I go often with my camera.   The reflections in the water of the lakes, the shadows from the branches of the many live oaks, light showing through Spanish moss and leaves, illuminated in the winter sunlight — all catch my attention.

There are always surprising new discoveries in Nature.   By means of the camera, I feel like I am “seeing” with an extra sense because I am always thinking and perceiving in terms of the light, the details of flowers, pine cones, and small ferns and ivy on the forest floor. So I often find myself looking down at the ground as well as up into sky where I can enjoy the infinite variety of clouds.  Instead of just walking along paths I have walked countless times before, I look attentively all around me the whole time.  To me, this is exciting.   In that quiet place with the breeze off the marsh and clouds sailing by slowly overhead, I tap into the sources of peace and strength that come from deep within me.    Life ceases for a merciful period of time to be something to race through with busyness and endless tasks and errands and instead is something to savor and marvel at in the moment.

In places like like the parks and gardens where I take walks every day with my camera, the mysteries of life are not so unfathamable anymore.  A clearer picture emergies, and though it may fade when I rejoin the world outside any one of my favorite sanctuaries,  I know what is there, what I feel, and what I learn each time I visit.

I am so looking forward to Spring this year. I love the way light filters through trees. It has a special clarity and newness in Spring. The landscape becomes Nature’s most astonishingly lovely painting, the whole spreading out before my eyes at every turn in scenes of wonder and awe. The rejuvenation of life each March and April has a profoundly beneficent effect on me, and I want to share as much of it as I can through my photographs and words.

I recall thinking last March that Spring that year seemed to me the most beautiful I had ever experienced. With our severe freeze and plant damage last month, I don’t see how it can be as spectacular, but that doesn’t really matter. There will be still be beauty in abundance.

Maybe I am getting older and wiser with the knowledge that only a limited number of such seasonal pageants lie ahead of me on this earthly journey. Maybe it’s the poet and artist in my soul which seeks out beauty and wonder wherever I can find it. However, and in whatever form it comes to me, I cannot ever take such splendor for granted. I never have.

Each Spring’s arrival is as if I am seeing it for the first time. I approach this coming time of year with what I can only describe as childlike wonder and awe, anticipation and excitement.

As I wandered the last month on a winter walk at Magnolia Gardens, I silently offered thanks and gratitude. The gifts bestowed at all seasons are nothing short of miraculous. How fortunate I am to have many an “impulse from a vernal wood” and therein find the surest measure of peace and freedom I can experience in a life too often filled with anxiety and world-weariness.

And it’s always late afternoons that make the flowers and landscapes so distinctly sharp and clear for my camera. It is at those times of day that the shadows are longer, and the light from the lowering sun illumines trees and woods from behind, creating many backlit scenes of warmth and light. I particularly like way the Spanish moss is lit up, and the way the sun casts shadows from trees across still, green sheets of algae in the wetland reservoir.

In concluding these thoughts, I want to focus for awhile on a feature of our Deep South landscapes here in Charleston and surrounding counties that is not just strange and mysterious, but beautiful and graceful as well. I am speaking, of course, about the ubiquitous Spanish moss (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_moss) that I have been fascinated by my entire life, having grown up in New Orleans, but living the past 30 years here in Charleston, where the stuff of Southern Gothic legend, art and fiction seems even more abundant.

During my daily walks, whether in a park, garden or along the streets of Charleston’s historic district, I can’t help but notice the moss hanging from almost every tree, so it seems. It can completely obscure many of the branches of our Crape Myrtle trees.

Gentle breezes off the marsh and open water at the state park add to a sense of peacefulness and being “away from it all.” That’s why I go there so often. Walking among and under the moss-hung branches and limbs of magnificent live oak trees, which are everywhere, I marvel at the quiet of the walkways where the shadows of trees on those late afternoon visits lengthen with the perfect light of waning days. I am offered surprising new ways of looking at and photographing the moss. These are always timeless and eternal moments, what the writer Elizabeth Carothers Herron describes as “ordinary mysticism”. She wrote this in an essay that appeared in Orion Magazine:

…Late in the day I sit under the willows by the creek. The sun slants sideways through the leaves. A breeze picks up to ease the summer heat and fans through the trees. The narrow slivers of silver-gray of the willows, like a thousand tiny scimitars, catch the sun in sporadic shimmers. The mother willow’s many arms seem to spin from her gnarled and twisted trunk. She dances through the swirl of the seasons, while her roots hold fast and keep the creek bank stable through winter floods. One of her long arms wraps around behind me, low and into the ground so that if I did not follow its path I might imagine it to be a separate tree. Her sisters dance, too, up and down the creek….To live in time is what we hunger for, not to run to catch up with it, but to return to it…

So I think those humble strands of mysterious Spanish moss wafting in hot Southern summer breezes are more than just epiphytes.

My interest in this subject crops up time and again in my journal musings throughout the years:

From Feb. 23, 2002:

This is the last resting stop on the trail where I can write in my notebook. There’s still that cool wind, as earlier, that is quite blissful as I sit under the shade of a small water oak, Spanish moss hanging down almost in my face. I can see the salt marsh extending way off in the distance. I can smell the sea in the wind. This is a meeting place of eco-systems, a coming together of inland forests and swamps with tidal creeks and salt marsh. There are a lot of places like this all along the South Carolina coast, but few are protected in preserves as this place is.

From Feb. 8, 2007:

I think a lot of Audubon Park when I am here, a magnificent urban refuge in the uptown area of New Orleans near the Mississippi River. I remember when I was in college, as well as when I was younger, visiting the park and being in awe of the oaks. Their branches draped with Spanish moss lent an air of mystery to the surrounding landscape. The shade they provide is unsurpassed, their bark thick and furrowed. These trees have an air of permanence, as if they will stand throughout the ages, long after we mortals are gone, but only if we don’t completely alter the climate and atmosphere so that these splendid trees can no longer thive in the southern coastal plain, and, as a result, steadily die off as a species and fade away into the past. That would be tragic.

And here is a selection of photos where I tried to capture the mystery and moods of Spanish moss:

https://www.flickr.com/gp/camas/25723kzv2t