Little Flowers of the Mountain

09/14/2026

🤎🤎🤎

The 350 beats per minute dropping to 4 and body temperature falling toward 40 degrees are both well documented, so the infographic's numbers hold up. Here's the caption.

Right now, chipmunks are running one of the most frantic food operations in the backyard, and most people barely notice it happening under their own porch steps. Every trip out means cheeks stuffed to several times the size of the head, hauling acorns, seeds, and nuts down into an underground burrow that can stretch out surprisingly far beneath the soil.

By late September, that burrow's pantry chamber is packed, and the chipmunk starts sleeping right on top of the stash it has spent weeks building. This isn't hibernation in the way most people picture it. Chipmunks don't build up the thick layer of body fat that true hibernators like groundhogs rely on to sleep straight through winter. Instead, they store food because they have to wake up and eat it.

Late October is when the burrow gets sealed off. The chipmunk plugs its entrance with soil and retreats below ground, cutting itself off from the surface world for the season. What happens physiologically after that first hard freeze is genuinely extreme for a small mammal. A chipmunk's resting heart rate normally runs around 350 beats per minute, and once it drops into torpor, that rate can crash to somewhere around 4 beats per minute. Body temperature falls from close to 100 degrees Fahrenheit down toward the temperature of the burrow itself, often into the low 40s.

This is where chipmunks diverge from animals that hibernate continuously. Instead of one long uninterrupted sleep, a chipmunk cycles in and out of torpor throughout the winter, typically every few days. It wakes up, its heart rate and body temperature climb back to normal, and it eats directly from the food pile it stashed back in the fall before dropping back into torpor again. That's the entire strategy: no fat reserves to slowly burn through, just a buried pantry and a body built to shut down almost completely between meals.

It's a useful reminder that a quiet pile of leaves by the foundation or a small hole near the base of a step isn't nothing. There's very likely an entire winter survival system running underneath it, built on months of frantic collecting and a heart rate that can swing from 350 beats a minute to nearly stopped, over and over, until spring finally arrives. 🐿️🍂

09/14/2026

09/13/2026

You Are the Gardener of Your Thoughts

Every reality begins
as a thought we choose to nurture.

You are not merely
a witness to your thoughts,
you are their gardener.

Whatever you give your attention to
shapes the way you see the world.

A thought repeated
becomes a lens.
A lens shapes perception.
And perception, lived long enough,
can begin to feel like truth.

Not every thought is the truth.
Some are old wounds,
fears mistaken for intuition,
ghosts dressed as certainty.

Let them come.
Let them pass.
Do not let every thought
take root within you.

Choose instead
the thought that leaves space
for mystery, compassion,
and the possibility
of what may unfold.

Because attention is a form of love,
and what you tend
shall flourish.

Give it to fear,
and the garden shall wither
and lose its colour.

Give it to wonder,
and existence shall become luminous.

Give it to the present,
and you shall see clearly
what is already blooming.

So choose wisely
what you decide to tend.
What you contemplate
changes what you notice.

What you notice
changes what you value.

What you value
changes what you choose.

And what you choose
becomes the shape of your life.

So sit with one thought.
Let silence test it.
Let time deepen it.
Let reality refine it.
And if it still holds truth,
water it.

For one day you may realize
the life you called destiny

was, in part,
the garden
your attention
chose to nurture.

~ 'You Are the Gardener of Your Thoughts' by Spirit of a Hippie

✍️ Mary Anne Byrne

~ Art Unknown via Pinterest

09/12/2026

🧡🧡🧡

09/11/2026

Aurora Bear

In the stillness of the ancient woods,
The Bear walks with the weight of stars.
His breath is thunder, his silence deep
A guardian where the old songs sleep.

He knows the path beneath the snow,
Where roots speak truths no man can know.
He dreams in caves of fire and bone,
Yet wakes to walk this earth alone.

He is the shield, the hidden roar,
The healer on the shadowed shore.
When danger comes, his heart stands tall
Not to conquer, but to protect all.

From moon to moss, from dusk to flame,
The Bear remembers every name.
He teaches us: be fierce, be kind
With grounded feet and fearless mind.

🎨 Art by Serin Alar
🖊️Poem: Piahn