Reminder in the Snow

This morning, the garden is an oasis of stillness after the torrential snows of yesterday, a magical realm surrounded by plumed trees and clouds and crystalline white.

On this quiet day before Imbolc (or Candlemas), I found a single tattered lacy leaf resting in the garden. It is both a delicate gift and a reminder - that all things turn in time, and we too must await the time of our turning, a perfect flowing translation into light and verdant springtime song.

Happy Imbolc to one and all...

Friday Ramble - Snowing

This Friday's ramble (alas) is with shovel in hand and hood up against the dense curtain of tumbling white stuff beyond the windows. For all that, the day is a fine one, mild and gray of sky, heavy snowfall draping everything in sight. Rooflines and eaves and gutters - all the edges and corners of the village have been rounded off and smoothed, burnished to cursive oceanic perfection.

Can the day's white stuff be classified as columns, needles, dendrites or rimed snow? I haven't a clue which of the four categories of snow I am moving about, but the snowfall has a way of muffling all sounds in the village, and the world is a magical place, all pristine and flowing and hushed. To this lurching and fumbling follower of the Way, such a day is as lovely as a winter woodblock image by Kawase Hasui or Tsuchiya Koitsu.

If I were out in the woods right now, I would be able to hear the snow falling among the trees, but there are signs and wonders here too.

Thursday Poem - Evening

The sky puts on the darkening blue coat
held for it by a row of ancient trees;
you watch: and the lands grow distant in your sight,
one journeying to heaven and one that falls;

and leave you not at home in either one,
not quite so still and dark as the darkened houses,
not calling to eternity with the passion
of what becomes a star each night, and rises;
and leave you (inexpressibly to unravel)
your life, with its immensity and fear,
so that, now bounded, now immeasurable,
it is alternately stone in you and star.

Rainer Maria Rilke, Evening
(translation by Stephen Mitchell)

Wordless Wednesday - Light and Shadow

Greeting the Day

It's all about light, or rather the lack of it. In these midwinter days, I find myself yearning for radiance and pursuing it with all the passionate longing of a frantic and obsessed collector. Down alleys and around corners we go, by twittenings and icy wooded corridors, along roof lines and through tree tops, over the hills and far away.

Leaning against the counter in the kitchen at sunrise with coffee in hand, I see rosy gold on the eastern horizon and am stopped right in my tracks, staring and besotted. The morning light dances across an icicle suspended from the eaves of the house or through the trees in the garden, and out comes the camera. I turn on the computer a short time later, and everything I create seems to be about light, whether the creation is a photo taken a short time earlier, a scanned drawing of some sort, an Adobe Illustrator rendering or a combination of the three like the image above.

Imbolc or Candlemas falls this coming Sunday on February 1, and you may be sure that there will be a celebration here in the frozen north.

Pale Monday Morning

Here we are at the first morning after "dark of the moon", with a whole new lunar month to observe and admire. My Lunaria calendar has already been turned to the second moon (moonth) of the calendar year, and the accompanying day journal turned to the right page. Counting the days according to the calendar of the seasons and marking them by the moons has always made more sense to me, and I do it faithfully.

This morning, a pale watery sun is coming up behind the Manitoba Maple (or Box Elder) like a smudged and ghostly fingerprint. The skies are gray and promise snow, and the temperature is hovering around -35 with the wind chill factored into the equation. This is not the sort of day when one can wander around outside for hours with camera in hand.

Just beyond the edges of this photo, there is a grand flock of crows dancing about in the trees and waiting for me to put out their breakfast, usually the remains of Spencer's evening meal. The feast will augment the splendid nosh already in place at several bird feeding stations around the winter garden, and this is also something done faithfully, even on the coldest and snowiest day of the year.

The term for a whole bucket of crows together is a "murder of crows", but I've never liked the expression and prefer to think of an assemblage of the canny birds as a "rowdy of crows". Whatever one chooses to call them, they sit patiently in the trees in the garden and wait for me to appear with their breakfast every morning, and they thank me with a song when they have dined.

Waiting

Laden

Friday Ramble - Radical

This Friday's word is radical, and it comes to us through the late Latin rādīcālis meaning having roots and the Old English wrotan meaning to root, gnaw or dig up, both originating in the early Indo-European wrad meaning branch or root.

Synonyms include: fundamental, basic, basal, bottom, cardinal, constitutional, deep-seated, essential, foundational, inherent, innate, intrinsic, meat-and-potatoes, native, natural, organic, original, primal, primary, primitive, profound, thoroughgoing, underlying, vital. They also include pejorative words such as anarchistic, chaotic, excessive, extremist, fanatical, far-out, freethinking, iconoclastic, immoderate, insubordinate, insurgent, insurrectionary, intransigent, lawless, left wing, militant, mutinous, nihilistic, rabid, rebellious, recalcitrant, recusant, refractory, restive, revolutionary, riotous, seditious, severe, sweeping, uncompromising and violent.

We use the word radical to describe someone who dwells outside the mainstream, someone who has departed from accepted norms, traditions and social conventions and does their own thing. The words has been in common usage since the sixties, and to be called radical is not usually a compliment. It is astonishing to think that a word used to connote the rebellious, unconventional,, confrontational and downright peculiar actually means something as lovely and organic and simple as "rooted. Now how did that happen?

Radical is fast becoming my favorite word this year. It signifies (for me anyway) a bone deep connection with the Old Wild Mother, with the earth under my feet and the moon and stars over my head, with timeless notions of rebirth, transformation and non-duality. Roots down, branches up and away we go...

Thursday Poem - I Praise My Destroyer

How can it all end,
the moon making foil of the blueblack sea,
at twilight the sandbars holding lavender
among turquoise shadows,
pastels of water lidded by pastels of sky
and, at angle, moon shimmer snaking to the horizon?
By the dockside, a diver kneels at his tank,
to test the regulator, as if taking communion.

***

How can it all end,
the cabbage whites aflutter
like tissue-papers
lofting to Heaven in a Japanese temple,
the yellow roses numbingly fragrant
and even the spiky conifer
whispering scent.

I praise my destroyer.
The sea turtle's revenge
is to dwell at equal measures
from the grave. Our cavernous brains
won't save us in the end,
though, heaven knows, then enhance the drama.
Despite passion's rule, deep play
and wonder, worry hangs
like a curtain of trembling beads
across every doorway.

But there was never a dull torment,
and it was grace to live
among the fruits of summer, to love by design,
and walk the startling Earth
for what seemed
an endless resurrection of days.

I praise life's bright catastrophes,
and all the ceremonies of grief.
I praise our real estate - a shadow and a grave.
I praise my destroyer,
and will continue praising
until hours run like mercury
through my fingers, hope flares a final time
into the last throes of innocence,
and all the coins of sense are spent.

Diane Ackerman, I Praise My Destroyer (Excerpt)

Wordless Wednesday - Lantern

Heron Dreams

Sometimes, on long winter nights in January, you dream of the great herons, and their perfect moonlight flight is not across summer skies at twilight, but frozen ponds and Himalayas.

Spencer At Twilight

Spencer's serious expression had its raison d'être in the music he was listening to when I took this photo. Our little pack of timber wolves were singing somewhere over the western hill, and the coyotes on the other side of the Two Hundred Acre Wood were answering them in perfect descant, both groups of voices rising and falling across the snow an hour or so before the January moon came up over the trees.

The twilight chorale was a new experience for Spencer, and he listened thoughtfully for a while before deciding to join in the songfest with gusto. Surprise, surprise... My new furry son has a fine expressive tenor voice of his own, and he has quite a range - the wolves and the coyotes were impressed. When he finished his ballad, there was complete silence for a moment, and then the others all began to sing at once. There was approval in their voices and they sang the warmest of welcomes to the new lad in the neighborhood.

Wind From the Sea

Wind From the Sea
Andrew Wyeth, 1948

Many years ago, I encountered Andrew Wyeth's "Wind From the Sea" and sat rapt with the magazine in my lap for some time, entranced by the tattered lace curtains blowing in the unseen wind from the sea, by the old window and the rather bleak (in conventional terms anyway) landscape beyond the window.

At the time of my encounter with the painting, I was not old enough to read, and I had no idea what the painting was called or who had painted it, but I knew that here was something special, and that the image before me would be with me all the days of my life. A child has not the vocabulary to describe such things, but the painting was simply magnificent and it called me out of my child self, into it and somewhere else, over the hills and far away. It was compelling; it was stark and somber and poignant beyond words - it was liminal and absolutely magical. I have never forgotten, and I have indeed carried the image around with me ever since, all the days of my life.

Snow Hill
Andrew Wyeth, 1989

The subjects of Wyeth's much later and dreamlike "Snow Hill" are dancing merrily around a beribboned pole, not a May pole as one might think at first glance, but a winter pole crowned by an evergreen and surrounded by snow. We cannot see the faces of the six dancers, but they were all known to Wyeth as models, and they were friends at various times in his life: Karl and Anna Kuerner, Allan Lynch, Helga Testorf (model for the legendary Helga paintings), Bill Loper and Adam Johnson. On the hillside below is the Kuerner farm near Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, a place known and loved by Wyeth in his childhood. In the distance we glimpse the railway tracks on which Wyeth's father (noted illustrator N.C. Wyeth) was killed with his young grandson in 1945. Wyeth once said jocularly that the subjects of this rather surreal painting were dancing around the pole in anticipation of his death because he had been so difficult to work with. The dancers certainly appear to be in a festive frame of mind, but if they are celebrating anything at all, it is Andrew's long and fruitful life and his art, not his demise.

To Andrew Wyeth, I owe my early engagement with the grandeur of life and the natural world, with the luminous, the magical, the wild and the fey which has sustained me for almost sixty years. Every trip I have ever taken into the woods with camera (or notebook and pen) had its genesis in my meeting with Andrew Wyeth's 1948 painting - every moment of wonder, every exposure, every entranced moment spent tracing shadows and shapes and textures in the wild.

Andrew Wyeth died two days ago in his sleep at the ripe old age of ninety-one, and I never had a chance to thank him. How I wish it had been otherwise. He gave me the world, and the eyes with which to truly see it. What child could ask for more?

From the Gate

Thursday Poem - Lines for Winter

Tell yourself
as it gets cold and gray falls from the air
that you will go on
walking, hearing
the same tune no matter where
you find yourself --
inside the dome of dark
or under the cracking white
of the moon's gaze in a valley of snow.
Tonight as it gets cold
tell yourself
what you know which is nothing
but the tune your bones play
as you keep going. And you will be able
for once to lie down under the small fire
of winter stars.
And if it happens that you cannot
go on or turn back and you find yourself
where you will be at the end,
tell yourself
in that final flowing of cold through your limbs
that you love what you are.

Mark Strand

Wordless Wednesday - Cold

By Winter Crowned (II)

By Winter Crowned

Friday Ramble - Wild Blue Meringue

There are no whipped egg whites here, no powdered sugar,cream of tartar, vanilla or almond extract, but finding such airy blue puffs on a frozen creek bed in January is a treat nevertheless.

My wild blue meringues are almost indecently sumptuous in their contours - they are sweetness indeed for winter eyes.

Wordless Wednesday - Storm Front

Blue and Gold

The warmth of the sun on one's shoulders on an icy January morning is a gift, an embrace, a sparkling boon. Springtime is still some months away, but the sun is growing stronger every day, and its strength can be felt - springtime is no longer quite the distant possibility it was in early darkling December.

I walk in wide blue fields under the golden midwinter sun and feel replenished and even hopeful. Strange to relate, on days like this, one can sense the greening season that is to come, and simple timeless notions of rebirth and renewal run through the veins like verdant sap. Somewhere over the hill, I sense the Old Wild Mother smiling - she's amused by my lurching antics out in this field and thinking her own springtime thoughts.

True Blues

The sky and the fields and the fences and the hills go on forever, and their color is blue, in hues ranging from palest sapphire in the light to deep inky indigo in the shadows.

I stand here looking around, cold and lost for words, but at the same time, strangely contented. What purity of line, what depth and texture and gloss and flowing curves...

What can I say about this perfect winter day and this place which has not already been communicated by the image?

Fragile

By the Bridge

How satisfying to hear the sound of water in the depths of winter... We stopped briefly near the bridge at Almonte on the way home from the highlands today, and the Mississippi river was on a tumultuous roll, plunging over the rocks in great streaming torrents and roaring along as if it had never heard the words "winter" or frozen".

The sound of the river roaring in Mississippi Mills (Almonte) has been all too absent in the last several months. The Mississippi River Power Corporation, owned by the town, is in the midst of constructing a brand new 5 megawatt generating station downstream from the existing facility - the new installation will be capable of generating 19 million kilowatt hours of energy per year, and it will be as "green" as they can make it.

I've been watching the project with interest because once upon a long ago time, I wanted to own a small independent power generating station of my own - I had visions of myself spinning and painting in an old stone mill house studio, playing a good cello near the water, quaffing claret by a mill pond stocked with trout and graced by herons at twilight. That dream will have to wait for another lifetime...

The river at Almonte has been one of my favorite places for years, particularly in winter. The spray drenches the trees for quite a distance around, and water freezes rapidly into some of the most spectacular icicles I've seen anywhere. The rocks below the falls are covered with ice and snow, and the photo opportunities are endless. Needless to say, a visit in January is something of a damp undertaking, but it's also magic.

Maple in Snow

In the Morning of the Year

It's a tradition... No matter how cold it is beyond the windows, I rise early, brew tea and mug in hand, I lean against the counter and watch the sun come up on the first day of the calendar year.

This morning's sunrise was filtered through the bare maples and their cloaks of ice, and the world beyond the windows felt warm and enfolding, although it was very cold.

A chance interplay between the ice and early sun forged coins of hammered light that hung suspended among the frozen trees, and at times, they were almost blinding. There were long gold and violet streaks flowing down the sky, and near the horizon they faded to a dusky pink that rolled across my sight like low undulating hills - from my perch by the kitchen window, I seemed to be looking up into the foothills of the Himalayas.

The whole scene was like an incredible painting, and I stood staring like a fool, wide-eyed and breathless. Georgia O'Keefe and Nicholas Roerich would have absolutely loved this sunrise. It was a gift, a gorgeous way to start the year, and I am clinging to the fragile hope that this sunrise was a harbinger of good things to come.