Thursday Poem - For Beltane/May Day

There is a song in the greenwood,

There's an age old tale to be sung,
Healing is there in the greenwood,
Spiraling endlessly under the sun.

Seat yourself under the oak trees,
Watch the leaf dust dance in the breeze,
Breathe in the flowers and catkins,
The slow buzzing motion of bees.

I give you a song from the greenwood,
A song to enchant and delight,
Refrains of sowing and reaping,
The lyric of life at its height.

Join in the dance of the greenwood,
Cast off your woes if you dare,
Life will be sweet in the greenwood,
Far from all hurry and care.

Hold high the cup of forgetting,
Drink deep of the greenwood wine,
Partake of the wildwood nectar,
So honey sweet from the vine.

Hear ye the pipes of the greenwood,
Far off music and dancing feet?
Ye shall be healed in the greenwood,
One with the earth's heartbeat.

(Cate)

Wordless Wednesday - Striped

Being Here, Being There...

What is it about springtime and these late April days that turns one's thoughts toward travel, distant flora and fauna and faraway places?

A close friend has just packed up house and home and is en route to Whitehorse in the Yukon where she is taking up a career position in wildlife management. Longing for adventure and dreaming of wild untrammeled places, I felt like packing my stuff yesterday and would have gone with her at the drop of a hat.

Oh, for northern mountains and singing wolves, for Arctic moons and flaming sunsets and the aurora borealis, for midnight suns and skies full of stars so close one can reach up and touch them...

For only a moment this morning, and a little after dawn, early sunlight went dancing across a single perfect bloom of Bloodroot, and I forgot all about hitting the road and full moons above the Arctic circle. The one glorious bloom was enough, and when the clouds rolled in a few minutes later and it started to rain, I didn't mind a bit.

Methinks it is a Zen thing...

Bloodroot

Bloodroot

(Sanguinaria canadensis)

Glowing white petals and golden hearts....

The first and the loveliest of the April blooming wildflowers in the Lanark Highlands, Bloodroot is a creature of dappled clearings and sunny days. On cool gray days, the petals are closely furled and enfolded within the wonderfully scalloped leaves like tiny porcelain goblets.

Bloodroot is not the most vibrantly colored resident of the Two Hundred Acre Wood, but it is dear to my heart, and the first blooms always leave me breathless.

Golden

Trout Lily

(Erythronium americanum)

Unison

A graphic rendering of this tower appears on many of the documents and news items published in the village, and it has become an eloquent symbol of the community in which we make our homes, spend our days and ramble about.

On summer mornings, flocks of mourning doves coo there, and on wet autumn days, the sound of raindrops spattering the metal roof is a comforting sound. In winter, the north wind howls through the belfry and makes a hollow whistling music like trumpeter swans heading south.

On these fine cool blue spring mornings, the tower seems to float above us all, and it can be seen from quite a distance. Out for our early walk and moving toward the river through the burgeoning greenery, Spencer and I turn as one and look up. Our eyes move together to the weather vane and silver roof, and even our breathing is in unison.

Friday Ramble - Earth Song

Listen to things more often than beings.
Hear the voice of the fire, hear the voice of the water,
Listen in the wind to the sighing of the bush:
This is the ancestors breathing.
Those who are dead are never gone;
The dead are not down in the earth:
They are in the trembling of the trees,
In the groaning of the woods,
In the water that runs, in the water that sleeps,
They are in the hut, they are in the crowd.
Those who are dead are not ever gone;
They are in the woman's breast,
They are in the wailing of a child,
They are in the burning log and in the moaning rock.
They are in the weeping grasses, the forest and the home.
Listen to things more often than beings.
Hear the voice of fire, hear the voice of water.
Listen in the wind to the sighing of the bush.
This is the ancestors breathing.

(Traditional Senegalese Song)

Thursday Poem - The Depths

When the white fog burns off,
the abyss of everlasting light
is revealed. The last cobwebs
of fog in the
black firtrees are flakes
of white ash in the world's hearth.

Cold of the sea is counterpart
to this great fire. Plunging
out of the burning cold of ocean
we enter an ocean of intense
noon. Sacred salt
sparkles on our bodies.

After mist has wrapped us again
in fine wool, may the taste of salt
recall to us the great depths about us.

Denise Levertov

In Praise of the Earth (For Earth Day)

Let us bless
The imagination of the Earth.
That knew early the patience
To harness the mind of time,
Waited for the seas to warm,
Ready to welcome the emergence
Of things dreaming of voyaging
Among the stillness of land.

And how light knew to nurse
The growth until the face of the Earth
Brightened beneath a vision of color.

When the ages of ice came
And sealed the Earth inside
An endless coma of cold,
The heart of the Earth held hope,
Storing fragments of memory,
Ready for the return of the sun.

Let us thank the Earth
That offers ground for home
And holds our feet firm
To walk in space open
To infinite galaxies.

Let us salute the silence
And certainty of mountains:
Their sublime stillness,
Their dream-filled hearts.

The wonder of a garden
Trusting the first warmth of spring
Until its black infinity of cells
Becomes charged with dream;
Then the silent, slow nurture
Of the seed's self, coaxing it
To trust the act of death.

The humility of the Earth
That transfigures all
That has fallen
Of outlived growth.

The kindness of the Earth,
Opening to receive
Our worn forms
Into the final stillness.

Let us ask forgiveness of the Earth
For all our sins against her:
For our violence and poisonings
Of her beauty.

Let us remember within us
The ancient clay,
Holding the memory of seasons,
The passion of the wind,
The fluency of water,
The warmth of fire,
The quiver-touch of the sun
And shadowed sureness of the moon.

That we may awaken,
To live to the full
The dream of the Earth
Who chose us to emerge
And incarnate its hidden night
In mind, spirit, and light.

John O'Donohue,
(from To Bless the Space Between Us)

The Old Wild Mother (Gaia/Earth) enfolds us, and She is all around us, providing us with air to breathe and good dark earth to walk upon, with nourishment for body and spirit, with wonders too vast and multitudinous to contain or describe in a blog post or a portfolio of innumerable quartos.

I shall spend this day as I always do, walking around with the camera slung around my neck, my pockets full of lenses and treats for the wild creatures Spencer and I will meet in our travels. We will pick up every single item of detritus we find in the hedgerows and lanes and grassy common areas, and we will give thanks for the great good privilege of being here. In other words, this day is much like any other day. Here's to you, Mama, from one of your most passionate devotees, her tribe and her companions.

From the Window

Blooming

Spring Beauty
Claytonia virginica

The photos do not do them justice, but the first wildflowers of the season are already blooming in Lanark, and although there were only two or three specimens of Spring Beauty in bloom yesterday morning, the woodland will be carpeted with them by next weekend, along with Hepaticas (Hepatica nobilis) and the first Dutchman's Breeches (Dicentra cucullaria).

There are buds on all the maples, and the first wild leeks (Allium tricoccum) are coming up down by the creek. The mottled leaves of the Trout Lily (Erythronium americanum) are peeking out of last autumn's leaves here and there.

As I reclined tummy down in those dead leaves with my close-up lens trained on the tiny Spring Beauty blooms yesterday, the first heron of the season flew overhead croaking a greeting, and I called an ecstatic greeting back to her, thinking of a beloved friend who passed beyond the fields we know last summer, and how much she loved the great herons. Every time I took a heron photo, I sent it off to her at once.

Spring, my friends, is here at last, and even the vestiges of my lingering pneumonia can't cast a pall over Her vibrant presence in my beautiful highlands.

Sunrise Crow

First Outdoor Blooming

The Friday Ramble - Running

Running - it is one of those words which we are always hearing in conversation, and we seldom (if ever) consider its origins. The word dates from before 900 CE and traces its origins back through the Middle English rinnen or rennen, the Old Norse rinna or renna, thence the Old English rinnan meaning continuing or partly continuing. In modern speech, the word describes rapid forward motion undertaken for the mundane purpose of arriving somewhere in a great hurry or a flap and sometimes (but not very often) for the sheer pleasure of it.

Running is a flowing and truly elegant thing when done properly and in the right frame of mind. It's a moving celebration of life and something of a meditation, maintaining perfect balance and equilibrium and floating along a few inches above the ground, clear and focused. In my younger days, I loved to run, although not particularly graceful and seldom (if ever) poetry in motion. I loved my early morning jaunts, the feeling of the wind in my hair and the day coming alive around me, the good dark earth rolling away under my sneakered feet like a spool of satin ribbon unwinding into the early light. On those morning runs, the world was a place of magic and infinite possibility, of grace and a sense of belonging here.

Every sentient creature on the planet runs, at its own speed and in its own way. Every waterway on the planet, from madcap intermittent springtime creeks to unfettered mountain rivers is running somewhere, and singing as it goes along. Laughing, all rivers run down to the sea, and they know their way there. Tossing their manes, horses run like the wind, and so do wild felines and coursing canines like wolfhounds and lurchers. They were born to run, and they know it, beyond any shadow of a doubt.

Over the years, I have spent countless hours sitting by rivers or leaning on old fences and watching wild things in motion, and it has always been the very best sort of time. I marvel at the seemingly effortless movement of rivers and wild horses and canines through the landscape - at their joy and their certainty that they are meant to be here and doing this liquid floating thing in this exact moment, one with the plane they are moving through. We could all use a little more of such feelings of nonduality and passionate certainty in our lives, and the speed at which we are actually moving is irrelevant.

Thursday Poem - From Blossoms

From blossoms comes
this brown paper bag of peaches
we bought from the boy
at the bend in the road where we turned toward
signs painted Peaches.

From laden boughs, from hands,
from sweet fellowship in the bins,
comes nectar at the roadside, succulent
peaches we devour, dusty skin and all,
comes the familiar dust of summer, dust we eat.

Oh, to take what we love inside,
to carry within us an orchard, to eat
not only the skin, but the shade,
not only the sugar, but the days, to hold
the fruit in our hands, adore it, then bite into
the round jubilance of peach.

There are days we live
as if death were nowhere
in the background; from joy
to joy to joy, from wing to wing,
from blossom to blossom to
impossible blossom, to sweet impossible blossom.

Li-Young Lee,
From Blossoms from Rose

Wordless Wednesday - Cheerful

First Crocus

In the north, April is a month of abundant "firsts", and among the most exquisite are the first crocus blooming in the garden. In their whites and golds and imperial purples, they are harbingers of the riotous blooming to come.

Young Bucks

It will be a week or two until the fields in Lanark have turned green, but at early morning and sunset, there are deer grazing here and there in the shadows along the edges of local farm fields and woodlands. Still in their winter coloration, the deer are almost impossible to see unless they move.

I've always thought that young deer are as exquisite a motif for springtime as are baby rabbits and chickens, with their dark expressive eyes and soft noses, their inquisitive expressions.

Bucks lose their antlers in February and begin to grow a new set almost immediately, but for now the young are unencumbered. By late August, the new antlers are fully grown and covered in soft velvet which must be rubbed off on trees. For some reason, the chosen trees for such rubbing exercises here are usually poplars, and a good way to estimate the number of bucks residing on the Two Hundred Acre Wood is to count deer "rubs" in late summer and early autumn.

Happy Easter

Water Laughing

Thursday Poem - The Moment

The moment when, after many years
of hard work and a long voyage
you stand in the centre of your room,
house, half-acre, square mile, island, country,
knowing at last how you got there,
and say, I own this,

is the same moment when the trees unloose
their soft arms from around you,
the birds take back their language,
the cliffs fissure and collapse,
the air moves back from you like a wave
and you can't breathe.

No, they whisper. You own nothing.
You were a visitor, time after time
climbing the hill, planting the flag, proclaiming.
We never belonged to you.
You never found us.
It was always the other way round.

Margaret Atwood, The Moment
from Morning in the Burned House

Wordless Wednesday - Artless Suspension

Snowing

First sunshine, melting and greenery peeking out of the earth, and now snow and an ailing internet connection.

A northern spring is always full of sly surprises, and one can never be sure that it has truly arrived until the trees are in full leaf and the daffodils are in bloom.

Falling Water

Empress

Perched in the top of a spruce tree overlooking the Clyde River this morning, the lady was clearly an old soul, the distilled essence (to me anyway) of spirit, wisdom, ferocity and grace, a veritable goddess among raptors, undisputed empress of the air.

I would like to sing her praises, but (alas) I cannot find the words for such magnificence.

Storm Coming In

Ah the power of a good April storm...

The evergreens on the hill are silhouetted against scudding clouds, and the wind dances around in circles, raising spiraling clouds of last year's fallen leaves. The air is full of fresh tangy fragrance with ozone edgings. There is a brief interval of stillness and silence, then the torrential rains come pelting down.

If one entertains any doubt whatsoever about the mojo of the Old Wild Mother and the dazzling power of the elements on this little blue world, they are swiftly cleansed by a good storm in April.

Thursday Poem - Scenic Route

Someone was always leaving
and never coming back.
The wooden houses wait like old wives
along this road; they are everywhere,
abandoned, leaning, turning gray.

Someone always traded
the lonely beauty
of hemlock and stony lakeshore
for survival, packed up his life
and drove off to the city.
In the yards the apple trees
keep hanging on, but the fruit
grows smaller year by year.

When we come this way again
the trees will have gone wild,
the houses collapsed, not even worth
the human act of breaking in.
Fields will have taken over.

What we will recognize
is the wind, the same fierce wind,
which has no history.

Lisel Mueller
Scenic Route from Alive Together

Wordless Wednesday - Gold After the Rain

Wet Daffodils