Wordless Wednesday - First Crocus

March's Full Moon of Earth Awakening

The "Moon of Earth Awakening" is a time of sylvan alchemy, of woodland streams running free and fields awakening to springtime. What are my own markers for this season? I think of black bears awakening from their hibernation, of Saw-Whet Owls (known in the Lanark Highlands as "sugar birds") singing in the forest, of sap being gathered and brewed into maple syrup in great cauldrons and vats in the woods, of geese and ducks returning north, of the Great Horned Owls who are nurturing their young in an old oak tree on our Two Hundred Acre Wood in Lanark. At dawn and dusk the skies are filled with geese traveling between fields and the river, and the same fields are graced by deer foraging for the first tender green shoots of the season.

Last evening the sky was full of dense dark stormy clouds, a natural following given the day's rains and grayscale persona, and I did not expect to see Lady Moon at all. I was delighted when I went out to the garden a few minutes before midnight and found the full moon in her pearly roundness beaming down at me from a lofty perch high above the old maple tree.

The season of long white nights has ended, for when the Vernal Equinox (Ostara) arrived on March 21, night and day were the same length. and we were all poised in a delicate balance which only graces the natural world twice in each calendar year. March's litany of full moon names comprise a cantrip replete with burgeoning springtime, melting snow, high winds, birds returning, new life and green things emerging from the earth.

We also know this moon as:

Alder Moon, Awakening Moon, Big Winds Moon, Blossoming Moon, Bud Moon, Catching Fish Moon, Chaste Moon, Cold's End Moon, Crow Moon, Crust on Snow Moon, Daffodil Moon, Death Moon, Deer Moon, Eagle Moon, Flower Shower Moon, Flowers Moon, Goose Moon, Green Moon, Growth Begins Moon, Hertha's Moon, Hyacinth Moon, Kono Moon, Lenten Moon, Little Bears Moon, Little Spring Moon, Longer Days Moon, Maple Sugar Moon, Moon of Opening Hands, Moon of the Crane, Moon of the Whispering Wind, Moon of Winds, Moon When Buffalo Cows Drop Their Calves, Moon When the Leaves Break Forth, Moon When the Geese Return, Moose Hunting Moon, Plow Moon, Princess Flower Moon, Purple Glory Tree Moon, Rebirth Moon, Renewal Moon, Sap Moon, Seed Moon, Sleepy Moon, Snow Melting Moon, Snowshoe Breaking Moon, Spring Moon, Storm Moon, Sucker Fishing Moon, Sugar Making Moon, Third Moon, Tibouchina Moon, Trail Sit Along Moon, Tree Peony Moon, Violet Moon, Water Stands in the Ponds Moon, Wind Strong Moon, Windy Moon, Worm Moon

Monday Morning - A Hat Full of Rain

One dreams of songbirds and apple trees in bloom, and she awakens to gray skies, the sound of rain on the roof beating a staccato time that eschews meter and metronome, a puckish wind capering in the eaves and ruffling last autumn's leaves like a deck of tattered playing cards.

The various cameras were charged up yesterday and made ready for pottering, but it appears that this is not a day for rambling. Then there is the matter of the hot water tank which ruptured yesterday and turned the bottom storey of the little blue house into a swimming pool, or perhaps a pond.

True to form, I scooped a a noble proportion of the tank's rust into a mason jar to be used later in arty undertakings - the natural iron oxide pigments produce lovely ochres, siennas and umbers, and they are great fun to work with.

As I was laying claim to my rusty bounty yesterday, I found myself thinking about the fact that we humans have been using such oxides in our artistic endeavors as far back as the magnificent prehistorical caves of Lascaux. I would be a happy camper if I could ever produce something a fraction as gorgeous as the Chinese horse, but that is unlikely to happen and just wishful thinking on my part.

I thought about the fact that a heady brew of rust (iron oxides), carbon dioxide and water is where all sentient life begins. I remembered too that the Japanese word for rust is sabi (錆), as in wabi sabi (侘寂) - that comprehensive Asian world view or aesthetic centered on notions of transience, simplicity and naturalness or imperfection.

We will spend today attending to the acquisition and installation of a new hot water tank, on heating water for tea and washing up as required, on looking out through the window and marveling at the patterning of raindrops on the old glass panes, the painterly way that the trees and old wooden fences beyond are beaded with glistening moisture.

Each and every raindrop is an atomy, a minute world teeming with vibrant life, whole universes therein looking up and smiling at this ungainly creature bent over them in wonder.

Through An Early Window

Blue skies, gossamer clouds dancing in the wind like old lace draperies in an open window, my dear old ash tree - all are lighted from above by the rising sun.

One is sometimes tempted to play with such photos, but really, they are perfect as they are. No amount of tinkering could ever make them better than they already are, and this is just what the day looks like.

I am learning (slowly) that my Pentax is passionate about early light and sunset light - it loves the rising sun in its realm of blue and its wispy clouds, the fiery glow on the horizon as the sun drops below the hills. At such times of day, the lens is reverent and loving, and it makes a deep gassho to the world in which it walks and dwells and wonders.

Friday Ramble - Out of the Fruitful Darkness

The seed has no idea of being some particular plant, but it has its own form and is in perfect harmony with the ground, with its surroundings ... and there is no trouble. This is what we mean by "naturalness".
Shunryu Suzuki, Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind

Fruitful: the word comes to us from Middle English and Old French, thence from the Latin noun fructus meaning "enjoyment" and the past participle frui, meaning "to enjoy". Out of such fertile ground arises the adjective fruitful meaning (if we construe it according to its roots) enjoyable or joyous, not simply prolific or committed to proliferating our heady genetic brew.

Springtime beckons, and we northerners are surfacing from somewhere deep underground now, as pale and wan of countenance as new leaves, catkins and shoots and just as hopeful too. After a long winter spent almost entirely within, curled up by the hearth, sleeping deeply and dreaming of sunshine, we lift our heads and look up. We stretch our arms toward the strengthening sun, and we consider madcap dancing, whirling like dervishes in wild awakening places.

It is axiomatic that one has to grow and bloom wherever she is planted, and that for the most part, she does not choose the place or medium of her growing and (hopefully) blooming: water, stone, potting soil, sphegnum moss, a remote and fertile fen??? Here we are, and this is where whatever-it-is is going to happen. In all probability, there are still a few cold and snowy days to come, but we are on our way at last. In the fruitful darkness of winter, we held our roots deep in the fertile soil of our thoughts and our native place. Now comes our time of emergence, our greening and flowering and somewhere up the trail (hopefully), the bearing of a still unknown fruit.

Yesterday, house finches started to construct a nest in the wreath on the front door of the little blue house in the village, and it was the cheeriest, most hopeful thing we have witnessed in some time. May there be greening, growth, happy blooming and fruiting ahead for all of us.

Thursday Poem - The Greatest Grandeur

Some say it’s in the reptilian dance
of the purple-tongued sand goanna,
for there the magnificent translation
of tenacity into bone and grace occurs.

And some declare it to be an expansive
desert — solid rust-orange rock
like dusk captured on earth in stone —
simply for the perfect contrast it provides
to the blue-grey ridge of rain
in the distant hills.

Some claim the harmonics of shifting
electron rings to be most rare and some
the complex motion of seven sandpipers
bisecting the arcs and pitches
of come and retreat over the mounting
hayfield.

Others, for grandeur, choose the terror
of lightning peals on prairies or the tall
collapsing cathedrals of stormy seas,
because there they feel dwarfed
and appropriately helpless; others select
the serenity of that ceiling/cellar
of stars they see at night on placid lakes,
because there they feel assured
and universally magnanimous.

But it is the dark emptiness contained
in every next moment that seems to me
the most singularly glorious gift,
that void which one is free to fill
with processions of men bearing burning
cedar knots or with parades of blue horses,
belled and ribboned and stepping sideways,
with tumbling white-faced mimes or companies
of black-robed choristers; to fill simply
with hammered silver teapots or kiln-dried
crockery, tangerine and almond custards,
polonaises, polkas, whittling sticks, wailing
walls; that space large enough to hold all
invented blasphemies and pieties, 10,000
definitions of god and more, never fully
filled, never.

Pattiann Rogers, The Greatest Grandeur
(from Firekeeper)

Greeting the Day

Nested

One of those perfect blue mornings which come along from time to time in a northern March, blue sky peeking through the evergreens and the first buds popping out on the young birch and maple trees at the edge of a deep valley on the Two Hundred Acre Wood. There was even a small brown moth or three fluttering among the trees on the weekend.

This morning we are back to winter weather of a sort, darkness, gray skies and dense cloud, rain now and wet snow scheduled to appear this afternoon - there is no sun to be seen, and the day will be crepuscular from dawn to evening. Among the synonyms for crepuscular (one of my favorite words), my tattered thesaurus gives me: Cimmerian, aphotic, atramentous, caliginous, clouded, dim, dingy, drab, dull, dusky, foggy, gloomy, indistinct, lightless, murky, nebulous, obfuscous, obscure, shadowy, somber, stygian, sunless, tenebrous and vague. Today conforms to most, if not all, of those words.

There will probably be no blue skies here for the rest of the week, but the lower temperatures and projected precipitation mean that our maple syrup producing friends in the Lanark Highlands can look forward to an extended maple syrup season, and that is a fine thing. We have already sampled the proceeds of this season's alchemical doings, and they are ambrosial.

Such are threshold (or liminal) days on the cusp of seasonal turnings. What does one do on when walking about on a dark rainy day is not in order? Beyond the somber windows and springtime chores (the linen cupboard for one) are pleasures to be contemplated: sketches and books and tea, all undertaken by the old library table in the warm glow of a good lamp. Later in the day, there will be buckwheat crepes for dinner, served up with the first maple syrup of the season.

Three Jennys

The three wild sisters perched on the fence could be a girl group like the Supremes, but they resemble the three witches from the first act of the Scottish play far more than they do popular girl singers, either past or present.

They sit looking out across the field, mistresses of all they survey and afraid of nothing, resting easy in their power and privilege and ability to handle whatever comes their way. I've never tangled with a wild turkey, but they are ferociously protective mothers and formidable opponents, a match for almost any predator that comes their way.

I absolutely adore their expressions, fierce and canny and knowing.

Happy Ostara, Vernal Equinox

Today is Ostara or the Vernal Equinox, one of the two times in the turning year (the other being the Autumn Equinox or Mabon) when Mother Earth and all her creations exist in perfect balance for a brief shining interval. Humanity had nothing whatsoever to do with this day. It is a pivotal astronomic point ordained by the heavens themselves, by the natural order of things in this magnificent cosmos where we live out our days, spinning like tops in the Great Round.

Earliest of the northern wildflowers, the Bloodroot (Sanguinaria canadensis) is forever associated with this day in my mind, although it will be a few weeks until this delicate creature blooms in our Two Hundred Acre Wood in the Lanark Highlands. The snowy petals and lavish golden hearts can be seen from a distance when walking in the woods here in springtime, and discovering a colony is like finding treasure.

If I lived further south than I do, this would be a day of greening and enchantment, a day when Ostara, the old Teutonic goddess of greening and fertility, wandered the wild places with her arms full of spring blooms, bestowing her largesse and her blessings on the plants and animals. Flowers would spring up in her footsteps as she passed, and the air would be full of birdsong and the heady fragrance of wild springtime herbs.

It will be several weeks until Lady Spring actually makes an appearance in the northern landscape, but rumors of her imminent presence and the greening season persist, and every bird in the garden seems to be declaring its lofty status as a messenger from the sacred, the harbinger of abundance and new life. Assuredly, there is blossoming in our thoughts, but the observance of this timeless festival is by necessity indoors and within. It is too cold to celebrate anything outside, but there will be wild salmon, a good risotto, a salad of tangy spring greens and a good bottle of Chablis on the old oak table this evening. All are welcome.

Last evening I went out to the garden (a cold going it was too) to look at the scrap of waxing Ostara moon visible on the western horizon after sunset, and it seemed to me that the dear little moon dancing over my head was perfect in every way. Later, there were waterfalls, butterflies and waving plumes of meadowsweet in my dreams. Perhaps the dank gray funk of March is on its way out at last. I can do no better this morning than direct you (if you wish of course) to what I was thinking and saying four years ago at this very time.

Happy Ostara, Happy Spring, Happy Vernal Equinox to one and all!

Early Sky

Thursday poem - Beannacht (Blessing)

On the day when
the weight deadens
on your shoulders
and you stumble,
may the clay dance
to balance you.

And when your eyes
freeze behind
the grey window
and the ghost of loss
gets in to you,
may a flock of colours,
indigo, red, green,
and azure blue
come to awaken in you
a meadow of delight.

When the canvas frays
in the currach of thought
and a stain of ocean
blackens beneath you,
may there come across the waters
a path of yellow moonlight
to bring you safely home.

May the nourishment of the earth be yours,
may the clarity of light be yours,
may the fluency of the ocean be yours,
may the protection of the ancestors be yours.
And so may a slow
wind work these words
of love around you,
an invisible cloak
to mind your life.

© John O'Donohue. All rights reserved
(from Echoes of Memory)

It has been two years since John O'Donohue left the earth he loved so much, but his expansive Irish heart is still with us, held in a net of his sublimely Celtic and utterly poetic words. OJohn's beautiful benediction is the perfect poem for this St. Patrick's Day week with its notions of homecoming, moonlight, calm waters and comfort, and I can think of no finer blessing. At the request of his family and the executors of his literary legacy, I have added a copyright note and link to John's website - it may be visited by clicking on his name near the top of this paragraph.

Wednesday - St. Patrick's Day

The words mean "Good Health", a Celtic blessing and sometimes a toast, still in common parlance in places like Ireland, Scotland and the Isle of Man, and indeed, wherever where Gaelic is spoken. Good health to you and your clan, this St. Patrick's Day!

Of Barns and Seasons

The angles, timbers, shape and underpinnings of the old bank barn always delight, and they give me food for thought, a heaping teaspoon of much needed humility, a sense of my own smallness in the greater scheme of things.

This is the view from the west, a wall of oak planks with its topmost winch for pulling hay into the loft and later lowering it into the stalls below, the old tin roof and its lightening rods, the branches of a guardian winter tree, a few clouds, the gray sky behind giving some thought to turning blue on a chill morning in March.

I marvel at the gargantuan hemlock and cedar posts hewed out by hand more than a century ago, shaped and fitted into place by an unknown pioneer handcrafting a place of shelter — the old oak planks forming the walls — the curving roof and rough stone foundation of the structure. I think of generations of farmers and horses wending their way home after a hard day spent tilling the rocky scraps of steep field above the barn and enfolding it — I think of the many thousands of sunrises, moonrises and starry nights which this place has witnessed, of the countless seasons it has seen come and go — I think of the red fox and her children who live in a den on the hill behind the granary.

I call my old barn "the Lady", and she always seems to be standing in a strong clear light, a wise teacher who has important lessons to impart to a somewhat gormless twentieth century crone. She (Barn) leans gently and effortlessly into the hills of her native place, and her stalwart muscular contours mirror the rugged landscape of the holding on which she was raised so many years ago.

Silvered by time and sculpted by the winds, Barn endures on her rolling timeless slope in a fold of the Lanark highlands, and so shall I in one form or another: a leaf, a pebble, a tree, a clear meandering stream. This is another one of those lessons I strive to remember and am always forgetting.

At Ease

Like most young German Shorthair pointers, Spencer is constantly in motion and most of my attempts to photograph him produce only blurs. On days when he has been cavorting in the woods, the chances of capturing him with the camera are a little better, and that is what happened here. He was tired out from running about in Lanark yesterday and was about to collapse into a deep contented sleep.

The deep blue snows in our woodland are unstable, compacted by the "on again off again" springtime processes of freezing and melting. Running in the white stuff is hard work for Spencer at this time of the year, but he adores doing just that, and he does it at every opportunity. A moment after I snapped this photo, he was stretched out full length across the rear seat of the VW and snored happily all the way home, his tail with its expressive end curl thumping happily now and again to signal his pleasure with the great wide world.

Our beautiful affectionate boy came to us as an emergency adoption a few weeks after Cassie's passing in early August of 2008, and he is a joy, having bloomed like a rose and settled into life with us as though he has always been here and always WILL be here. We still think that Cassie arranged Spencer's coming from across the Rainbow Bridge, knowing how distraught we were when she had to leave us.

Now Showing

Springtime peeks over the hill and a slight exuberance sets in after a very dark and gloomy winter. One starts rattling about in her photo archive from last year and is astonished at what she finds.

A few prints are in order, not to mention a whole raft of greeting cards. The vibrant images of the last year or two cry out for frames and mattes, and they demand to be seen, somewhere, somehow, sometime.

One chooses the images carefully - each and every one must sing or speak or chant, and they do just that in myriad languages, dialects and tongues: old and new, ancient and modern, wild and sweet and lyrical. The background musics are clear flowing woodland streams and puckish winds dancing across the hills.

Friday Ramble - River

To trace the history of a river, or a raindrop, as John Muir would have done, is also to trace the history of the soul, the history of the mind descending and arising in the body. In both we constantly seek and stumble on divinity, which, like the cornice feeding the lake and the spring becoming a waterfall, feeds, spills, falls, and feeds itself over and over again.
Gretel Ehrlich, Sisters of the Earth

The ancient Irish bards knew the Salmon of Knowledge as the giver of all life's wisdom. In the salmon's leap of understanding like a leap of faith, we can see ourselves "in our element," immersed in the river of life. The cycle of the salmon's journey reminds us that all rivers flow to the same sea.
Lynn Noel, Voyages: Canada's Heritage Rivers

I would love to live like a river flows, carried by the surprise of its own unfolding.
John O'Donohoe

The word river comes to us through the good offices of the Middle English and Anglo-Norman rivere and the Vulgar Latin riparia, thence the proper Latin riparius and ripa all meaning "of a bank" or simply "bank". The word's closest kin is the adjective riparian, and we use it to describe the verdant lands along natural waterways and those who live there too. To be a riparian is a fine thing.

How can one not think of rivers on a day like this when the sky is blue, and springtime is melting the rivers of Lanark, setting them free to sing again? In remote cedared coves and the quiet fields of their beginning places, rivers and waterways are running again and lifting their wild voices in the sunlight.

The awakening waters sparkle like sapphires in the cool March sunlight, reflections of blue sky and rosy clouds filling every pool and eddy. The lambent moons of springtime are perfect as they pour their light across quiet rivers in hidden highland places. Lone voices and choirs, ballads, symphonies and oratorios, there is springtime in every note sung, and what a metaphor for life and journeying! If I had been given the privilege of granting my own name, that name would probably have been "River".

Life and the cosmos are a great river flowing on and on: the stars streaming over our heads on winter nights and the waters flowing along underneath our feet, rain, ice and snow in season, the tides and currents of the oceans, the salty life-giving rivers of blood singing through our veins, Mother Earth in her perfect effortless ebb and flow.

We are never far from rivers, no matter where we land up living out our days, and rivers are the perfect motif for this earthly journey we are all on together. There are rivers running right through our lives, and if we are fortunate, we will come to know many in a single lifetime: to understand their ancient language and cadence, sense their ebb and flow, plumb the mysteries of their currents and eddies and learn their rumbling chants and fluid harmonies — when we are so blessed, the canticles of the great rivers become the music of our journey.

Thursday Poem - The Great Affair

The great affair, the love affair with life,
is to live as variously as possible,
to groom one's curiosity like a high-spirited thoroughbred,
climb aboard, and gallop over the thick, sun-struck hills every day.

Where there is no risk, the emotional terrain is flat and unyielding,
and, despite all its dimensions, valleys, pinnacles, and detours,
life will seem to have none of its magnificent geography, only a length.

It began in mystery, and it will end in mystery,
but what a savage and beautiful country lies in between.

Diane Ackerman

Wordless Wednesday - The Red Umbrella

Signs of Spring (Sheepish)

There can be few motifs of springtime more endearing than these little woolly creatures. Thirty-six (so far anyway) Border Leicester, Coloured Border Leicester and Blue Faced Leicester lambs have been born at Windblest Farm in the Lanark Highlands this year. Five coloured Blue Faced Leicesters were added to the breeding flock last autumn, and some of the new lambs are comely indeed.

When at the farm, I am always tempted to drape myself over the railings of the enclosures and watch the diminutive curly children for hours at a time, and I often forget to take a picture although the Pentax or the Lumix is usually slung around my neck.

There is a timeless and very restful rhythm to a few hours spent among the the sheep, unless (of course) one is a watchful shepherd in the month of March, ever short on sleep and dazzled by the morning sunshine after a night spent in the darkness of the lambing pens.

Blue Sky, Green Roof, Sweet Maple Abundance

From a Tay Bridge

What is it about these sunny days on the cusp of springtime?

Yesterday every bridge in Perth held a few happy (if bemused) and slightly dazzled northerners, peering over the railings into the deep blueness and looking thoughtful. The blue of the river was so vibrant and intense that the eyes could scarcely drink it in, but quaff it we did, as though it was fine wine.

Perhaps our wonderment arose from the tableau created by the handful of floating gulls on the river, whiter than snow and resting with studied insouciance on the icy waters. Whatever the reason for our enthralling, the moment was grand, and one to be remembered.

Sugar Cat, Bliss Cat

Charlie, enjoying a few minutes of sunshine on the fence in front of the old log barn on a fine early March morning...

You can't see it here, but the maple sap is running, and the syrup season is in full swing in the Lanark Highlands. The sugar house on the hill behind the barn is cranked up and boiling away merrily, steam billowing in all directions, sweetness in the air.

Friday Ramble - Resilience

Here and there among the deep drifts of snow and ice, a single spruce or balsam fir lifts its head toward the sun, and its fresh blue-green tint and spicy fragrance are reminders that longer days and brighter times are just around the corner. Local conifers are never brighter or spicier than they seem to be in March, and this year their resilience and cheerful demeanor are lessons to be learned and remembered.

First came the deep snows, then village snow ploughs carelessly dropping their loads of white stuff on hedgerows, groves and solitary trees with careless insouciance all winter long. We have been on the receiving end of a remarkable amount of snow this winter, and we may reasonably expect a fair amount of snow to arrive before the end of March, but my dear little trees are nodding and sending out a heady perfume which signals a tantalizing and imminent change in the seasons. They have begun their preparations for Oestara (or the Vernal Equinox) and springtime, and they simply cannot be dissuaded from expressing their pleasure.

The words resilient and resilience come from the Latin resiliēns, meaning to leap back, and we use them often without ever thinking about their essence, about what they really mean. When something is resilient, it exists in a state of innate balance and buoyancy, possessing the happy faculty of springing back or rebounding to its true form after being subjected to abuse, adversity or unnatural compression.

That sounds like Buddha nature to me.

Thursday Poem - Wild Geese

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

Mary Oliver (from Dream Work)

In March, whatever one is doing and wherever one happens to be, she is always tuned to the heavens and waiting for the return of the great geese to northern skies. Mary Oliver's perfect poem says it all, and I never tire of reading it.

Wordless Wednesday - Chimney, Roof and Sky

Cursive, No Cursive

I've just finished creating a series of blank note cards for a dear friend, an accomplished writer and a gifted correspondent with a wide circle of friends and an almost lifelong journaling practice, and it seems to me that it is high time I got back to handwritten "stuff" myself. There is a whole shelf of beautiful blank journals here in the study and a large box of handcrafted cards created by my little design studio, the KerrdeLune Design Works.

The problem is that whenever I consider writing longhand, I think about the quality of my handwriting and sketching, and I cringe. So much for the spirited creature who learned the fine art of penmanship from the gentle nuns at school and took prizes all over the place for her graceful endeavors.

"The time has come," sayeth a small but persistent voice. "Not another blank journal may enter the little blue house in the village until you begin to write in those you already have in your possession, not another artsy card created or purchased until you take up your Waterman pen and begin to write all those long promised notes to friends and kin both far and near."

"The cursive script produced by your arthritic paws leaves much to be desired, but it is your handwriting (or scrawling) after all, and it is what you have been granted to work with. Commit something of your journey to real paper, and let the correspondence begin."

Is this just an excuse to acquire inks in peacock blue, crimson and magenta, more pens? We shall see...

The Hunger Moon of February

This month's moon usually makes its appearance when it is icy cold in the north. This year for some reason, the night was mild, clouding up a little later and raining through the darkness and on into early morning.

For me, this full moon has to be the Owl Moon, for the great birds are nesting now, and I know of at least one nest (or nursery) in an old oak tree near the beaver pond at the back of the Two Hundred Acre Wood. Around this time every year, the The Saw-whet Owl (or sugar bird) is courting, and many other northern owls are caught up in the same timeless seasonal rituals of bonding and parenting. In February, love, fertility and the perpetuation of one's genetic materials are in the air. The same is true for northern woodpeckers, particularly the Hairy.

Here we are again, looking morosely at the size of our wood piles, surveying the contents of our freezers, counting the sealers in our larders and hoping that there will be enough to last us until springtime arrives. If we can hang on for a few more weeks, the full moon of March promises relief and sweetness too, for the splendid wild alchemy of the maple syrup season will be in full swing when the next full moon makes its appearance, and (hallelujah) the geese will on their way home.

Last year at this time, I mentioned a favorite book of recipes and seasonal customs, and it seems both prudent and appropriate to do so again this year as I am rereading it. For a fine trove of moon lore and thoughtful observations about the ways in which humanity have traditionally hunted, gathered, cooked and "put things by" for the long nights, read Jessica Prentice's Full Moon Feasts. Her book, subtitled "Food and the Hunger for Connection", follows the thirteen moons of an agricultural year, beginning with this month's Hunger Moon. Each of the thirteen chapters contains recipes which are in tune with the timeless rhythms of the season.

We also know this moon as the: Ash Moon, Big Winter Moon, Bone Moon, Bony Moon, Budding Moon, Chestnuts Moon, Cold Winds Moon, Coyotes Frighten Moon, Crow Moon, Dark Red Calves Moon, Death Moon, Eagle Moon, Fish Running Moon, Frost Sparkling in the Sun Moon, Gray Moon, Horning Moon, Ice in River Is Gone Moon, Ice Moon, Index Finger Moon, Little Bud Moon, Long Dry Moon, Makes Branches Fall in Pieces Moon, Mimosa Moon, Moon of Ice, Moon of Purification and Renewal, Moon of Rabbit Conception, Moon of the Cedar Dust Wind, Moon of the Raccoon, Moon of the Frog, Moon When Geese Come Home, Moon When Bear Cubs are Born, Moon When Spruce Tips Fall, Moon When Trees Pop, Moon When Trees Are Bare and Vegetation Is Scarce, Narcissus Moon, No Snow in Trails Moon, Owl Moon, Peach Blossom Moon, Pink Moon, Plum Blossom Moon, Primrose Moon, Quickening Moon, Raccoon Moon, Rain and Dancing Moon, Red and Cleansing Moon, Second Moon, Snow Crust Moon, Snow Moon, Solmonath (Sun Moon), Squint Rock Moon, Staying Home Moon, Storing Moon, Storm Moon, Sucker Fish Moon, Sucker Moon, Trapper’s Moon., Treacherous Moon, Violet Moon, Wexes Moon, Wild Moon, Wind Moon , Wind Tossed Moon, Winter Moon

The photo looks much better when viewed in its larger size, and a simple click on it will get you there.