Golden

Friday Ramble - This Green Earth

Earth is a good word for pondering in the midst of this fleeting shaggy season when we are working away in our gardens and tending the beginnings of the harvest yet to come...

The word dates from well before 950 CE, and it comes to us through the good offices of the Middle English erthe, the Old English eorthe; the Germanic Erde, Old Norse jǫrth, Danosh jord and the Gothic airtha, all springing from the Ancient Saxon eard meaning soil, home, or dwelling. All are possibly related to the Latin aro, meaning to plough or turn over.

What are we thinking of when we say "earth" anyway? Is it the dark and fragrant soil beneath our feet, garden plots, orchards, wooded hills, city parks, farmers' fields and arroyos? Is it wild plums, oak leaves, gracefully arching willow branches, seeds and sleeping roots? Is it the granite bones of the planet and its fiery heart far below?

It's all that and much more. Our fragile skin and blood and bones, the rivers of our veins, the ground beneath our feet, the synapses and sinews of the planet on which we stand, the rocks and trees and other beings with whom we share our home - even the air we are breathing in and out - all are connected and part of an elemental process, a vast web. Arrogant humans are an infinitesimally small and thoughtless part of that web, but we are always forgetting that we are part of anything at all. Blithely cocooned in our hubris, we think of ourselves as separate and above the earth, as being its masters and owning the right to litter and clutter and torment and destroy.

It doesn't have to be that way. Yearning for wholeness, we can turn and look back on the long journey we have taken to come this far, and at some point we come to know that we are not separate at all. We are part of Mother Earth as She is part of us. To borrow the words of wise woman and deep ecologist, Joanna Macy, "We are our world knowing itself".

Within our wild knowing are gems beyond price, first and foremost trust, a bone deep certainty that we are all together here and at home on the good dark earth we stand on. In the words of Barbara Kingsolver: "In the places that call me out, I know I'll recover my wordless childhood trust in the largeness of life and its willingness to take me in.

Trusting in the rightness of our presence here, we can stand with our feet in the soil and our heads in the sky and know, root and branch, that we belong here as much as soil, wild plums in the hedgerow and sandpipers do. Dirt and clouds - what a life!

Thursday Poem - Quiet Friend

Quiet friend who has come so far,
feel how your breathing makes more space around you.
Let this darkness be a bell tower
and you the bell. As you ring,

what batters you becomes your strength.
Move back and forth into the change.
What is it like, such intensity of pain?
If the drink is bitter, turn yourself to wine.

In this uncontainable night,
be the mystery at the crossroads of your senses,
the meaning discovered there.

And if the world has ceased to hear you,
say to the silent earth: I flow.
To the rushing water, speak: I am.

Rainer Maria Rilke,
Sonnets to Orpheus, Part Two, Sonnet XXIX
(Translated by Joanna Macy and Anita Barrows)

Wordless Wednesday - Morning Glory

Lady Merlin

The garden has a new patron, and there she sits, mistress of all she surveys and a force to be reckoned with, a fierce and hungry force.

The feeders in the garden behind the little blue house in the village have been mostly quiet for days; not a sparrow or a chickadee or a nuthatch to be seen most of the time. The old trees sway in the summer wind, but they are seldom graced by a feather, a beak or a wing - there has been much scampering about and rustling in the hedgerow, but the birds have been staying out of sight until an hour or so before sunset.

As it has turned out, their quiet and caution are warranted. This young falcon, a female Merlin (Falco columbarius), has taken to hunting in our garden, and she perches in a tree there for hours at a time. Her speed is astonishing, and her ferocity and agility in the air are really something to see. On the attack, she is a blur in the clear blue air.

There have been tales in the village of a successful nesting of these beautiful falcons in our park, and the tales are true. Wonder of wonders, we have a falcon in our midst, and she is a beauty.

The Mead Moon of July

An aestival creature, the full moon of July... Rising radiant out of the velvet summer night, She is lightly touched with gold and crowned with stars, lighting rivers, newly mown hayfields, fruiting trees and verdant valleys, city streets, rooftops, chimneys and gardens all shaggy with produce and flowers.

Now and then a skein of geese heading for cool night waters is silhouetted against Lady Moon's face. At times, Her light falls across a flock of grazing wild turkeys or browsing deer in a farmer's field, paints a floating moonlight highway across the lake and up into the region of the boundless summer stars. I always think of a full moon in late July as the "Moon of First Harvest", or the "Moon Before Lughnasadh."

A young Great Horned Owl shared last evening with us and watched the full moon rise over the trees, tilting its head and chanting soft words of appreciation - the cantrip was easy on the ears and captivating too. There is always a sense of untrammeled magic residing in July's moon - a gentle enchantment so lustrous it is almost tangible.

For the most part, the names of this fair summer moon have something to do with abundance, gathering in and harvest. We also know Her as the: Black Cherries Moon, Blackberry Moon, Blessing Moon, Blood Moon, Blueberry Moon, Buck Moon, Claim Song Moon, Corn in Tassel Moon, Corn Moon, Corn Popping Moon, Crane Moon, Daisy Moon, Fallow Moon, Feather Molting Moon, Flying Moon, Grass Cutter Moon, Ground Burn Moon, Hay Moon, Holly Moon, Horse Moon, Humpback Salmon Return to Earth Moon, Hungry Ghost Moon, Index Finger Moon, Larkspur Moon, Lightning Moon, Little Harvest Moon, Little Heat Moon, Little Moon of Deer Horns Dropping off, Little Ripening Moon, Lotus Flower Moon, Manzanita Ripens Moon, Mead Moon, Meadow Moon, Midsummer Moon, Middle of Summer Moon, Moon of Blood, Moon of Claiming, Moon of Fledgling Hawk, Moon of Much Ripening, Moon of Ripeness, Moon of the Home Dance, Moon of the Horse, Moon of the Middle Summer, Moon of the Young Corn, Moon When Cherries Are Ripe, Moon When Ducks Begin to Molt, Moon When Limbs of Are Trees Broken by Fruit, Moon When People Move Camp Together, Moon When Squash Are Ripe and Indian Beans Begin to Be Edible, Moon When the Buffalo Bellows, Moon When the Chokecherries Begin to Ripen, Moon When the Wild Cherries Are Ripe, Mountain Clover Moon, Peaches Moon, Raspberry Moon, Red Berries Moon, Red Blooming Lilies Moon, Red Cherries Moon,, Return from Harvest Moon, Ripe Corn Moon, Ripe Moon, Ripening Moon, Rose Moon, Salmon Go up the Rivers in a Group Moon, Seventh Moon, Smokey Moon, Strawberry Moon,, Strong Sun Moon, Sun House Moon, Thunder Moon, Warming Sun Moon, Water Lily Moon, Wattle Moon, Wort Moon.

I am rather fond of "Blessing Moon", "Mead Moon" and "Ripening Moon".

Fruiting

Friday Ramble - Remember

Remember...... The word comes to us through the Middle and Old French rememberen and thence from the Latin re meaning again and memor meaning memory or thoughts. In other words, to remember means to retain experiences in our minds, to be able later (sometimes after many years) to call something back to mind clearly and do so at will. It's strange what we remember, and what we choose not to remember, or rather, what we choose to forget with specific intention.

There are memories lodged deep within each of us which awaken longings so intense that they are painful, and we each have our own stories, our own storehouses and hoards of special memories and dreams. Like the mythical dragons of old, we heap up treasures in the dusty recesses of our craniums, and we guard them fiercely.

A color here, a shape there, sunlight drifting through the cranny in an old barn wall, an elusive evergreen fragrance wafting from somewhere nearby, rolling pine-clad ridges from here to there, the sound of rain falling among the trees, the companionable call of an owl at twilight, the perfect swaying dance of a cluster of Queen Anne's Lace on a summer morning in late July ...

My own memories seem to suggest that wild places have been engaging my attention and tugging away at my sensibilities for a long time - probably since I arrived on the planet this time round, and perhaps even before that. How else can I explain the absence (generally) of urban motifs in my portfolio work, this feeling of utter kinship with wildness and the wild?

As a child, I went off seeking wild places whenever I could escape, and it was always difficult to leave such places behind when I found them. As an adult (well sort of), It was a gift to share the untrammeled and undomesticated with children and grandchildren, although I am sure they sometimes found me tedious on the subject. Now I am contemplating another sharing with my sweet and perfect new great-granddaughter, Olivia-Rose, and the mere thought is a joy beyond words.

If we can teach those who will follow us into stewardship of this earth to appreciate its grandeur and mystery, we may be able save the world, and such passionate coinage transcends all my feeble expressions of love and reverence and wonder.

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)

Rainer Maria Rilke's lyrical hymn to twilight is surely one of the most magnificent poems ever written, and it is one I never tire of reading - it speaks to me in a way that very few other poems ever do.

Wordless Wednesday - Brightly Hanging

Rosy

House Finch (Male)

(Carpodacus mexicanus) 

 

Alas, the third brood of house finches  who entered the world from a nursery in the wreath on our front door are growing up.  It will be only a few days until they have flown, the nest is vacant again, and we can go in and out of the little blue house as we do at other times of the year.  After entering and exiting the house through the garage or the rear door for several weeks, it will feel strange to be using the front door again.  

 

For months we have been listening to youngsters chirping merrily, and we have been watching their parents fly back and forth with food and words of encouragement to each other.  We have been gloriously serenaded by a magnificent rosy tinted male finch each and every morning, and it is a wonderful way to start one's day.  After the children fly off this week, there will be no morning finch songs until next year, and I am rather dreading the poignant silence to come.

Gathering Up and In

Over the past many days, there has been a dense steamy heat here. It has us toiling in the garden before sunrise and taking early walks with Spencer before the world becomes too hot to potter about in, then spending the day indoors. There are always creations in progress in studio or darkroom, and there is a variety of domestic alchemies to be undertaken in July: processing vegetables for the freezer and making gluten free bread, marshaling quart (liter actually) sealers of pickles, relishes and tomato sauce like legions of foot soldiers and tucking them into the downstairs pantry for next winter. At the end of the day there is tea and a good book, a little Mozart on the sound system, the companionship of clan and kindred spirits.

Huge round bales of hay are everywhere one looks in July, fields of waving wheat and barley and oats. The first gold and cream corn of the season is showing up at roadside stalls and farm gate shops along with cucumbers, beets, purple onions as big as baseballs, tiny new red potatoes and rainbow hued salad makings. Dinner is often a bowl of freshly picked salad or a lightly wokked melange of veggies in every conceivable color, lightly tossed in olive oil and lemon juice or a serendipity invented-on-the-spot dressing with a little curry tossed in to kick things up a notch.

How can we not think of harvest and plenty at the height of summer? How can we not think of the reciprocity of the Old Wild Mother and her generous treatment of us? We in our turn treat this beautiful earth with such utter contempt and thoughtlessness.

Still in the Garden

Dancing in the Western Sky

She dances in the western sky at sunset like a radiant female in a Maxfield Parrish painting.

The summer sky is painted from here to there in shades of lavender; and the floating summer haze is like a diaphanous veil. The slender crescent of moon glows like a lantern, and a single star hovers high above everything. The drifting clouds are intense rose and purple, and all is framed by a frieze of smoky dreaming trees.

Parrish was a painter like no other, and he "did" dawn and evening skies like nobody else. His use of color was dazzlingly luminous, particularly his golds, cobalts, mauves and purples, and he achieved what is often called an elegiac vivacity through a complicated technique in which layers of oil color were applied alternately with layers of varnish. An ethereal magical otherworldly quality informs everything he ever painted.

There is no mansion, barn or gently flowing stream here, but I would like to think that my photo is reminiscent in its own small way of Maxfield Parrish's lovely "New Moon".

Thursday Poem - Night Falling

Out on the lake alone in my canoe, an hour
before the light has fallen away, there's a fiery sun
above me, cool dusky waters and hidden depths
below. I make my way along the shore and its
guardian cliffs, a patient observer of evening
unfolding, these timeless oscillating rites of
rising light and slowly descending darkness.

A great heron moves though the shallows,
and mallard ducks assemble on the shoreline,
somewhere a loon laughs on a hidden bay.
My paddle moves of its own accord through
the ripples and every drop falling away from it
is a flame, a sparkling union holding fire in its
heart and thoughts of other paddlings here -
evening sun, shadowed trees and distant stars,
a lone woman in her battered canoe at twilight,
the earth and dappled waves conjoined.

It's an unfinished conversation of sorts, the
drops falling away from my paddle forming
trailing dots and small silences in a dialogue
with its roots in the past and its end resting
easy on the quiet water somewhere up ahead.
Who knows such things with any certainty?
Lake and landscape are telling tales this
evening, but they seldom speak in words.

Cate (kerrdelune)

Wordless Wednesday - Keeping Watch

On the Library Table - Daughters of the Witching Hill

Daughters of the Witching Hill is a remarkable fictional treatment of the Pendle witch trials by Mary Sharratt, a novel based on the true story of a small group of women and men tried, convicted and executed as witches in the post-Reformation Britain of the early seventeenth century.

The reigning monarch of the time ( James I) was convinced that Britain was a hotbed of witchcraft and satanic conspiracies and had just published a witchunter's manual called Daemonologie. Those wishing to advance themelves at court could do no better than promote their monarch's ideas and hunt down witches, and Roger Nowell, high sheriff and magistrate of Lancashire was a very ambitious man indeed.

Jamesian Britain is a dreary comfortless place, and the lives of many of its people are lives of hardship and quiet despair. Bess Southerns is an impoverished widow living with her daughter and granddaughter in an old stone tower in Pendle Forest. Known locally as Mother Demdike, Bess is a practicing cunning woman who earns her meager daily bread (and that of her family) through small mundane magics - she is a blesser with the power to cure human and animal illnesses, help barren women conceive children, find lost or stolen items and similar taskings.

Raised in the old Catholic faith, Bess does no curses or dark magics. She uses her talents for good, and her craft is rooted in the folk magics and prayer charms of her Catholic childhood. She also draws on an older power, that of the earth itself as represented in the Queen of Elfhame. That power is personified in the presence of Tibb, her shapeshifting spirit helper or familiar - he serves Bess on instructions from someone he lovingly calls "my Lady". By contrast, Bess's destitute childhood friend Anne Whittle (Mother Chattox), turns to dark magics in desperation, and her actions draw the unwelcome attentions of local authorities to the little community of Lancashire wise women and men. The results are tragic.

Bess's daughter Eliza follows her mother's craft, but turns away from it when her husband dies, believing that her spouse's death was orchestrated by Mother Chattox. Granddaughter Alizon possesses the ability to become a powerful healer, but she is conflicted and foregoes formal training, hoping for a more ordinary, prosperous and balanced existence. When Alizon rebukes a traveling peddler for his uncouth conduct without thinking and he suffers a stroke on the spot, she is reported to the local magistrate/sheriff as a witch. Alizon, six other women and two men are tried and convicted of witchcraft and sentenced to hang for their crimes. The elderly Mother Demdike does not fall prey to the hangman's noose but perishes in prison - the last words of the book are memorable, and they belong to her.

Roger Nowell ordered his men to bring down Malkin Tower stone by stone till only the foundation remained. Yet he could never banish me and mine from these parts. This is our home. Ours. We will endure, woven into the land itself, its weft and warp, like the very stones and the streams that cut across the moors.

Mary Sharratt has done a wonderful thing in bringing the Pendle witches back to life after their long sojourn in relative historical obscurity. For all the bleak trappings of lives lived in dire poverty under the yoke of post-Reformation culture, her characters blaze with vitality, power, deep reverence and passion for life. They shine with a light that is bright, true, and at times, utterly joyous; their voices are clear and eloquent. She has recreated the era of the Pendle witches with a sure hand, illustrating poignantly the desolate social landscape forged by the banishing of most ritual forms in Britain and the rise of a spare Protestant spirituality to power. Vibrant, authentic and beautifully written, this novel works on every conceivable level - it is a wonder and a delight to read.

To learn more, please feel free to visit Mary Sharratt at her website.

Seeding Out

Allium (Allium spp)

After Yesterday's Rain

Rose (Floribunda)

Sunsprite

Thursday Poem - Aunt Leaf

Needing one, I invented her —
the great-great-aunt dark as hickory
called Shining-Leaf, or Drifting-Cloud
or The-Beauty-of-the-Night.

Dear aunt, I'd call into the leaves,
and she'd rise up, like an old log in a pool,
and whisper in a language only the two of us knew
the word that meant follow,

and we'd travel
cheerful as birds
out of the dusty town and into the trees
where she would change us both into something quicker —
two foxes with black feet,
two snakes green as ribbons,
two shimmering fish — and all day we'd travel.

At day's end she'd leave me back at my own door
with the rest of my family,
who were kind, but solid as wood
and rarely wandered. While she,
old twist of feathers and birch bark,
would walk in circles wide as rain and then
float back

scattering the rags of twilight
on fluttering moth wings;

or she'd slouch from the barn like a gray opossum;

or she'd hang in the milky moonlight
burning like a medallion,

this bone dream, this friend I had to have,
this old woman made out of leaves.

Mary Oliver

Wordless Wednesday - Waning

Green and Shaggy Days

Ah, sweet and steamy summer.... The air outside is still and dense, and the river is as still as glass - it reflects all the comings and goings along its shores like a mirror, this summer for sure and perhaps all the summers that have ever been in this place.

Spencer and I rise before dawn and go out into the garden to look at the waning moon dancing up there in the blue - if the high cloud of summer permits, that is. We take our walks early in the heat, and our sunrise potterings along the shaggy green hedgerows have confirmed what we suspected - that the north is already showing the first signs of waning sunlight and shorter days.

Apple, crab and plum trees are covered with the first small hard green fruits, and the same goes for nut trees like butternut, beech, hickory and walnut. The garden is full of drunken bees veering from bloom to bloom, and local squirrels are already out collecting nuts for their winter larders - there is hardly a butternut, beech nut, hickory nut or walnut to be seen anywhere, although the nuts are still far from their proper mature size. The top of each and every nut tree is filled with squirrels frantically gathering and storing the nutty bounty of the season for the winter to come.

What does one do on hot summer nights in the village when the air outside is still and dense and steamy? She pulls the draperies closed, lights a beeswax candle (a very small one because of the heat), makes a pot of tea and puts on a little night music (Mozart of course), then pulls out a good book and revisits the the golden summers of other places and other times.

This week, I am reading (again) Michael Chabon's magnificent Summerland and listening to Roger Norrington's lovely Die Zauberflöte (The Magic Flute). Norrington's recording is the perfect music for a summer night, and Chabon stirs up a heady magical brew in which baseball, fairies, Old Man Coyote and mythology go together perfectly. Tofu hot dog anyone, iced tea, lemonade? A trip to the ball park or an outdoor concert?

Maya, Rose of the Sun

Kordana Rose (Maya)

Summer's Gate

Thursday Poem - In Praise of Mortality

Want the change. Be inspired by the flame
where everything shines as it disappears.
The artist, when sketching, loves nothing so much
as the curve of the body as it turns away.

What locks itself in sameness has congealed.
Is it safer to be gray and numb?
What turns hard becomes rigid
and is easily shattered.

Pour yourself out like a fountain.
Flow into the knowledge that what you are seeking
finishes often at the start, and, with ending, begins.

Every happiness is the child of a separation
it did not think it could survive. And Daphne, becoming a laurel,
dares you to become the wind.

Rainer Maria Rilke, In Praise of Mortality

The Sonnets to Orpheus, Part Two, XII

(translated and edited by Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy)