Longing for Light

Every morning, I awaken before sunrise and make coffee, then wait for the first beam of sunlight to make its way through a dawn facing window. Sometimes there is sunlight, but mostly there is not. Northern days stretch out languorously at the beginning of a new year, and we are in February's middling pages before a great difference can be felt in the velvet touch of morning through the draperies.

At the end of January, I find myself longing for light and chasing it wherever I glimpse it for even a moment: village streets at sunrise, my sleeping garden, dusting the branches of trees in the Lanark woods or glistening like sequins in the snow when the clouds roll back for a while. Like Midas Crook in Ali Shaw's lovely mythic The Girl With Glass Feet, I hunt light through the frozen landscape with notebook and lens, falling into crevices now and again, blundering into trees and old stones, occasionally getting stuck in a drift somewhere on snowshoes and flailing my way free.

There is a fine elusive old truth resting out there somewhere in the intangible interstices between light and shadow. On my rambles, I trace blue lines in the snow with my fingers and measure the difference in their slant from day to day. The sparkling shapes whisper that springtime is already on its way, but this morning they are also saying that it is going to be a while. A fine blue sky beckons through the windows, and it shades gloriously to pink and gold near the horizon, but we are stuck in the minus thirties. I shall hunt the dancing motes of light within.

Wooded Silence

Thursday Poem - The Snow Man

One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;

And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter

Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,

Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place
For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

Wallace Stevens, from Harmonium

Wordless Wednesday - Listening

Over Our Heads

Hillside

Friday Ramble - Entelechy

The word for this week is entelechy, and a lovely word it is. Both word and concept were coined by the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle, and they spring from the Late Latin entelecheia, thence the Greek télos meaning "end or purpose", and échein, meaning simply "to have".

Aristotle defined entelechy as "having one's end within", and the late U.N. Secretary General, Dag Hammarskjold, described it as "existing in the fleet joy of becoming". The French philosopher Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, also a renowned paleontologist, geologist and physicist, described entelechy as being "something inside of you like a butterfly is inside a caterpillar".

Entelechy is the potential within a nut or acorn to become a tree, within a rose hip of becoming a fragrant bloom in summer. It is the power within an awakening seed at the bottom of a pond to make its careful way to the surface and bloom as a lotus or waterlily. It is the possibility encoded in each of us at birth of becoming decent kind thoughtful adults and reaching some form of enlightenment.

Enlightenment may not take place in this lifetime, and some of us have a long way to go (I am thinking of myself here), but we are already on our way, and all along that winding trail are nuggets of wisdom, knowing and shy discernment.

To use the words of Emily Dickinson, we dwell in Possibility, although we manage to forget it most of the time. Here again on a Friday Ramble, one of those seeds of truth about which I sometimes need reminding. How often I need such reminders these days! I am frequently crotchety and impatient with myself, but that is part of the process too.

One of my summer water lilies would have been a better image for this morning's post, but I craved the burnished mahogany smoothness of last autumn's acorns. Now they rest on a sunny hillside in the Lanark Highlands, and this old tree shepherd will tend them on their way to becoming stately oaks.

The Wolf Moon Of January

Last evening, the bright moon rising over the evergreens was a thing of beauty, but a chill beauty that sang of ice and wind and hunger somewhere in the wilds.

On cold winter nights the moon seems so close that I can almost touch her, and she is a powerful teacher. I am reminded by her radiant presence that the lens through which I see everything in these eldering days is metaphorical, sacramental and relative - it arises from a sense of kinship, from a bone deep and inexpressible faith in the elemental grace and grandeur that glue the world together. I trust in that grace and grandeur, and they light up all my earthly days. Sometimes, just sometimes, my camera captures just a trace of the Great Mystery at the heart of existence.

In January, we stoke up our fireplaces and wood stoves, and we stay close by our hearths in the long nights. We brew endless pots of tea and countless cauldrons of soup. We count sticks of firewood piled in our summer kitchens and along our verandas, silently calculating how long the supply of firewood will hold out this year. We wrap up in every warm garment we own and take toboggan loads of food out into the forest for the birds, the red squirrels and the deer. We look for the first signs that daylight hours are increasing, and we measure the sharp lengths of the long blue shadows falling along the trail into the woods.

Last, night as I shivered outside with the camera and waited for the moon to come up, I had a happy thought - in a few weeks, the Great Horned Owls will be courting and then nesting in my woods, and a few weeks after that, the maple syrup season will (hopefully) be starting in the Lanark Highlands.

We also know this moon as the: After Yule Moon, Big Cold Moon, Buckeyes Ripe Moon, Carnation Moon, Center Moon, Ceremonial Initiate Moon, Cold Moon, Cooking Moon, Turning Moon, Earth Renewal Moon, First Moon, Frost in the Tepee Moon, Frozen Ground Moon, Great Moon, Great Spirit Moon, Greetings Maker Moon, Her Cold Moon, Hibiscus Moon, Holiday Moon, Ice Moon, Lakes Frozen Moon, Little Winter Moon, Long Moon, Man Moon, Midwinter Moon, Moon After Yule, Moon of Darkness, Moon of Flying Ants, Moon of Life at It's Height, Moon of Strong Cold, Moon of the Bear, Moon of the Child, Moon of Whirling Snow, Moon When Animals Lose Their Fat, Moon When Limbs of Trees Are Broken by Snow, Moon When Snow Drifts into Tipis, Moon When the Snow Blows like Spirits in the Wind, Moon When the Sun Has Traveled South, Moon When the Old Fellow Spreads the Brush , Moon When Wolves Run Together, Ninene Moon, No Snow in Trails Moon, Old Moon, Pine Moon, Plum Blossom Moon, Quiet Moon, Rivros Moon, Rowan Moon, Severe Moon, Snow Blindness Moon, Snow Moon, Snow Thaws Moon, Snowdrop Moon, Snowy Path Moon, Strong Cold Moon, Sun Has Not Strength to Thaw Moon, Thumb Moon, Trail Squint Moon, Two Trails Moon, Weight Loss Moon, Whirling Wind Moon, White Waking Moon, Winter Moon, Winter's Younger Brother Moon, Wolf Moon

I like the name "Wolf Moon", but I am also fond of "Great Spirit Moon" and "Earth Renewal Moon".

Wordless Wednesday - Life Within

Out of My Snow Bound Tree

"I wish to grow dumber, to slip deep into woods that grow blinder with each step I take, until the fingers let go of their numbers and the hands are finally ignorant as paws. Unable to count the petals, I will not know who loves me, who loves me not. Nothing to remember, nothing to forgive, I will stumble into the juice of the berry, the shag of bark, I will be dense and happy as fur."
Noelle Oxenhandler

Thoroughly weary of cold and snow these days, I find my thoughts turning not to palm trees, oceans and gentle breezes, but to wildnesses north of Lake Superior. Just what is that all about?

What it comes down to is the simple fact that I am still crazy after all these years, still an untamed creature if there ever was one. In the depths of winter, I dream of doing again a wild thing done often when younger - donning a heavy parka, multitudinous layers of thermal underpinnings, wool trousers, boots and snowshoes, packing a tent and a camp stove, tucking my paints under my arm and heading deep into the woods for a nice long sojourn, far from the madding crowd. After forty years, winter wildnesses continue to call in voices at once plangent and clamorous.

It never fails. On dark winter nights, when the wind howls around the little blue house, I should be dreaming of tropical islands. Instead, I dream of sitting beside a campfire, snowy trees all around, a bright moon and a sky full of stars overhead. There are wolves and owls in the distance, and I am cold, but as happy as one wil(d)y old woman can be. Standing among the snow drowned trees on the heights, I look south over the lake and its rocky shores; then I turn and look over forests stretching north for thousands of miles. Yes indeedy, I am home.

Times change of course. I am well past doing such a thing, too elderly to be trudging into the woods north of Superior for weeks on end, wearing snowshoes and packing all the necessities on my back. These days I would be carrying a digital camera rather than lugging the old 4 x 5 view camera and a whole bag of associated equipment. My bones and joints ossify at the very thought of doing such a thing, and the inner crone is appalled.

Nevertheless, the dreams persist. Some of the best images I ever captured were with the old camera looking out over the north woods. I may be out of my tree, but what a fine snowy tree it is.

Crystalline

Winter Sun and Trees

Friday Ramble - Frugal

Frugal.... The word hails from the sixteenth century and comes to us through the good offices of the Latin frūgālis meaning economical. Interesting to relate here, the root form is frūg, and it actually means fruit or produce.

Roget gives us the following synonyms among others: Spartan, abstemious, canny, careful, conserving, discreet, meager, meticulous, parsimonious, penny-wise, preserving, provident, prudent, sparing, thrifty. Better words in my book are simple and simplicity.

The noun form, frugality, describes a lifestyle lived in a thoughtful and resourceful manner using goods and services already possessed, wherever possible, to achieve balance and well being. Another way of looking at it is to say that in cultivating frugality, one embraces the principle of "enoughness".

Organizations like the Amish, the Mennonites and the Religious Society of Friends have endorsed frugality since they came into being. Environmentalists, aboriginal groups and modern pagans promote the virtues of a frugal lifestyle in which humans rediscover their ancestral skills as hunters and gatherers, having little or no need of modern contrivances and finding meaning in nature and the earth (the Old Wild Mother) rather than possessions and conventions.

I find myself thinking of Lewis Hyde's gift economy here, and if you have not read his work, please do. To be frugal is to make the best possible use of one's gifts. It is to tread lightly on the earth, reducing one's ecological footprint and lessening one's demands on a world strained almost beyond its regenerative powers by human excess, greed, gluttony and contempt.

When we live frugally, we are making use of what we have been given with grace, respect and thanksgiving - we are partaking of a wild and earthy fruitfulness, a careful abundance and an ethic of universal stewardship. We are walking through this world rooted and knowing our place in it, living as the good stewards, artists and creators we were meant to be.

Lewis Hyde says it a lot better than I ever could.

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 - Snow Topped

By the Fire

The wind howls, the snow blows, and it is very cold beyond the windows. Here we are again, stuck indoors with a cold, a high fever and what looks like the beginnings of another bout of pneumonia. This is to be expected from time to time when one insists on pottering around in the woods on cold days with a load of wild bird food and a camera around her neck.

There is a fire in the fireplace this morning, a bowl of clove studded and very fragrant oranges on the table, mugs of tea in hand and a little Mozart (The Magic Flute) on the sound system, soon to be followed by Sheela-na-gig's madcap Baba Yaga's Ball. I can neither smell or taste the oranges at the moment, but my imagination fills in the gaps.

As I tottered around the house yesterday afternoon, miserable, shivering and draped in every single shawl I own, a dear friend appeared on the threshold with a thoughtful card and a whole bag of lovely books to engage these sniffly hours. I am blessed indeed.

Among the Snowy Trees

At Sunrise on Winter Days

at sunrise on winter days,
our trail is through new fallen snow —
every footfall a waxing moon

our muffled steps rise up
through the snow-drowned trees
like flocks of pale buntings

goldenrod, thistles, milkweed,
great spruces weighted under snow —
all nod in early greeting

ghost choirs of summer grosbeaks
sing above our heads — icicles
form along the rooflines as we pass

winter rounds the village, smoothing
contours of house and street alike —
spinning deserts out of snow

in morning stillness, we know ourselves
at last — perfect and complete,
nothing abandoned or left behind.

(Cate)

The Sound of Snow

Thursday Poem - Perhaps the World Ends Here

The world begins at a kitchen table. No matter what,

we must eat to live.

The gifts of earth are brought and prepared, set on the table.
So it has been since creation, and it will go on.

We chase chickens or dogs away from it. Babies teethe
at the corners. They scrape their knees under it.

It is here that children are given instructions on what
it means to be human. We make men at it, we make women.

At this table we gossip, recall enemies and the ghosts of lovers.

Our dreams drink coffee with us as they put their arms
around our children. They laugh with us at our poor
falling-down selves and as we put ourselves back
together once again at the table.

This table has been a house in the rain, an umbrella
in the sun.

Wars have begun and ended at this table. It is a place
to hide in the shadow of terror. A place to celebrate
the terrible victory.

We have given birth on this table, and have prepared
our parents for burial here.

At this table we sing with joy, with sorrow.
We pray of suffering and remorse.
We give thanks.

Perhaps the world will end at the kitchen table,
while we are laughing and crying,
eating of the last sweet bite.

Joy Harjo
(From Reinventing the Enemy's Language)

Wordless Wednesday - Ready, set ...

To Years Old and New

What shall I say about this past year, about all the water already under the bridge and now somewhere else entirely? Spring arrived right on schedule, and the world was green again; summer was golden, and autumn was fiery red. All three seasons were glorious but brief, as they always are here in the north. Now we stand at the gate of another year, and in the depths of winter.

Early last year, I lost a dear friend to cancer - she battled the disease to the end like the gracious and noble spirit and true warrior she was, and she lost her struggle after several years of courageous and no-holds-barred resistance. We often went pottering together, and now there is one less blithe companion to go walking through this world with. My friend's passing leaves a void, but I am grateful for having known and loved her and hopeful that, in the words of Rita Mae Brown, "gratitude will finally conquer the loss".

The journey as a freelance photographer, designer and occasional wordsmith continues. It winds gently along through wondrous, unknown and ever changing territory, albeit in an occasionally uncertain (re skills, creativity and age) frame of mind, but this is nothing new. I am learning that uncertain realms are good dwelling places, and there are fine old lessons to be learned in them. Hugging the shores of one's life is just fine, but the Great Mystery makes its home further out. Once in a while we have to paddle our canoes out into deeper waters to meet it.

Faced with an uncertain future (isn't the future always uncertain?), one simply pledges herself to embrace that future and whatever it holds with radical acceptance and a blithe spirit of adventure, then she potters onward. The face in the mirror looks a little more weathered every day, and at times it seems as furrowed as a newly turned field in springtime, but I am rather fond of this elder me. As I grow older, I am becoming quieter and more radical - as the late Florida Scott-Maxwell phrased it so beautifully in her memoir, "fierce with reality". Having been freckled and rather easy going all my life (and about as intimidating as the Easter bunny), I secretly aspire to become a commanding presence in my elder years, someone wise, compelling and a little scary. Being grand would be lovely, but it is not going to happen.

Intentions for 2011 are simple. I shall spend more time reacquainting myself with the treasures in my library and more time rambling in the woods with Himself and Spencer, a camera slung around my neck and notebook in hand. I shall spend more time watching sunrises and moonrises, more time listening than talking, more time just sitting and breathing, in and out, in and out. In other words, I shall continue to work on the same stuff I worked on last year: on finding a measure of authenticity, on cultivating decency, tolerance and compassion, on loving this earth and just plain old being kind. All are qualities which seem fragile and imperiled in our times, and I have a very long way to go.

Roshi John Tarrant, one of my favorite Zen thinkers and teachers, gives us a list of things to remember at any time of the year. His words are chock full of wisdom, and I return to them over and over again.

At this turning of the year, I offer up thanks to deities great and small for Himself and Spencer, for community, hearth and sangha, for good friends and traveling companions far and wide, for mountains, rivers and trees, radiant moons and starry starry nights. I give thanks for the wild wisdom and enlightenment of which I have yet to partake, but which I trust are waiting for me somewhere up the trail. Emaho!

Adorned

Madcap Yearnings, Runcible Thoughts

How to describe these madcap January yearnings for rantipole hues, gracefully curving lines, foreign musics and exotic fragrances?

There is no denying it - I turn inward somewhat at this time of year, downing mug after mug of rich amber Darjeeling or perfumed Earl Grey, prowling through the library (the size of a small city and tucked into every available nook and cranny of the little blue house in the village) at all hours of the day and night, hauling out my sketch books and playing with collage, looking anywhere and everywhere for color - any old vibrant color will do. The scarlet flash of a male cardinal's wing in the hedgerow is cause for celebration in January as are the blues of nattering jays, the delicate grays and creams of chickadees and nuthatches at the feeders.

Skies are morose, and it is raining here this morning. The snow is melting fast, but only a day or two ago, the garden was a marvel in the fleeting sunlight. Filling the bird feeders, I stopped by the cathedral fretwork of rose canes arching gracefully over the fence. As I watched the thorny boughs waving in the wind, along came a memory straight from the shaggy green halls of departed summer - one of multitudinous blush-colored blooms and superb old rose fragrance. A little further along, the old stone birdbath held a frothy symphonic confection of frozen russet leaves and stems, scallops of ice and bubbles like champagne. I was going to chuck out its contents and fill the birdbath with seed, but I just couldn't bring myself to disturb that fetching frozen arrangement.

Returning indoors, I made a pot of strong spicy chai and tucked John Williams' lovely Mediterranean Concerto on the CD player; then I pulled out Meredith Blevins magical The Hummingbird Wizard and Kim Antieau's delicious Coyote Cowgirl. For several happy hours, it was summer again.

Quiet Morning