Thursday Poem - Camas

Consider the lilies of the field,

the blue banks of camas

opening into acres of sky along the road.

Would the longing to lie down

and be washed by that beauty

abate if you knew their usefulness,

how the natives ground their bulbs

for flour, how the settlers' hogs

uprooted them, grunting in gleeful

oblivion as the flowers fell?

And you - what of your rushed

and useful life? Imagine setting it all down -

papers, plans, appointments, everything -

leaving only a note: "Gone

to the fields to be lovely. Be back

when I'm through with blooming."

Even now, unneeded and uneaten,

the camas lilies gaze out above the grass

from their tender blue eyes.

Even in sleep your life will shine.

Make no mistake. Of course

your work will always matter.

Yet Solomon in all his glory

was not arrayed like one of these.

Lyn Ungar
(from Blessing the Bread)

Wordless Wednesday - Dayglow

Being Cool

Tasting the Air

Eastern Gartersnake (Thamnophis sirtalis sirtalis)

McDonalds Corners, Lanark Highlands

June 2011

A lifelong admirer of all native things ophidian, I can never understand why snakes always get a bad rap in the world at large.  Of course there are no poisonous snakes in Canada to worry about except the Eastern Massasauga Rattlesnake, (Sistrurus catenatus), and that gorgeous creature is rare due to persecution and the loss of its habitat - it has been designated as Threatened by the various Canadian committees responsible for such things.

The name massasauga means "great river-mouth" in Algonquian Chippewa and probably refers to the snake's original habitat, bogs and marshes near northern river deltas.  Shy and reclusive by nature, the only venomous pit viper in Canada subsists on rodents and other reptiles, and it is rather small, generally less than thirty inches in length. Instances of it actually biting anyone are rare, usually occurring when someone picks it up or accidentally walks on it while hiking. The north woods will be a poorer place without the Massasauga if that sad day ever comes.

This "garter" was large as the species goes, almost four feet in length.  The scales were artfully patterned, the eyes round and lustrous, the forked tongue scarlet and tipped with black, the interior of the mouth scarlet too.  In and out when the snake's tongue, tasting the air and transmitting its findings to the chemical receptors of the Jacobsen gland in the roof of its mouth. Through its tongue, the snake experiences the great wide world and makes sense of the environment in which it lives.

For some reason or other, the flicking of a snake's tongue is often thought to be an aggressive gesture, but it just isn't so, and I always enjoy watching them sample the living world.

Spencer on the Shore

Tail up, happy ears, a big smile and dancing feet.....  Spencer loves everything about the lake, the color of the water, the sun sparkling on the surface, the sound of the waves. 

He circles the bay with us watching for herons, loons and ducks, scans the trees above the gorge for noisy young ravens; he wades up and down the wide shallows by the bridge with gusto before venturing into the deeps to fetch sticks tossed by his admiring parents.

He is a strong swimmer now and confident in deep water. There is never a moment's hesitation about paddling out to seize the projectile of the moment, and he wants us to throw it for hours and hours even.

The idea on a fine sunny afternoon is not just to patrol the shore, cool his furry toes or fetch things - it is a practical scientific demonstration of Archimedes' principle in action.  Just how much lake water can one happy boy displace as he splashes along in the shallows?

Friday Ramble - Fragrance/Fragrant

Yesterday it rained for hours.  When I stepped out onto the deck during a brief halt in the downpour, there was the heady perfume of roses in full bloom, kissed by raindrops and dishing out frothy sublime fragrance with abandon.

Moving toward the door in wellies, with a camera around my neck and a mug of Constant Comment in hand, I was turning over words in my mind: serendipity, summer, lunar, zephyr, solstice... thinking that one of the words I was murmuring like a litany would be the Friday word of the week, something I could enjoy researching, musing on and writing about here today. Finding a good word and following it all the way back to its Indo-European roots is a lark, and it is always such fun to do.  No wait..... We wrote about zephyrs last week, and we wrote about solstices early this week on the day of Litha or the Summer Solstice.

Fragrance is the word for this day, and it is the only word that will do.The word hails from the early fifteenth century at least, springing from late Middle English, thence from the Latin frāgrāns, frāgrāre meaning "to give off an odor" or simply "to smell sweet". Roget's Thesaurus gives us synonyms such as: aroma, redolence, perfume, elixir, bouquet, incense, musk, attar, balm, civet, potpourri, nosegay, scent, sachet, cologne.

Rain or no rain, my June garden is an abode of fragrance and sweetness, and it's enough to fill an ancient rose loving Celt, Roman, Persian or Egyptian with wonder, admiration and flat-out envy. Finding an adjective for such wild and earthy opulence is always difficult, and for a few minutes yesterday, I was completely lost for words.

The gloriously blushed rose here this morning is David Austin's exquisite "Heritage", and the master himself describes its perfume as classically beautiful with overtones of fruit, honey and carnation on a myrrh background.   Next up are the antique Maiden's Blush, David Austin's Abraham Darby, Evelyn, Gertrude Jekyll and the gorgeous once-blooming Constance Spry. Hallelujah, summer is here, and it really doesn't matter that it is raining again this morning.

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, from Firekeeper

First Rose

 

 Heritage (David Austin)

Jewel in the Summer Wind (II)

Male Ebony Jewelwing

(Calopteryx maculata)

Jewel in the Summer Wind

Female Halloween Pennant
(Celithemis eponina)

Swaying back and forth in the wind yesterday as I tried to capture this glorious creature on my memory card, I remembered something from many moons ago, and it made me smile. Who knows what recess of the old noggin the memory had been hiding in?

On a fine summer day long past, I was poking about on the school playground at noon and saw a gorgeous golden dragonfly.  When it flew off into the nearby woods, I followed it hoping for a closer look, and enchanted by the legions of gilded Odonata swooping and swirling through the air in a clearing, I sat down with my back against a tree to watch them for a few minutes and forgot about the time.  I didn't remember to go back to class until almost the end of the school day, and the nuns were not amused - I vaguely remember being expelled for a day or two and a letter being sent home to my embarrassed and apologetic parents.  A whole bag of adjectives peppered their reprimand to me at the time: wild, unruly, thoughtless, disobedient, intractable.

Plus ca change, plus ca reste le meme... Fast forward fifty years, and here I am in the woods on another summer day, being chewed by bugs and happy as a clam at high water - I'm well past sixty now and to quote the great Paul Simon, still crazy after all these years.  I'm still enchanted by dragonflies and breathless every time I encounter one, still following them into the trees at every opportunity, still thankful that the Old Wild Mother creates such wonders and I am around to see them. I rather think that the dragonfly which so enchanted me that day was the wondrous winged entity pictured above.

I have a better camera now though, and I no longer need a darkroom.  I could never have taken anything like these images with the Brownie Bullet that was my constant companion when I was just a tadpole learning the timeless arts of truancy, and I always seemed to be penniless then, having spent my meager pocket money on film for that dear little Kodak box camera.

Dancing With the WInd

The Rose Moon of June

A lovely quiet in the park at the base of the fountain, and the moon coming up over the angel's outspread wings on the longest full moon night of the year... It felt good to sit nearby with a fine velvety summer darkness all around, the sound of nights birds in flight and water falling into the wide basin at the angel's feet, leaves and grasses perfuming the soft air.

In the northern hemisphere it is high summer, and we tend to think of the burning intensity and power of old Helios ascendant, not the silver aura of Lady Moon lighting up the summer night against tapestries of twinkling stars, silhouetted trees, marble fountains and falling water.  Hers is a gentler more serene presence, easy on the eyes, tender on one's heart.

Swiftly fly the days this far north and other less balmy times are somewhere beyond the hill.  Tending our shaggy fruiting gardens, we revel in the light, but we are already thinking of harvesting, gathering in and putting bounty by for the seasons to follow this one.

In the Lanark Highlands, the first harvest of the year is already in progress, and the fields are dappled with great round bales of fragrant hay: timothy (or blue grass), alfalfa and sweet clover. Is there anything on this planet to compare with the delightful and rather spicy fragrance of freshly cut clover?

The corn is growing by leaps and bounds, and fields of barley are "pinking up" nicely. At sunset there are deer and fawns grazing along the shadowed verges of freshly mowed fields, wild turkeys foraging in woodland groves and expressing their pleasure in clear voices that carry for some distance.  Our cups, our pails and our baskets runneth over with light and abundance and contentment in June; our thoughts are lodged in warmth and golden sunlight.

We also know this moon as the: Bass Moon, Big Mouth Moon, Big Summer Moon, Blackberry Moon, Bulbs Mature Moon, Columbine Moon, Corn Tassels Appear Moon, Dancing Moon, Duckling Moon, Dyan Moon, Egg Hatching Moon, Egg Laying Moon, Egg Moon, Eucalyptus Moon, Fatness Moon, Fish Spoils Easily Moon, Fishing Moon, Flowering Cherry Moon, Full Leaf Moon, Gardening Moon, Green Corn Moon, Hoeing Moon, Honey Moon, Hot Moon, Lady Slipper Moon, Leaf Dark Moon, Litha Moon, Lotus Moon, Lovers' Moon, Mead Moon, Middle of Summer Moon, Midsummer Brightness Moon, Midsummer Moon, Moon of Horses, Moon of Little Fawns, Moon of Making Fat, Moon of Planting, Moon of the Turtle, Moon When Green Grass Is Up, Moon When June Berries Are Ripe, Moon When the Buffalo Bulls Hunt the Cows, Moon When the Hot Weather Begins, Moon When the Leaves Are Dark Green, Moon When the Leaves Come out, Moon When They Hill Indian Corn, Oak Moon, Peony Moon, Planting Moon, Pomegranate Moon, Raspberry Moon, Ripening Moon, Ripening Time Moon, Seventh Moon, Sockeye Moon, Solstice Moon, Strawberry Moon, Strong Sun Moon, Summer Moon, Sun High Moon, Thumb Moon, Turning Moon, Watermelon Moon, Windy Moon

I am also fond of Blackberry Moon, Green Corn Moon and Honey Moon.

Wordless Wednesday - Cups in the Window

 

Splendidly Leafing

Wild Fox Grape (Vitis labrusca)

Red Before Rain

 Oriental Poppy (Papaver orientale)

It's the perfect scarlet remembered when one is revisiting summer - a crinkled somewhat transparent magnificence through which sunlight passes without being diminished, the beams lighting up everything they touch on the other side of their journey through the red.  Think crimson here, think cardinal and carmine, think rubies in the grass... 

The hearts of poppies are dark and velvety, their petals so brilliant that they linger behind closed eyelids and haunt one's dreams at night.  The blooms are stunning when viewed against the shaggy green of the garden, and I suspect that like many of the Old Wild Mother's creations, their vibrant hues cannot be duplicated by bumbling humanity.  It is no wonder at all that so many painters have tried to capture poppies with canvas and paint.  Claude Monet was mad about poppies and painted wide swaths of them in the fields around Argenteuil and Vétheuil. Vincent Van Gogh also had a passion for poppies, and Georgia O'Keeffe's poppies are so brilliant they leap right off page, screen or canvas.

After a night of gentle rain, our own poppies are looking somewhat bedraggled this morning and tattered around the edges, but they are truly lovely, and they evoke wabi sabi, that timeless Japanese aesthetic in which aging, fading and tattered edges are cherished as beautiful in their own way and as visible reminders of transience and impermanence.

I am considering creating a whole bed of poppies this year, all the cultivars I can find that will flourish this far north, and ditto for the purple irises glittering like rain wet jewels in the grass.  I can see them all through the window as I type this, and they lift me up like cloud of swallowtails dancing along the river on a fine sunny day.

Quiet Grace

Canada Anemone or Crowfoot (Anemone canadensis)

by Geddes Bridge, Lanark Highlands

June 2011

Thursday Poem - How Sweet It Is

at dawn, a frail moon waning in the high

still light of morning blesses this perfect

summer day, one that will never come again

in all its sweetness and its verdant spice,

and slow walkers in the early fog, we go paw 

and paw through fragrant summer yieldings

of swaying purple clover and rhyming crickets,

of humming bees and dancing leaves

while all around us, unseen but deeply felt 

and loved, this world is breathing in and 

out, our three voices rising and falling as one

into seamless light and tune and time.

how sweet this world, these fleeting 

earthly days, how very very sweet...

Catherine Kerr (kerrdelune)

Wordless Wednesday - Reflecting

That Happy Buzz

For weeks, the garden has simply rested in the sunlight, sending up new branches and putting out leaves - there was nary a butterfly, a dragonfly or a bee to be seen.

This morning, all my roses are wearing buds, and the air is full of happy buzzing from legions of common eastern bumble bees (Bombus inpatiens) foraging in the flowering spurge we planted only last week.  When one bumble flew into the house earlier, I nudged it on to a square of cardboard and carried it outside to the garden where it made its way to the lupins and settled noisily back into gathering nectar.

Bumbles are some of my favorite summer garden residents, and their numbers have been in decline after several harsh winters and cold wet springs - it is good to see so many of them gracing our flower beds.  Diligent pollinators, their august presence means that local orchards may be able to anticipate a good harvest this year, and that is something to crow about, or rather to buzz about.  A world without Mackintosh apples does not bear thinking about.

The Grey and the White of It

This graceful white Embden and handsome Greylag are a mated pair of geese at my soul sister Caroline's beautiful heritage farm in the Lanark Highlands, and they are raising a family together - the eggs will hatch out some time this week.

The tender regard of these two comely members of genus Anser  for each other is a splendid thing to see - they really are fetching creatures with their fine plumage, the bright orange color of the skin around their eyes, their beaks, legs and big webbed feet.

The geese and I are usually the best of friends.  When not nesting, they follow me around with their tail feathers waggling happily, talking a mile a minute and passing comment on everything they see.  With a large family due to arrive on the scene any moment now, the two birds are in a different frame of mind, irascible, prone to emotional outbursts and easily distracted from mundane pursuits.

One is taking a chance in visiting the barn where the goose's nest reposes or even in walking anywhere nearby.  The gander is fearless and a ferocious defender of his hearth, home, spouse and children-to-be.   He hisses and honks at interlopers, runs at them all fluffed up and looking twice his usual size - he bites, beats on unprotected arms and legs with his formidable wings flapping, and it hurts.  It's best to maintain a safe distance...

The Scots use geese as sentries at highland whiskey distilleries, and in the past I have often wondered how effective the great birds are as guardians, but I wonder no more..  Watch geese take great pleasure in doing their work, and they excel at it.

Sunday Swallowtail

Canadian Tiger Swallowtail

(Papilio canadensis)

Friday Ramble - Radical

 

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

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

We use the word radical to describe someone who dwells outside the mainstream, someone who has departed from accepted norms, traditions and social conventions and does their own thing. The word has been in common usage since the sixties, and being called radical may or may not be a compliment. I am always astonished and vastly tickled on some level to think that a word used to connote the rebellious, unconventional,, confrontational and downright peculiar actually means something as lovely and organic and simple as "rooted. Now how did that happen?

In the original sense of the word, being radical simply means being connected and part of things, and that makes the word one of my all time favorites.  It signifies (for me anyway) a bone deep connection with everything that matters, with the Old Wild Mother and all her creations, with the earth under my feet, the moon and stars over my head - with timeless notions of rebirth, transformation and non-duality. Pots off, roots down, branches up and away we go...

Thursday Poem - Directions

The best time is late afternoon

when the sun strobes through

the columns of trees as you are hiking up,

and when you find an agreeable rock

to sit on, you will be able to see

the light pouring down into the woods

and breaking into the shapes and tones

of things and you will hear nothing

but a sprig of birdsong or the leafy

falling of a cone or nut through the trees,

and if this is your day you might even

spot a hare or feel the wing-beats of geese

driving overhead toward some destination.

But it is hard to speak of these things

how the voices of light enter the body

and begin to recite their stories

how the earth holds us painfully against

its breast made of humus and brambles

how we who will soon be gone regard

the entities that continue to return

greener than ever, spring water flowing

through a meadow and the shadows of clouds

passing over the hills and the ground

where we stand in the tremble of thought

taking the vast outside into ourselves.

Billy Collins
(from Directions in The Art of Drowning)

Wordless Wednesday - Yellow Lady Slipper

Greater Yellow Lady's Slipper

(Cypripedium pubescens)