Beyond the Fields We Know

Thursday Poem - Evening

2012-05-31T06:30:00.000-04:00

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, 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
(translation Stephen Mitchell)

Wordless Wednesday - Coming Up

2012-05-30T06:48:00.003-04:00

May is scarlet, purple and green...

2012-05-29T07:19:00.001-04:00

The end of May is not far off, and there's a legion of first appearances in the garden behind the little blue house and local hedgerows too...

The first buttercups, clover, daisies, salsify and vetches are blooming in the field at the end of the street, and a colony of escaped poppies dancing in scarlet profusion. The texture of the poppies with the sun shining through them is astonishing and we stop to stare - the blooms seem to give off light and not just pass it along.

Here and there are tufts of the purple weed known locally as Creeping Charlie, Ground-ivy or Gill-over-the-ground. I wasn't aware of it for some long time, but Glechoma hederacea has a whole cornucopia of medicinal uses, and it is in common use as a salad green in many cultures. European settlers carried it here on their travels, and it thrives in its "purpleness" wherever it finds itself, turning up in diverse habitats like vacant lots, parks, hedgerows and curbs, in residential flower beds and carefully manicured lawns.

Tall spires of Russell lupins in shades of pink and purple sway back and forth in our garden, and our blackberry bushes are in full bloom, full of bumble bees doing their happy appointed thing. If the rain holds off, I shall be out with camera and macro lens later today and moving with the wind as I try to capture the profligate hues on offer.

I am always enthralled by the differences between these madcap florid end-of-May doings, and the state of things here only a few weeks ago. Gone are the browns and the grays - there are reds and purples to be sure, and even the greens are dazzling.

The Long Cool View From Here

2012-05-28T06:11:00.000-04:00

The Jester's Cap and Bells

2012-05-27T06:31:00.000-04:00

Wild Columbine

(Aquilegia canadensis)

The colors of these wild cousins are truly opulent, and their delightfully complex structure always reminds me of a medieval jester's cap and bells - there is something of blithely capering choreography to their nodding back and forth movement on gracefully curved and arching stems. In late May, they always seem to be wearing at least one spider web, and this bloom is actually wearing two.

Unseasonal coolness, high winds and heavy rains wrought an early demise of columbines, trilliums and yellow lady slippers this year, and it was delightful to discover this prime and happy specimen cavorting alone in a sunny nook by the trail yesterday. As I was looking, legions of swallowtails fluttered by my head and danced further along the path into the woods, and the air was filled with dragonflies.

Rapt Attention in the Green

2012-05-26T07:00:00.000-04:00

Friday Ramble - Radical

2012-05-25T07:00:00.002-04:00

This Friday's word is radical, and a natural choice for this madcap greening season when we are all planting packets of seeds and transplanting flats of flowers, herbs and veggies - 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 entities 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, 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, 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 - Becoming

2012-05-24T08:03:00.002-04:00

Wait for evening.
Then you'll be alone.

Wait for the playground to empty.
Then call out those companions from childhood:

The one who closed his eyes
and pretended to be invisible.
The one to whom you told every secret.
The one who made a world of any hiding place.

And don't forget the one who listened in silence
while you wondered out loud:

Is the universe an empty mirror? A flowering tree?
Is the universe the sleep of a woman?

Wait for the sky's last blue
(the color of your homesickness).

Then you'll know the answer.

Wait for the air's first gold (that color of Amen).
Then you'll spy the wind's barefoot steps.

Then you'll recall that story beginning
with a child who strays in the woods.

The search for him goes on in the growing
shadow of the clock.

And the face behind the clock's face
is not his father's face.

And the hands behind the clock's hands
are not his mother's hands.

All of Time began when you first answered
to the names your mother and father gave you.

Soon, those names will travel with the leaves.
Then, you can trade places with the wind.

Then you'll remember your life
as a book of candles,
each page read by the light of its own burning.

Li-Young Lee
(from Behind My Eyes)

Wordless Wednesday - May's Wild Orchid

2012-05-23T06:42:00.000-04:00

Larger Yellow Lady-slipper

(Cypripedium furcatum or Cypripedium pubescens)

For the Dragons of the Air

2012-05-22T07:46:00.003-04:00

Four-spotted Skimmer

(Libellula quadrimaculata)

Another lovely summer spent chasing airborne dragons beckons...

The air over the Two Hundred Acre Wood was filled with dragonflies this past long weekend, buzzing erratically to and fro as they dined on gnats, deerflies and mosquitoes with gusto. As is usually the case here near the end of May, many of the happy fliers were skimmers with a light sprinkling of baskettails, darners, dashers and pondhawks.

This specimen was probably female, but the male and female genders of this lovely flier are similar and difficult to sort out. The sole differences seem to be the presence of a flange on the S8 segment (female) and a slight grayish bloom on the abdomen of an adult male.

For all the rain, the clouds, the thunder and the lightening, the presence of so many winged and merry dragons is a harbinger of high summer, long blue days, technicolor sunrises and early mornings spent in the garden, purple summer evenings spent on the deck with a good book and a tall glass of iced tea. Let it be, please - may it be so and soon.

Jack in the Shadows

2012-05-21T07:00:00.000-04:00

Jack-in-the-pulpit, also called Bog onion, Brown dragon,

Indian turnip, Wake robin or Wild turnip

(Arisaema triphyllum)

Wild Wonders All a-Maying

2012-05-20T06:00:00.000-04:00

How astonishing the wild encounters of May: the first stained glass swallowtails fluttering in the western field, ferns, wild leeks and jacks-in-the-pulpit swaying in the deep rich soil near the creek, jeweled dragonflies swooping and circling in the air over the hill, columbines along the trail in red and gold.

After a winter that seemed as if it would last forever, here are trees and songbirds, leafings and buddings and a thousand and one other wonders painting the air with glorious color and fragrance and song.

Setting off down the trail with a camera around my neck, a bag of weighty peripherals slung over my shoulder and the pockets of my photographer's vest crammed with an assortment of other bits and pieces, I cover only a few feet before I find myself sitting down on a sun warmed rock and just drinking in the light and the season like wine - no, better make that champagne. The world dances and sparkles like the best bubbly, all golden and fizzy and madcap and too wonderful for words. Even the grosbeaks high in the overstory seem intoxicated.

It seems this is to be another one of those years when I never make it all the way to the back of the Two Hundred Acre Wood. There is just too much to see along the way.

The Fragrance of Morning

2012-05-19T07:23:00.002-04:00

Friday Ramble - Serendipity in the Blue

2012-05-18T08:08:00.000-04:00

We use the word serendipity to describe situations in which we discover something wonderful by accident - often when we are searching for something else entirely. In other words, we stumble upon wonders when we are least expecting them, tripping right over things before realizing that we have found something astonishing.

The root form is Serendip, an old name for Sri Lanka (formerly Ceylon) hailing from the Arabic Sarandib, then the Tamil Seren deevu or Sanskrit Suvarnadweepa meaning "golden island", possibly related to Simhaladvipa meaning, "Dwelling-Place-of-Lions Island". If so, the origins of serendipity go back a very long way indeed, for the only lions on the island were extinct long before modern man arrived, and little evidence of them ever been found.

The adjective form has been around since 1754 when Horace Walpole used it in a letter to a friend, explaining that he had derived it from an old Persian fairytale called "The Three Princes of Serendip". The three royal gentlemen in that tale were on a quest and always finding things they were not looking for and had no need of. Walpole was making an important point in his letter - that a fey and subtle wisdom is often at work in serendipitous situations, a canny ability to see relationships between ostensibly irrelevant facts and come to important conclusions from them.

Serendipity seemed like the perfect word for this week. Pottering up a city street a few days ago and not feeling terrific, I looked back at the Canadian Museum of Nature, and suspended high in the tower called "the Queen's Lantern" was the gorgeous inflated scale model of a Blue Whale (Balaenoptera musculus), there perhaps to publicize the Whales Tohora exhibition currently showing in the place. Lustrous of eye, the lady floated in her glass ocean against the limitless blue sky, and no doubt about it, she was smiling. I have a "thing" about whales, and I needed her smile that morning although I knew it not - she lit me up, made me smile too, gladdened my heart.

The Maori tribes of New Zealand believe whales are their ancestors, and the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa created its mythic touring exhibition to educate us about the magnificent creatures, their mythology and their plight. The "great blue" is truly the greatest creature on earth, and the species is currently listed as endangered. It is heartbreaking to think that these magnificent creatures may not be with us for much longer. As a species, what on earth and the oceans are we thinking of?

Thursday Poem - Why We Tell Stories

2012-05-17T07:53:00.000-04:00

For Linda Foster

I
Because we used to have leaves
and on damp days
our muscles feel a tug,
painful now, from when roots
pulled us into the ground

and because our children believe
they can fly, an instinct retained
from when the bones in our arms
were shaped like zithers and broke
neatly under their feathers

and because before we had lungs
we knew how far it was to the bottom
as we floated open-eyed
like painted scarves through the scenery
of dreams, and because we awakened

and learned to speak

2
We sat by the fire in our caves,
and because we were poor, we made up a tale
about a treasure mountain
that would open only for us

and because we were always defeated,
we invented impossible riddles
only we could solve,
monsters only we could kill,
women who could love no one else
and because we had survived
sisters and brothers, daughters and sons,
we discovered bones that rose
from the dark earth and sang
as white birds in the trees

3
Because the story of our life
becomes our life

Because each of us tells
the same story
but tells it differently

and none of us tells it
the same way twice

Because grandmothers looking like spiders
want to enchant the children
and grandfathers need to convince us
what happened happened because of them

and though we listen only
haphazardly, with one ear,
we will begin our story
with the word and

Lisel Mueller

Wordless Wednesday - The Flowering Gate

2012-05-16T08:18:00.000-04:00

Coming Down to Earth

2012-05-15T07:53:00.000-04:00

Spring gifts us with tulips in every color of the rainbow, particularly late blooming varieties like these. Then the rains come, and so do exuberant winds blowing through the garden and setting everything in motion. In only a day or so, petals of the ornamental crabapple trees in the garden anoint the sweet greening earth like confetti, and the tulips are forests of waving stems unadorned by petals and stamens.

I adore tulips in the fullness of their blooming, and the camera loves them too, but they are loveliest as they are coming apart and drifting in the wind like little silken boats. Coming to rest, the fallen blooms form masses of glossy petals, scarlet and gold, pink and creamy white, and once in a year or three, there are vibrant purples, as rich and inky dark as a summer night.

Mozart devotee and lifelong tulip lover that I am, I planted the dark purple tulips called "Queen of the Night" again last autumn, but nary a one came up this time around. Perhaps the midnight Queens taste like wine - their sleeping bulbs are always the first to be snatched by squirrels.

There in the Sunlit Green

2012-05-14T07:09:00.000-04:00

Rain and Leaves and Mother's Day

2012-05-13T08:31:00.001-04:00

And so it goes... The weather here has done one of its famous mid-May flops or oscillations. With just a week or so to go before we are officially in spring's frost-free zone, temperatures have tumbled, and the furnace murmurs happily along from time to time. It chants a susurrant mantra about new beginnings, things greening up and warmer times being somewhere just over the hill and not too far off.

This morning it is cool, overcast and rainy. The house finches raising a fivesome brood in the wreath on the front door fly back and forth a thousand times a day with food, but they're also spending a fair bit of time hunkered down on the crowded nest keeping their fuzzy (and ever hungry) offspring warm and dry. Maple trees in the garden are mildly dismayed by the weather and showing pink and red along their edges when the north wind brings them fluttering down and onto the wet deck. Rain spattered leaves suspended here and there in the hedgerow are like little stained glass windows in the wildness.

There is always a silver lining though - the return to cooler weather means that we will not be carried away entirely by flies and mosquitoes today, and that is a good thing for we were royally chewed this week. Mother's Day morning is to be spent in the woods, with the tribe assembled around the table later, bison chili, a brown rice risotto, salad, a homemade baguette or three and many cups of tea to follow.

To my many mothers, wherever they are and whatever they are doing, my deep and heartfelt thanks on this day, to the Old Wild Mother of us all, first and foremost...

The Rosy Tints of Morning

2012-05-12T07:37:00.000-04:00

Could there be more cheerful views through the kitchen window as I potter about here at first light with mug in hand? Even the Norway maple in the corner wears red, and the colors in the garden are so rich and vibrant they dance.

Friday Ramble - Trailing Edges

2012-05-11T07:54:00.002-04:00

I open my eyes, the trailing edges of a dream by woodland and river brushing against my foggy mind – impressions of roots and moss covered rocks, ferns springing up and wildflowers blooming in shady places, flickering sunlight and blue sky seen through old trees, the song of the river in its blithe becoming.

There was melancholy in my dream and an element of panic too – the night’s concerns linger as I come slowly back to life with coffee in hand after my night's ramblings. What if I am failing here in this lifetime? What if I am unable to share in any meaningful way, just how rare and precious and beautiful is this sacred earth we are all treading together?

The tender ferns emerging from the ancient rocks in the gorge care not for such things, and they are content simply to be there in the sunlight of their native place. Perhaps, like them I get to come back and leaf out over and over again until I get things right. I remember Joanna Macy's words and am comforted:

It is my experience that the world itself has a role to play in our liberation. Its very pressures, pains, and risks can wake us up -- release us from the bonds of ego and guide us home to our vast, true nature. For some of us, our love of the world is so passionate that we cannot ask it to wait until we are enlightened.
Joanna Macy, World as Lover, World as Self

Whatever happens, I know that I shall be here among these hills forever and drinking in the light. My molecules will disperse and reassemble and cavort in many other life forms, but it may be that they will remember in some small measure or scrap of their being what it was like to be here this time around. That is quite enough...

[This is actually an expanded version of my contribution a few days ago to Elderwoman Musings, and the morning described was one of those watershed moments in life. I've added a quote from one of my favorite Buddhist thinkers and handful of words to clarify my thoughts at the time. My friends at "Musings", Kathleen, Donna and Ellen are wise and thoughtful women, and they are the finest of companions for mindful journeying through this world with camera, pen and notebook in hand]

Thursday Poem - Questions Before Dark

2012-05-10T07:15:00.001-04:00

Day ends, and before sleep

when the sky dies down, consider

your altered state: has this day

changed you? Are the corners

sharper or rounded off? Did you

live with death? Make decisions

that quieted? Find one clear word

that fit? At the sun's midpoint

did you notice a pitch of absence,

bewilderment that invites

the possible? What did you learn

from things you dropped and picked up

and dropped again? Did you set a straw

parallel to the river, let the flow

carry you downstream?

Jeanne Lohmann
from The Light of Invisible Bodies

Wordless Wednesday - The Heart of the Matter

2012-05-09T08:10:00.000-04:00

Rain, rain, rain....

2012-05-08T07:57:00.001-04:00

One thinks of April as being the northern month of springtime rains, but here we are in the middling pages of May with heavy cloud and rain cloaking the village and more of the same "in the cards" for the next several days. So much for planned rambles in the woods with Himself and Spencer...

We are weeks behind where we usually are at this time of the year, no columbines or wild yellow orchids in bloom in the woods, local trees still laboring mightily to leaf out themselves out for summer. There are a few early irises out in the garden, all rain spattered and velvety, but our vegetable plots seem forlorn as they wait for us to seed them lavishly and with hopes for a good harvest later this year.

Woe betide us, the black flies are out and about in dense biting clouds, and we're a mite chewed this morning, having spent a few hours yesterday poking about in hedgerows - there is nothing the local gnattery like better than a fine soggy day and warm blooded entities to munch on.

What is a little precipitation, after all? There are flowers in a south facing window, and before long there will be freshly baked bread and cookies (gluten free of course). Tea and crafty books await, along with the piano sonatas of Scarlatti, the soaring vocal harmonies of the Mediaeval Baebes and the Sibyl of the Rhine. The rain beyond the windows is a pleasing rhythm section, keeping its own natural time like a mantle clock or my banged up old metronome. It's all good. I really should design a a tee-shirt with those words on it. This is another one of those mornings when I need a reminder.

Gold and White in the Shadows (II)

2012-05-07T06:14:00.000-04:00

Great White Trillium

(Trillium grandiflorum)