Friday Ramble for Ostara

Today marks the Vernal Equinox or Ostara, one of two times in the calendar year (the other being the Autumn Equinox or Mabon) when the Earth and her unruly children hover in perfect balance for a brief interval. Humans had nothing to do with this day - it's a pivotal astronomic point ordained by the natural order of things in the astonishingly beautiful cosmos where we live out our days, spinning like tops in the Great Round of space and time.

Today,  day and night are perfectly balanced in length. After a long hard winter that persists in hanging about and making our lives an endless snow removal exercise, that is something to crow about. No matter what the weather is like today (and it is nothing to write home about), brighter, warmer times are on their way.

If I lived further south, this might be a time of greening and enchantment, a day when Eostre, the old Teutonic goddess of greening and fertility, wanders wild places with her arms full of spring blooms. Flowers would spring up in her footsteps as she passed, and she would be attended by hares, her special animal. The air would be filled with birdsong, the heady fragrance of rich dark earth and wild springtime herbs.

Alas, the only snowdrops blooming here at the moment are in a glass jar in my study. It will be several weeks until Lady Spring makes an appearance, but rumors of her imminent presence and the arrival of the greening season persist. We are hopeful. It has been a long winter this time around, and Eostre can't show up too soon for me. The birds in the garden feel the same and are proclaiming their craving for warmth and light. Every feathered visitor seems to be declaring its lofty status as a messenger from the sacred, a harbinger of abundance, fertility and new life.

Early this morning, Beau and I went outside into the garden for a few minutes, and a cold going it was. As we shivered in the star spangled darkness and looked up, it seemed to us that March's full moon (now only a thin waxing crescent a day or two past new) always bears more than a passing resemblance to a great cosmic egg. Its egginess is a perfect expression of this turning of the wheel with its verdant motifs of warmth, light and new life coming into being.

There is, most assuredly, blooming in our thoughts, but the weather is too cold for outdoor celebrations, and it will be very dark tonight since the moon is a thin waxing crescent. We will spend a few minutes outside looking at the stars, and perhaps we will light a celebratory candle on the deck, but our observance will be indoors for the most part. All are welcome at the table, and there are enough chairs and mugs to go around. See you there.

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)

The Irish poet, priest and philosopher John O'Donohue passed away several years ago, but his benediction poem is a comfort with its notions of homecoming, moonlight, calm waters and return.

Wordless Wednesday - Still Cold

Rumors of Spring

Now and then, there are balmy, brilliant blue days in March, but mostly, we lurch along between winter and spring, blue skies and grey skies, scudding clouds and no clouds at all. Temperatures are up, down and all over the place, and we (Beau and I) are never sure what to wear when we set out in the morning for our first walk, a light, waterproof jacket one day, a warm parka the next. Two days ago, we went about in light jackets, and this morning we are back to parkas and boots.

Wonder of wonders, a gnarly old willow down by the creek was putting up lovely furry catkins a few days ago and the icicles suspended below cradled tiny branches and fragile scraps of green. The little stream at my feet was running free and singing, its waters dark and glossy and filled with possibility. Willow, song and flow are still percolating in my thoughts this morning, a day or two later.

A hodgepodge of seasonal images and motifs perhaps, but not unusual for my favorite corner in the great wide world, and I am quite all right with it. There is light in dwindling icicles, in thawing streams and fuzzy little willow buds, and perhaps springtime is not far off. Hardy northerners that we are, we cling to the thought and turn our collars up against the icy wind.

On we go, paw in paw, light flickering through the trees, little scraps of green in the landscape around us, soon (hopefully), flocks of returning geese in the sky above. There are balmy days and cold days; sometimes there is rain, and other times there is snow. The slowly awakening world is a symphony written in sound and light, and even our footsteps have a part to play in the performance.

 Happy Saint Patrick's Day!

Sequestered, 345 (CCCXLV)

Sunday, Saying Yes to the World

One human life is deeper than the ocean. Strange fishes and sea-monsters and mighty plants live in the rock-bed of our spirits. The whole of human history is an undiscovered continent deep in our souls. There are dolphins, plants that dream, magic birds inside us. The sky is inside us. The earth is in us.

Ben Okri, The Famished Road

Winter Has another Go

Here we are again!

Friday Ramble - Getting Through March, Sheepishly

March came in like a lioness, and then the lioness stepped away for a few days. Within her brief absence, plucky birds paired off amorously, and local starlings sang merrily, pretending they were robins. For a while it looked as if there would be an early maple syrup run. For a handful of days, I dared to entertain thoughts of springtime - gardening magazines, nursery catalogs and seed packets bloomed on every surface in the little blue house in the village.

Silly me, I should know better than to succumb to such fancies. There are halcyon days now and then in March, but they are scant, and they are difficult to predict. Storms, frigid days and icy nights persist, the north wind flinging heaps of snow against the door of the garden shed, tumps of earth and faded grasses vanishing after emerging briefly out of the white stuff. There is still a lot of snow about, and our geese, loons and herons are going to be late coming home this year. It will be weeks until they can find food in frozen farm fields.

What is one to do at such times? I drink Logdriver espresso and Yorkshire tea, make soup and cookies, pummel bread dough. In the wee hours of the night, I plot new beds of heirloom veggies and herbs to be dug (hopefully) next month, research heirloom roses, ponder starting another quilt. I cultivate forbearance and try to be cheerful when temperatures drop and ice turns the threshold back into a skating rink. I hope ardently that March will get her act together and morph into a lamb, darn it.

At the end of winter, one becomes a tad maudlin. A friend in the Lanark Highlands told me this week that spring lambs are about to be born in her magnificent old log barn, and I could have cried. Poor wee curly beasties, coming into the world in such bleak and harrowing circumstances.

Enough is enough already. Rain is just fine, and it is easier to shove than snow. One thing about the weather though. When night skies are clear, they are fabulous: flaming sunsets and moons one can almost reach up and touch, planets dancing in the sky at dusk, dippers of starlight strewn by handfuls from vast, streaming cosmic cauldrons up there somewhere in the darkness. What a show, what a trip!

Tobar Phadraic (for St. Patrick's Day)

Turn sideways into the light as they say
the old ones did and disappear
into the originality of it all.

Be impatient with easy explanations

and teach that part of the mind

that wants to know everything

not to begin questions it cannot answer.

Walk the green road above the bay

and the low glinting fields

toward the evening sun, let that Atlantic

gleam be ahead of you and the gray light

of the bay below you, until you catch,

down on your left, the break in the wall,

for just above in the shadows

you’ll find it hidden, a curved arm

of rock holding the water close to the mountain,

a just-lit surface smoothing a scattering of coins,

and in the niche above, notes to the dead

and supplications for those who still live.

But for now, you are alone with the transfiguration

and ask no healing for your own

but look down as if looking through time,

as if through a rent veil from the other

side of the question you’ve refused to ask.

And you remember now, that clear stream

of generosity from which you drank,

how as a child your arms could rise and your palms

turn out to take the blessing of the world.

David Whyte, from River Flow

(with permission)

Wordless Wednesday - Flowing

Fey Dreams and Eldritch Musics

Dancing in this elderly sconce are nighttime dreams of sunlight, warmth, birdsong and green things emerging from the earth. When I am awake, an eldritch music hovers on the edge of my hearing, a fey tune scarcely more than an echo in the wind.

Reed pipes perhaps or a harp? Rose-breasted grosbeaks? The horns of elfland? Bare naked satyrs prancing about in the woods with flutes? The whole thing may be just wishful thinking on my part. I am always restless in March and raring to go, impatient to be putting on my wellies and picking up my gardening tools.

When Beau and I are out on our walks, we listen for geese coming home. We have not heard them so far, but there will be rejoicing when we do. Wherever we are and whatever we are doing at the time, we will kick up our heels and dance. 

Wild magics are afoot in this season of emergence and rebirth and greening. There is magic in the sky over our heads, in the awakening trees in the sunny woods. There is magic in my garden, and I am here to take it all in again this year. Hallelujah.

Sequestered, 344 (CCCXLIV)

Sunday, Saying Yes to the World

maybe it is her birth

which she holds close to herself

or her death

which is just as inseparable

and the white wind

that encircles her is a part

just as the blue sky

hanging in turquoise from her neck

oh woman

remember who you are

woman

it is the whole earth

Joy Harjo, The Blanket Around Her

(For International Women's Day)

Treasure Within

Friday Ramble - Passing Through

The Bohemian Waxwing (Bombycilla garrulus) passes through the village in October as it heads south to its winter habitat and again in March when it flies back to its breeding grounds in the boreal forests of the north. Some winter in the southern United States; others travel as far as Costa Rica and Panama for the winter.

Traveling in madcap flocks, Bohemians stop along their migration route to fill up on berries, cherries and other fruit, and their appearance makes me smile, a fine thing indeed this year. The birds fly jubilantly around the old crabapple tree, gleefully dance from branch to branch, make crude comments to the nearby crows and starlings, laugh at their own jokes and pelt each other with desiccated crabapples. Getting clear photos of them is quite an exercise because they never stop moving.

Bohemian Waxwings are mainly fruit eaters, and in colder weather, they subsist on frozen  mountain ash berries, hawthorn berries, rosehips, high bush cranberries and other fruit. In late winter, and early spring, it is not unusual for the birds to become tipsy after consuming fermented berries. They fly around erratically, stagger about, have trouble making landings and even fall out of trees at times.

I thought these rowdy visitors were Cedar Waxwings until I noticed their peachy colored faces, rufous (red) undertail coverts and white wing streaks, also their scarlet-tipped secondaries, often rather difficult to see. By the time the birds departed, the old crabapple tree was bare, and the deep snowdrifts in the front yard were peppered with bits and pieces of frozen crabapple. Along came a whole murder of crows and made short work of the leavings.

Bohemians are seasonal harbingers, and their appearance in the front yard in March often means that springtime is on its way, but this year, they should have waited a few weeks longer. It is still cold and snowy here. We have a long way to go.

Thursday Poem - You Can't Be Too Careful

Spring storm and hail of ice cubes
pummels my town and no other.
There was a time when townspeople
would call this fall the wrath of God
or work of witches. A lower profile
may have saved some crones
renowned for bitter herbs, odd dames
you went to in the woods for troubles.
But some would go on being busybodies
and scolds dragged out, dunked, drowned
or hung like limp, forgotten fruit
from gallows trees. Scarecrows and
cautionary tales. And truly the crows
flee from our town screaming
blue murder, scarier than a siren.
Even in these enlightened times,
some of us still go warily,
keeping secret our wild simples,

asking nothing for our quirky blessings.

Dolores Stewart Riccio, from The Nature of Things

Wordless Wednesday - Waiting for Sweetness

Seeing Red

Beyond the window is an ocean of white that goes on forever and ever. Weary of ice and snow, I have been longing to have my morning cuppa out on the deck, but I will not be doing that for quite a while. The best I can do is stand inside the doors with my mug and look out wistfully. At the rate we are going, we may not even see the garden before the end of April, and there won't be any greenery showing until the long weekend in May. A little bright color is a fine thing right about now, and it is welcomed with open arms when it turns up out of the blue.

While pottering in a local market a few weeks ago, a tin bucket of tulips caught my eye, and I scooped up a bunch in assorted colors, carrying them home as tenderly as if they were fledgling birds. The whites, pinks, purples, oranges and yellows were fine stuff, but the scarlets were nothing short of amazing - attention grabbers of the first order. My find was a bucket full of gladness and then some.

In an old cut glass vase (a flea market find), the velvety petals and bright green leaves didn't merely light up the day - they lighted up everything else around here too. One tulip would have been enough, but a whole bouquet was almost indecently sumptuous. It was a small ritual, a way to invoke spring, even if the blooming was indoors and in my thoughts. My tulips were a small magic that conjured gladness and made the gnarly bringer of blooms (me) feel like doing the tango with a tulip in her teeth.

From now until spring, there has to be a pot, a crock, a bucket, a vase or a tankard of something flowering near the south facing window. I think about how beautiful a single garden rose will look there when summer comes, and it seems to me that such thoughts are not just about a vase of tulips or a single rose, but about all the boundless gardens of the earth coming into riotous, intoxicating bloom.

Sequestered, week 343 (CCCXLIII)

Sunday, Saying Yes to the World

We have been carrying on two parallel conversations, one about respecting human diversity, the other about preserving natural diversity. Unless we merge those conversations, both will be futile. Our efforts to honor human differences cannot succeed apart from our effort to honor the buzzing, blooming, bewildering variety of life of earth. All life rises from the same source, and so does all fellow feeling, whether the fellow moves on two legs or four, on scaly bellies or feathered wings. If we care only for human needs, we betray the land; if we care only for the earth and its wild offspring, we betray our own kind. The profusion of creatures and cultures is the most remarkable fact about our planet, and the study and stewardship of that profusion seems to me our fundamental task.

Scott Russell Sanders

Bunch of Gladness

Friday Ramble - Cauldron

This is one of my favorite intervals in the whole turning year - the cluster of sunny days and cold nights in late winter and early springtime when the eastern Ontario highlands gear up for the maple syrup season.

In the woods, the sugar bird (saw-whet owl) sings its courtship songs, and local lore says that when it does, the time has come to tap the maples. Clouds of smoke and steam rise from wooden sugar shacks tucked in among the old trees, and the intoxicating fragrance of boiling maple sap is everywhere. Magic is afoot, and no mistake. No doubt about it, ambrosial is the word.

The sylvan alchemy in progress is wild and sweet, and the homely metaphor of the maple syrup cauldron has profound resonance for me. I still have the battered cast iron Dutch oven I carried when I rambled the continent many years ago, stirring soups, potions and stews by starlight and watching as sparks went spiraling into the inky sky over the rim of my old pot. The motes of light rising from its depths were stars too, perfect counterpoint to the constellations dancing over my head.

At home, there is usually a stockpot bubbling away on the stove in my kitchen. There are cast iron skillets and pots, bean crocks in assorted sizes and a slow cooker or two. Squirreled away in the cupboard are enameled cookware by Staub and Le Creuset in bright red and unglazed earthenware tagines. One can never have too many cooking vessels, and I can always be tempted into acquiring others. A small three-legged incense bowl rests on the table in my study, and I use it every day. 

Out in the Lanark woods, there are the sugar camps of friends with miles of collecting hose in confetti colors strung from maple to maple. Modern evaporators are used these days, but in some camps, antique syrup cauldrons boil over open fires to show how maple syrup was made in times past.

The word cauldron comes from the Middle English cauderon, thence from the Anglo-Norman caudiere and the Latin caldāria, the latter meaning “cooking pot” and rooted in the adjective calidus meaning warm or “suitable for warming”. At the end of the trail is the Proto-Indo-European (PIE) root kelə meaning simply “warm”. Calendar, calorie, chafe, chiaroscuro, claim, clamor, class, clear, council, hale, haul and lee are kin. So is caldera, the term geologists use to describe the massive crater formed when a volcano's magma chamber is emptied by a massive eruption or its roof collapses. The biggest caldera on earth is the Apolaki Caldera located in the Pacific ocean off the Philippine islands, and the most active is probably the La Garita Caldera in southwestern Colorado. Of course, Wyoming's magnificent Yellowstone Caldera is in a class all by itself.

The night that gifts us with stars and enfolds us gently when the sun goes down is a vast cauldron or bowl. Somewhere in the darkness up there, Cerridwen is stirring her heady cosmic brew of knowledge, creativity and rebirth, her magical kettle simmering over a mystic cook fire. From her vessel, the bard Taliesin once partook of a single drop and awakened into wisdom and song. We're all vessels, and one of the best motifs for this old life is surely a pot or cauldron, one battered, dented and well traveled, but useful and happy to be so, bubbling and crackling away in the background (sometimes in the foreground), making happy musics and occasionally sending bright motes up into the air.

And so it is with this old hen when her favorite wild places begin to awaken again. Notions of alchemy bubble away gently. Sparks fly upward; images of pots and cauldrons cosmic and domestic whirl about in her thoughts. She could not (and would not) be anywhere else in the great wide world. Is she a wild thing herself? Oh, yes.

A repeat performance (slightly edited, with a few additions and rewordings) but this remains one of my favorite bloggy offerings ever.

Thursday Poem - For the Children

The rising hills,
the slopes,
of statistics
lie before us.
The steep climb
of everything, going up,
up, as we all
go down.

In the next century
or the one beyond that
they say,
are valleys, pastures,
we can meet there in peace
if we make it.

To climb these coming crests
one word to you, to
you and your children:

stay together,
learn the flowers,
go light.

Gary Snyder, from Turtle Island

Wordless Wednesday - Alight

Stirring Things Up

Springtime may be happening in some parts of the world, but it is not happening here yet, and it won't for some time. There is nary a whisper of its coming, just Old Man Winter rattling his icy talons, rampaging through bare trees in the garden, roaring down the chimney and delighting in our glum expressions.

I feel cauldrons of soup, meatloaf and sourdough coming on this morning, also molasses cookies and scones. Stirring up such things is comforting when the wind howls in the rafters, and I can't see my neighbor's veranda for towering heaps of snow.

The teapot is warming, the kettle is burbling happily, and my favorite mug awaits. It is time to pull out Sarah Leah Chase's New England Open-House Cookbook and hatch a few culinary plots, also Alexandra Stafford's Bread Toast Crumbs, and The Art of Simple Food (I & II) by Alice Waters. Yum, we can do this.

This afternoon, I will curl up in a comfortable corner with a mug of tea and continue reading Richard Grant's delightful (and hilarious) Tex and Molly in the Afterlife. Let the wind and the season and this bitterly cold day do what they will.

Sequestered, week 342 (CCCXLII)

Sunday, Saying Yes to the World

That, I think, is the power of ceremony: it marries the mundane to the sacred. The water turns to wine, the coffee to a prayer. The material and the spiritual mingle like grounds mixed with humus, transformed like steam rising from a mug into the morning mist.

 

What else can you offer the earth, which has everything? What else can you give but something of yourself? A homemade ceremony, a ceremony that makes a home.

Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom,
Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants

The Way We Were

... and the way we will (hopefully) be again in the not so distant future. This morning I am feeling nostalgic and rather wistful. Fog drifting through the coves of the eastern Ontario highlands is lovely stuff.  Getting another foot of snow overnight was not.

Friday Ramble - Shining Through

An unquiet time, these late February days. At night, I give myself up to dreams of wildflowers, sunlight and songbirds in the overstory. Barefoot and asleep, I wander the woods in the wee hours of the morning, listen to coyotes singing their pleasure under the moon, follow clouds across the western field, eavesdrop on bullfrogs in the beaver pond and bees in the wild apple trees by the fence.

By day, Beau and I potter along and look at icicles dangling from village roofs, assay the strength of returning sunlight and measure the length of shadows in the landscape with our eyes. On our morning walks, we notice how snowdrifts are receding along our favorite trails through the woods. They leave puffs of snow like meringues and fine lacy fretworks behind them as they dwindle and retreat. 

Somewhere in the woods, a Great Horned Owl is on nest duty, and it converses with its mate who is hunting nearby. There is also the toot-toot-toot courtship song of the Saw-whet Owl, that fierce little harbinger of the approaching maple syrup season.

It is a few minutes before three in the morning, and there are wonders to be seen through the kitchen window as I lean against the counter with a cup of Bigelow's Constant Comment tea. The southern sky is a tapestry of faraway stars from here to there, each and every one my kin.

Our woodland rambles are brief this winter, but we take them whenever we can. As we go along, light flickers through bare trees and slants across our path. Everything in the great wide world seems to be filled with light and sparkling. Late winter restlessness vanishes like smoke, and we rest easy in the moment, content just to be here and watching the day unfold.  The feeling is familiar, a late winter Zen thing, and it is always a welcome guest on the threshold.

There is a quote from Shunryu Suzuki on my computer desktop, a gentle reminder that the world is perfect, complete and magical, just as it is. It warms my heart.

"The world is its own magic."  

Thursday Poem - Love After Love

The time will come

when, with elation

you will greet yourself arriving

at your own door, in your own mirror

and each will smile at the other's welcome,

and say, sit here. Eat.

You will love again the stranger

who was your self. Give wine.

Give bread. Give back your heart to itself,

to the stranger who has loved you

all your life, whom you ignored

for another, who knows you by heart.

Take down the love letters

from the bookshelf,

the photographs, the desperate notes,

peel your own image from the mirror.

Sit. Feast on your life.

Derek Walcott