Pockets of Wonder

In September, every garment in my wardrobe seems to have acorns in its pockets, offerings from the red, white and bur oaks of the village and the eastern Ontario highlands. After years of rambling in both places, I have come to think of the towering quercus people as cherished sisters and old friends.

On sunny autumn days, I find a comfortable seat among my kin, and we have long conversations, some of the most thoughtful discussions ever. I have no leaves, and I don't bear acorns, but the great oaks welcome me nevertheless.

Pockets without acorns rattling around in their depths enfold other offerings, pine and spruce cones, walnuts, butternuts, beech nuts, shagbark hickory nuts and conkers (horse chestnuts). I adore their shapes, their colors, their textures, their fragrance, the whole season of their fruiting, and I can never resist gathering them out in the woods. Autumn is a season of entelechy, a time of becoming, a time of of once, now, and (hopefully) future trees, enchantment in every glossy nut and acorn.

Turning my pockets out this weekend before chucking everything into the washing machine, I realized there has been a whole forest riding around with me for several days, and it made me smile. No need to pine for my tree sisters when I am away from the woods - they are right here with me.

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Sunday, Saying Yes to the World

The September pairing of purple and gold is lived reciprocity; its wisdom is that the beauty of one is illuminated by the radiance of the other. Science and art, matter and spirit, indigenous knowledge and Western science—can they be goldenrod and asters for each other? When I am in their presence, their beauty asks me for reciprocity, to be the complementary color, to make something beautiful in response.

Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass

Ripening Under the Sun

Friday Ramble - Drifting

On September mornings, the village can be a mysterious place. The earth is often warmer than the air above, and the chance meeting of the two elements wraps everything in a diaphanous veil, turns otherwise mundane landscape features into entities fey and luminous. Lady Autumn is upon us, and she is comfortable in her tenure of mist, rain, wind and madcap tumbling leaves.

There is nothing like a good fog, and this time of the year dishes up some splendid atmospheric murks. Mist swirls around everything, draping the whiskery trees, smoothing hard edges and rounding the contours of house and street. The north wind scours leaves from the old trees near home, and they rustle underfoot as Beau and I go along on our early walks. Irv is always with us, and if we listen carefully, we can hear Cassie and Spencer pottering along beside us too, their expressive doggy toes doing a kind of scuffling dance through the fallen treasure.

Out of the pearly gray and sepia come sounds now and again. Birds converse in hedgerows and geese move unseen among the clouds, singing as they pass over our heads. Doors open and close as sleepy residents collect their morning papers. There is the soft growling of automobiles and the rumble of buses, the muffled cadence of joggers gliding through the park, the high, clear voices of children chattering on their way to school, commuters heading downtown to work. Once in a while, there is the whistle of a faraway train, usually only a faint echoing in the air. Close to home, raindrops often beat a staccato rhythm on roofs first thing in the morning, and little rivers sing through the eaves. All together, it is symphonic.

On foggy September mornings, the world seems boundless, brimming with luminous floating Zen possibility, soil and trees and sky and mist giving tongue in a language that is wild and compelling. Part of me is curled up and engaged in a slow breathing meditation, counting my breaths, in and out, in and out. Other parts are out there drifting along with the fog and happy to be doing it. 

Thursday Poem - The Peace of Wild Things

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

Wendell Berry

(August 5, 1934 – August 31, 2026)

A rare light has gone out of the world with Wendell Berry's passing. I admired him, and not just for his written work. He was a passionate advocate for the earth, for common sense, decency and compassion, for all those values that are, or ought to be, the bedrock of our existence on this dear little blue planet.

Wordless Wednesday - Still Blooming

September, Taking Wing

It's the first Tuesday in September, and village children are off to school, walked all the way there (or sometimes just to the bus stop) by proud parents, big sisters and brothers, and even family pets. I have known many of the kids since they traveled around the neighborhood in prams, and here they are going off to school. 

The youngsters wear jackets and sneakers in confetti colors, carry backpacks and lunch boxes in pink, turquoise and lime green, tote pint-sized umbrellas patterned in flowers or bunnies or polka dots. They bloom like pint-sized peonies out in the street, and watching from the windows, I feel like doing a little blooming too.

Only a short distance away, other brightly arrayed offspring have hatched out in village hedgerows, and they are strengthening their wings for the long journey south that will begin in a week or two. When the newly hatched monarch butterflies alight on Michaelmas daisies in the garden, the combination of orange, purple and gold is dazzling. Every butterfly is a stained glass jewel, wild, vivid and breathtaking,

There are vibrant colors everywhere I look in early September, and they are a sumptuous treat for these old eyes. It doesn't matter whether the riotous tints are on Virginia creepers, monarch butterflies, coneflowers or tiny raincoats - they invite me to kick up my heels and dance.

Happy September, everyone! 

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Sunday, Saying Yes to the World

I don't know what gladness is or where it comes from, this splitting open of the self.

It takes me by surprise. Not an awareness of beauty and mystery, but beauty and mystery themselves, flooding into a mind suddenly without boundaries. Can this be gladness, to be lifted by that flood?

This is something that needs explaining, how light emerges from darkness, how comfort wells up from sorrow. The Earth holds every possibility inside it, and the mystery of transformation, one thing into another. This is the wildest comfort.

Kathleen Dean Moore, Wild Comfort: The Solace of Nature

Bumble Girls in the Basil

Friday Rambles, Demeter At the Gate

A single burnished leaf from the oak in the front yard floats down and comes to rest in a pot of bronzey chrysanthemums on the threshold. The deep scarlet in the center of the "mums" matches the vibrant color of the front door, a cheerful thing and very welcoming. Days are still very warm here for the most part, but nights are starting to cool down, and it won't be long until we have to carry pots indoors every evening as darkness falls and the wind comes out of the river.

As the oak leaf makes itself comfortable among the blooms, a long v-shaped skein of geese passes overhead, joyously honking on its way out to farm fields to feed. The great Canadas will return at sunset and spend the night on the river.

Closer to the earth, the swallows of summer are packing their flight bags and making ready to depart, their places on telephone wires to be taken by flutters of sparrows and constellations of noisy starlings who are putting on winter stars and flashy yellow beaks. Monarch butterflies will be leaving around the same time.

Frantic squirrels everywhere are filling their larders, and I have surrendered to the little blighters in the matter of geraniums - there does not seem to be much I can do to prevent the flowers from being unceremoniously tossed out of their pots and replaced with buried acorns, berries, crabapples and walnuts. For some reason, the squirrels leave chrysanthemums alone. The scent perhaps?

When I awakened this morning before sunrise, Jupiter was just above the eastern horizon and the constellation Orion was rising in the southeast quadrant, his club held high and sword belt twinkling. The appearance of the giant is one of my seasonal markers, and his appearance in the predawn sky is a sign fall is on its way.

Above us, autumn stars twinkle in the darkness. Here on earth, apples, corn, pumpkins and hay are ripening and being gathered in. There is no doubt about it—Demeter is at the gate, and she is rattling its rusty latch with enthusiasm. The lady knows the ancient cantrip that grants her entrance to these smoky northern hills, and she knows the key in which it is to be sung. This is my favorite time of the year.

Thursday Poem - Assurance

You will never be alone, you hear so deep
a sound when autumn comes. Yellow
pulls across the hills and thrums,
or the silence after lightening before it says
its names—and then the clouds'

wide-mouthed apologies. You were aimed

from birth: you will never be alone. Rain

will come, a gutter filled, an Amazon,

long aisles—you never heard so deep a sound,

moss on rock, and years. You turn your head—

that’s what the silence meant: you’re not

alone. The whole wide world pours down.

William Stafford, (from The Way It Is)

For my little brother, James (Jamie) Brendan Franklin, (March 10, 1960 - August 22, 2023). Journey onward knowing you were (are, and always will be) remembered, treasured and much loved. I carry you in my heart.

Wordless Wednesday - Jewel In Summer Stillness

Spatterdock or Yellow Pond Lily (Nuphar advena)

The Jeweled Thicket

Spotted Jewelweed or Touch-Me-Not

(Impatiens capensis)

There is a whole thicket of these colourful critters blooming in the moist earth along the creek in the woods, and we were happy to find them this past weekend.

Jewelweed is a wild herbal with known medicinal benefits, and it has been used by indigenous groups for centuries. They used infusions made with the leaves to treat measles and fevers, poultices of bruised stems for the pain and itching of skin ailments like poison ivy, poison oak and poison sumac. The plant contains compounds which neutralize uroshiol, the chemical causing contact dermatitis, and it is a fine addition to one's medicine chest.

The plant is also an important nectar source for hummingbirds, and they are usually about when it is in bloom. When hummers reach into the bell-shaped blooms with their long beaks and brush up against nearby seed pods, the pods explode, propelling seeds some distance into the air, hence the common name, Touch-Me-Not.

For years, I cultivated jewelweed in my garden, and thanks to its exploding seed pods, it came up everywhere. Keeping it in check was quite an undertaking, and I eventually removed it from the garden altogether. I have just harvested seeds from the thicket in the woods and am about to give the species another try.

Jewelweed is cheerful stuff, and I like the freckled faces on the flowers when the plants are in bloom. In addition to being a "tried and true" wild medicinal, it provides nourishment for hummers, bees and other insects, and that makes it a clear winner in my book. Here we go again!

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Sunday, Saying Yes to the World

The earth offers gift after gift—life and the living of it, light and the return of it, the growing things, the roaring things, fire and nightmares, falling water and the wisdom of friends, forgiveness. My god, the forgiveness, time, and the scouring tides. How does one accept gifts as great as these and hold them in the mind?

Failing to notice a gift dishonors it, and deflects the love of the giver. That's what's wrong with living a careless life, storing up sorrow, waking up regretful, walking unaware. But to turn the gift in your hand, to say, this is wonderful and beautiful, this is a great gift—this honors the gift and the giver of it. Maybe this is what [my friend] Hank has been trying to make me understand: Notice the gift. Be astonished at it. Be glad for it, care about it. Keep it in mind. This is the greatest gift a person can give in return.

Kathleen Dean Moore, Wild Comfort: The Solace of Nature

In the Wee Small Hours of the Morning

Friday Ramble - Consider

This week's word is one of my favorite words in the whole English lexicon, in part because of the notions of careful thought, deliberation and balance enfolded in it, but mostly because of its splendid celestial origins.

Think Vincent Van Gogh and his gorgeous "Starry Starry Night". Consider hails from around 1350 CE, tracing its origins through the Middle English consideren and the Latin considerare, both meaning "in the company of the stars", thence the Latin sidus/sideris meaning a star or cluster of stars. At the beginning of it all is the Proto-Indo-European (PIE) root form *sweid meaning to shine. Other English words like constellation and sidereal are kin, the first describing a group of stars, and the latter meaning simply "starry" and by extension, celestial or heavenly.

Small wonder that we are given to considering, at least in the original sense of the word. Forged from the dust of ancient stars, we are probably never more true to ourselves or more in tune with our fundamental natures and inner light than when we are engaging in the liminal act of considering something. In doing so, we move away from the mundane and profane and intuitively toward our bone deep connection with the cosmos. Hallelujah, we are the universe expressing itself, and the stars over our heads are our kin. Dancing motes in the eye of the infinite are we.

It's one thing to consider my origins on a cold clear night when I can almost reach up and touch the moon and stars. It's another thing entirely to do so in late summer or early autumn when the sky is filled with clouds from here to there, and I can hardly see hand or lens, let alone sunlight, moonlight or stars. Who doesn't love a good haze or fog though, and days and nights on the cusp of the seasons dish up some splendid, atmospheric murks. Even when we can't see them, our starry kin are right up there over our heads and shining down on us. As Clarissa Pinkola Estes wrote:

"We find lingering evidence of archetype in the images and symbols found in stories, literature, poetry, painting, and religion. It would appear that its glow, its voice, and its fragrance are meant to cause us to be raised up from contemplating the shit on our tails to occasionally traveling in the company of the stars."

Thursday Poem - Enriching the Earth

To enrich the earth I have sowed clover and grass
to grow and die. I have plowed in the seed
of winter grains and of various legumes,
their growth to be plowed in to enrich the earth.
I have stirred into the ground the offal
and the decay of the growth of past seasons
and so mended the earth and made its yield increase.
All this serves the dark. I am slowly falling
into the fund of things. And yet to serve the earth,
not knowing what I serve, gives a wideness
and a delight to the air, and my days
do not wholly pass. It is the mind's service,
for when the will fails so do the hands
and one lives at the expense of life.
After death, willing or not, the body serves,
entering the earth. And so what was heaviest
and most mute is at last raised up into song.

Wendell Berry, from Collected Poems

Wordless Wednesday - First Toms

On the Road Again

A family around the corner keep this gem in storage much of the year, but they are about to set out on their annual summer road trip, and their vintage VW is parked in the driveway, slowly being stuffed to the gunnels with things like camp stoves, picnic coolers, coffee mugs, sleeping bags and air mattresses. Also, a comfortable bed for their elderly dachshund who travels with them. No boarding kennel for Willy (Wilhelmina). Where her family goes, she goes.

Watching the process unfold takes me back to the long ago days when friends and I used to load up a VW bus and take to the road for a week or two before starting classes in September. Our chariot (Freija) was burgundy and cream rather than the fetching shade of orange here, but she was a grand girl, and we adored her. The image on her wheel cover was a peace symbol and seeing a Volkswagen Westfalia camper adorned with that old hippie symbol still makes me smile.

One summer we opted for an elderly Vauxhall instead of the VW, and its reverse conked out somewhere in the wilds of northern Ontario. We had to nudge it out of its parking spot every morning, one of us in the driver's seat and the others in front of the bus pushing it frantically. The exercise was fun, but the next summer we went back to using the VW. Freija was a trooper, and she never let us down, ever.

Sequestered, 366 (CCCLXVI)

Male American Goldfinch

(Spinus tristis)

Sunday, Saying Yes to the World

Long before writing was invented, human beings read their world. They interpreted their dreams and the flights of birds. They read the intestines of sacrificial animals and the memories of their ancestors. They read the things that surprised them, or the things that reminded them of something else. Most of all, they read in the places where there were holes—spaces—gaps. They filled up the blanks of the universe, as though they were pages, with writing. Leonardo advised aspiring artists to “discover” the pictures to be found in cracks on walls; Chinese sages were conceived as their mothers stepped into the footprints of unicorns; all of us make up our lives out of the cracks in the walls of our past memories and the unicorn prints of our futures. The making of a life is similar to the making of a text. We live by reading our own stories.

Whatever we do in our lives, we make a text of our lives. Whether or not our stories belong to the shared patterns of the great, true stories—the myths—they are the texts from which we find out our relation to the divine, to one another and to the self.

Linda Sexson, Ordinarily Sacred

A Gift From the Squirrels

Friday Ramble - August Musics

Here I am, trying to describe something in the great wide world that is quite beyond description. I know it is so, but I carry on anyway, and I make a complete shambles of the exercise. To be clear, this morning's sumptuous sky has no need of a old hen with camera and notebook, but I have to say something. To let such a dazzling moment pass without saying anything or writing a word about it would be shameful.

Northern skies on middle-to-late August mornings are intense happenings, early sunlight burnishing clouds into brilliance and lighting up contrails against skies that often as not have a touch of violet in them. Sometimes, everything up there looks like stained glass. There are high fluffy streaks from horizon to horizon, strands of light touching everything with copper and oro pallido, the pale lustrous gold that only visits the world at the beginning of day (although Tuscan skies sometimes held such wonders in late afternoon when I was a student there many years ago).

One needs a large brush to paint such sweeping confetti colored expanses, lenses that can take in the great wide world from here to there. My camera carrying exercises are brief at the moment because of the heat and humidity (mostly the humidity)  but I am already thinking of acquiring another lens or two, of visiting my local art supply shop and purchasing more tubes of scarlet, gold and indigo for my paint box.

What a show the cosmos puts on when Beau and I go out to greet these August mornings together. Barefoot, I sip my tea and try to capture a few images. My companion looks up at the sky and all around, his eyes round in wonder and his expressive tail waving like a metronome.

At dawn, flocks of Canada geese fly up from their night on the river and out into farm fields to feed. There is wave upon wave of happy honking as they pass over our heads. Their joyous, almost symphonic presence is a clear indication that summer is waning. For all that, there is magic everywhere, and there is music.

Late summer mornings are full of light and texture and color and sound. This is the traditional music of August, "the music of what happens" as the season draws to a slow and honeyed close. How amazing it all is, how poignant and how fleeting. My image and little net of words are shamefully lacking, but they will have to do.

Thursday Poem - August

Summer sings its long song, and all the notes

are green. But there’s a click, somewhere in

the middle of the month, as we reach the

turning point, the apex, a Ferris wheel,

cars tipping and tilting over the top, and

we see September up ahead school and

schedules returning. And there’s the first

night you step outside and hear the

katydids arguing, six more weeks to frost,

and you know you can make it through to fall.

Dark now at eight, nights finally cooling off

for sleep, no more twisting in damp sheets,

hearing mosquitoes’ thirsty whines.

Lakes of chicory and Queen Anne’s

lace mirror the sky’s high cirrus.

Evenings grow chilly, time for old sweaters

and sweatpants, lying in the hammock
squinting to read in the quick-coming dusk.
A few fireflies punctuate the night’s black text,
and the moonlight is so thick, you could

swim in it until you reach the other side.

Barbara Crooker

Wordless Wednesday - Little Green

Smaller Worlds Within

On a fine morning in August's middling pages, a weathered stump along the trail wears a carpet of haircap moss (Polytrichum commune). The delicate wonders emerging from the thatch are dancing sporophytes, fragile strands topped by seed capsules wearing raindrops and filaments of spider silk. Beyond the right edge of the photo, a crab spider is waiting for something tasty to appear and is poised for ambush.

How often does one wander along a trail and not notice such wonders? I suspect the answer is, most of the time, for this old hen anyway.

My moss colony in the woods is a tiny jeweled world, complete within itself, and its swaying raindrops hold the whole sunlit forest in their depths, upside down of course. For the life of me, I can't come up with the right words to describe it. A tiny cosmos, teeming with life. Its own history. Its own traditions. Its own stories. It's own fey music. Astonishing. Breathtaking. Radiant. Perfect.

Hanging out with the fabulous forest mosses is a soggy business, and getting back on my feet is not as easy as it used to be, but oh, the colors, and the light.

Sequestered, 365 (CCCLXV)