Turning Toward October

As so it goes... Clear blue skies and sunlight, leaves crunching underfoot on our early rambles and falling on the hoods of parked cars along the street.

Thousands of wild geese are in the air, moving between the river where they spend the night and nearby farms where the corn is being cut down for the winter. The great Canadas are accomplished gleaners, and they are off to feed at first light.

Ice crystals rime the puddles along our morning walks, and everything sparkles: grasses, foliage, rooflines and chimneys. The air in the park is perfumed with wild herbs going to seed, and casting their scent to the wind.

No doubt about it, autumn is here. McIntosh apples are being harvested as I write this, and so are squashes and other gourds. I can hardly wait to taste them. 

Sequestered, 373 (CCCLXXIII)

Sunday, Saying Yes to the World

Whatever has happened, whatever is going to happen in the world, it is the living moment that contains the sum of the excitement, this moment in which we touch life and all the energy of the past and future. Here is all the developing greatness of the dream of the world, the pure flash of momentary imagination, the vision of life lived outside of triumph or defeat, in continual triumph and defeat, in the present, alive. All the crafts of subtlety, all the effort, all the loneliness and death, the thin and blazing threads of reason, the spill of blessing, the passion behind these silences — all the invention turns to one end: the fertilizing of the moment, so that there may be more life.

Muriel Rukeyser

Early Wandering, Treasure at My Feet

Friday Ramble - Going for the Gold

It's the reds that grab our attention at this time of the year. When maple trees in the eastern Ontario highlands turn in autumn, the gorges, hills and quiet coves are ablaze with color. Other trees are dazzling in their own right, but their earthier hues are always upstaged by the riotous, cavorting red maples.

There is an elemental chemistry at work in the woods. In summer, the green pigment in leaves (chlorophyll) helps converts sunlight into energy in the elegant chemical process called photosynthesis. (That word comes from the Greek phōs meaning "light", and suntíthēmi meaning "putting together".) Trees retain the carbon dioxide extracted during photosynthesis and use it to manufacture nourishment, together with water taken in through their roots. Oxygen extracted at the same time is released back into the earth's atmosphere for us to breathe.

Wild and earthy magics of the very finest kind are in progress, trees and sentient beings all breathing in and out together and sharing the bounty of light. That there is magic is without question, and it always seems to me that trees are sentient beings too, not just woody things with leaves and branches and roots.

When autumn arrives, deciduous trees withdraw into themselves. Chlorophyll production slows down, allowing the anthocyanin and carotenoid pigments also in leaves to come into their own. Leaves high in anthocyanins and low in carotenoids turn scarlet, and those with high levels of both flavinoids flash bright orange. Leaves high in carotenoids and low in anthocyanins do a sky dance in honeyed golds and yellows. Absent both anthocyanins and carotenoids, tannins rule, giving us the burnished russets, ochres, umbers and bronzes of the great oaks, hickories and beeches.

Like most northerners, I have a passion for scarlet, claret and ruby in autumn, but it always seems to me that the golds, bronzes and russets of our other native tree species don't get the attention they so richly deserve. The oro (gold) on display here in late September and early October is anything but pallido (pale or light). It dazzles the eye; it sings and struts and dances; it kicks up its heels. It rocks.

Poplars, ashes, elms and birches wear radiant saffron, and so do ginkgo trees in the village. Beech leaves are coppery coinage, and oak leaves turn an alluring rosy bronze. In Lanark, the aspens and tamaracks down by our beaver pond wear a delightful buttery gold. Nearby, late blooming goldenrod sways back and forth until it goes to seed and offers its fuzzy children to the wind. A few resolute yellow daisies and hawkweed bloom in protected nooks among the rocks. Everywhere, there is fine contrast from spruces, pines and cedars in the background, and blue-green evergreen fragrance fills the air.

And then there are all the smaller bright entities down on the forest floor among the fallen leaves. Eastern yellow fly agaric (Amanita muscaria) glows like a hundred watt bulb in the woods, and one can spot it in autumn as at no other time of the year. From the shadows, the lovely but poisonous fungus dishes out its frothy incandescence like a halogen lamp set on high beam.

Here's to the glorious golds of the fall panoply. When the long white season arrives and snow covers the countryside, it is the golds that will turn up in my dreams. Long may they delight these old eyes in dazzling array.

Thursday Poem - Why We Tell Stories

1
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, from Alive Together

Wordless Wednesday - Puddle Holding the Sky

Happy Fall Equinox

Molly Makes a Stand

Molly resembles the Raggedy Anne doll I had as a child, and I enjoy seeing her under the tree in a neighbor's garden in late September. She conveys seasonal sentiments eloquently with her round eyes, crookedy stitched smile, corn husk hair and hands, red corduroy overalls and flowered shirt. Crowning it all is a fine squashy burlap hat.

My friend is a scarecrow or flaycraw, a traditional Yorkshire and northern English word crafted from two Old English roots: "flay" (from flíȝan or flēȝan) meaning to frighten or put to flight, and "craw" (from crāwe), an archaic word for crow. Thus, Molly is a "crow-frightener", or scarecrow in modern parlance. Yorkshire dialects are a treasure trove of colourful words and expressions, and York St John University maintains a website devoted to such things: Yorkshire Dialects. Lots of splendid words there for etymology and dialect enthusiasts, and I visit the place often. 

Molly doesn't scare crows or other birds, and as a matter of fact, they like to perch on her and sing. Every few years, she becomes rather grubby, tattered, and festooned with bird droppings. When that happens, she undergoes a midlife refit. Her corn husk hair and hands are replaced, and she gets a new hat and overalls. This year, she also seems to have acquired a new head.

Sequestered, 372 (CCCLXXII)

Sunday, Saying Yes to the World

We are animal in our blood and in our skin. We were not born for pavements and escalators but for thunder and mud. More. We are animal not only in body but in spirit. Our minds are the minds of wild animals. Artists, who remember their wildness better than most, are animal artists, lifting their heads to sniff a quick wild scent in the air, and they know it unmistakably, they know the tug of wildness to be followed through your life is buckled by that strange and absolute obedience. ('You must have chaos in your soul to give birth to a dancing star,' wrote Nietzsche.) Children know it as magic and timeless play. Shamans and inveterate misbehavers know it; those who cannot trammel themselves into a sensible job and life in the suburbs know it.

What is wild cannot be bought or sold, borrowed or copied. It is. Unmistakeable, unforgettable, unshamable, elemental as earth and ice, water, fire and air, a quintessence, pure spirit, resolving into no constituents. Don't waste your wildness: it is precious and necessary.

Jay Griffiths, Wild: An Elemental Journey

Longing For Light

Friday Ramble - For the Autumn Equinox

It seems as though summer has just arrived, but here we are again, nearing the eve of the autumn equinox. Slightly cooler mornings, heavy dews and falling leaves after months of blistering heat and humidity, can it be?

The autumn equinox is often observed on a fixed date (September 21st), but the astronomical coordinate this time around is Tuesday, September 22. Like all the old seasonal festivals, the observance begins at sundown on the night before, Monday, September 21st. South of the equator, the natural cycles are reversed, and Monday night is the eve of the vernal equinox (Ostara).

The fall equinox is a pivotal cosmic hinge, and it wears many names: Mabon, Harvest Home, Second Harvest, the Feast of Ingathering and Alban Elfed, to name just a few. Mabon is the most common of the bunch, a modern invention taken from the name of the god Mabon (Maponus), a male fertilizing principle in Welsh mythology.

The American pagan Aidan Kelly came up with the name Mabon in the seventies when he was crafting a calendar for modern pagans and noticed the fall equinox did not have a pagan name of its own. His invention has stuck, but I think of the festival as "Harvest Home". As such, it has been celebrated for time out of mind, and the name recognizes the grain and harvest motifs at the heart of the observance. 

Tuesday's observance blends modern pagan practices with the rich traditions of ancient harvest festivals. Ceres, Demeter, John Barleycorn, Lugh, Tammuz and Persephone are better candidates for a tutelary deity presiding over autumn harvest rites, but I do have a soft spot for the "Great Son" of the Mabinogion, sometimes considered a companion of Arthur's Round Table. Mabon may not be harvest god, but he is certainly a powerful symbol of the land's bounty.

In the old Teutonic calendar, the autumn equinox marked the beginning of the Winter Finding, a ceremonial interval lasting until Winter Night on October 15, also the date of the old Norse New Year. For moderns, the date marks the end of summer and the beginning of autumn. In Christian tradition, the day is associated with St. Michael the Archangel—his feast takes place a few days from now on September 25 and is known (for obvious reasons) as Michaelmas. The autumn blooming Michaelmas daisy or New England aster with its purple petals and golden heart is one of my favorite wildflowers, and I always look forward to its blooming.

The autumn equinox is about abundance and harvest, but most of all, it is about balance and equilibrium—one of two astronomical coordinates in the whole turning year when day and night are perfectly balanced in length. Like all the old festivals dedicated to Mother Earth, it is a liminal or threshold time, for we are poised between two seasons, summer and autumn.

One holds out hopeful thoughts for the autumn equinox, that skies overhead will be brilliantly blue and full of singing geese by day, that trees and vines and creepers will be arrayed in crimson and gold, that a splendid golden moon will be visible against a blanket of stars by night. This year, the moon will be almost full, and September's full moon is usually called (surprise, surprise) the Harvest Moon.

Autumn images tug at the heart, and I always prowl through reams of archived images looking for just the right one for this day, but I am never sure I have found it. Falling leaves, asters, puddles, clouds, light, geese, herons??? It's always about the light, and autumn light is absolutely fabulous.

Thursday Poem - Mabon

Ephemeral truce.
The dark begins
its long winning streak.
But for now
in this disheveled garden
a riot of blowsy flowers
hangs on like a chorus
of aging show girls
still with a few good kicks.
The air is ripe
with seedy perfume
and pleasant lies,
the pomegranate shared
between two mouths.
This is our second harvest,
the corn, the squash,
the reconstructed
memories of summer.
Ceres, comfort us with apples,
with grapes and the wine of grapes.
Wheaten breads are baked
in the shape of the sun.
We savor them
with honey.
It will be a long time
before this golden
moment comes again.

Dolores Stewart (Riccio)

Wordless Wednesday - Fenced

Taking the Sky Road Home

Only in September and October do sunsets like this occur, ground mist creeping through fields and trees below skies that resemble a Maxfield Parrish painting. The clouds look like trails, and they remind me of the title I conferred on a sunset image a few years ago, "Taking the Sky Road Home".

Fog and ground mist are common entities at sunrise and nightfall here in autumn. The clouds of condensed moisture are generated by the earth's slow breathing and float along above the surface. We humans are cloud-breathing dragons - we generate our own mists and fogs as we take air into our lungs and expel it again. Trees and forests breathe in and out too. As above so below, sky, humans, trees and the earth all breathing in and out together. The rosy streaks painting the sky above our heads are kin to the nebulous veil drifting along below.

We call visible murky stuff "fog" when it reduces visibility to less than 1,000 metres, and we call it "mist" when we can see further than 1,000 meters through it. One can just make out farm buildings way in the distance in the second photo, so this is mist rather than fog, and a right fine mist it is, all gauzy and ethereal and slightly spooky.

We might be anywhere in the world, but we (Beau and I) are leaning against an old rail fence in the eastern Ontario highlands on a cool night in September. My collar is turned up against the wind, and we watch as another day fades. I take photo after photo, hoping just one or two will turn out. The clouds, the setting sun and the veils of gossamer condensation floating above the earth are beyond words. Why am I trying to describe them in an utterly graceless and oh-so-inadequate net of words?

The sun slides below the horizon, another autumn day folds up like an umbrella, and the stars come out. A brief interval, but perfect in every way.

Sequestered, 370 (CCCLXX)

Saying Yes to the World

Any single path truly taken leads to all the others. Even then, you will find that outward and inward become the same direction. The center of the wheel is everywhere.

Robin Morgan, The Burning Time

(January 29, 1941 – September 5, 2026)

Blessings On the Line

Climbing a ladder to hang Tibetan prayer flags under the eaves is out of the question at the moment (and probably forever), and I have begun to think of the dancing plastic clothespins on the line in my garden as my prayer flags, windhorses or Lungta.

In the Himalayas, cloth prayer flags are hung in high places at temples, monasteries, stupas and mountain passes, and they carry blessings to the surrounding countryside, are believed to bring good fortune to all who pass near them.

My clothespins are the same colours as Tibetan prayer flags (blue, white, red, green, yellow), and when September breezes move through them, they make music too. Why didn't I think of it before? Blessings on the wind indeed.

Friday Ramble - Autumn

This week's word comes to us through the Middle English autumpne and the Old French autompne, thence the Latin autumnus. The Latin form may hail from even older Etruscan forms, the first part of autumnus (autu) originating in the Etruscan root autu or avil meaning year, and the second part (mnus) from menos meaning loss, minus, or passing. There we have it. At the end of our wordy adventure is the burnished but wistful thought that another year is ebbing. Another circling in what I call "the Great Round," the natural cycle of our existence, is drawing to a close.

September is about harvest and abundance, but it is about balance too. The Autumn Equinox is one of the two times in a calendar year when day and night are balanced in length. The event is most often celebrated on September 21st, but this year the astronomical coordinate falls on Tuesday, September 22nd. At that time, the sun seems to pass over the equator on a journey southward, moving steadily away from us who live above the 49th parallel. Things are actually the other way around of course, and it is the earth and her unruly children who are in motion. Between the Midsummer Solstice and the Winter Solstice, our planet's northern hemisphere tilts away from the radiant star at its center, and we go along for the ride.

The constellations of winter are starting to appear, and the dome of night is a treasure trove of deep sky wonders, a gift for stargazey types like this Old Thing. Late last night, a tapestry of stars covered the sky from here to there, and Venus dazzled low in the western sky, borrowing light from the sun and acting for all the world as if it was a star, and not a planet. Perhaps I ought to do the same thing?

This morning, Beau and I were out in the garden before sunrise, and it was cool. Orion, our favorite autumn constellation, was clearly visible in the south. Sirius, brightest of all stars, twinkled below and slightly beyond the hunter's right foot. When the sun rose, the stars vanished and every roof in the village was sewn with sequins of dew. With mornings like this, can one feel anything but jubilant?

On early walks, falling leaves drift around our ankles and make a fine rustling music. Earthbound foliage on the trail is going transparent and turning into stained glass in splendid buttery colors. We pause to look at all the wonders around us, and it is a wonder we ever get anywhere at all. When I stopped to look at a leaf in our path this morning, Beau looked up at me curiously, then sighed. I started to say I was looking for a perfect leaf, then stopped and started the sentence over again. Every fallen autumn leaf along our way is perfect, just as it is.

Thursday Poem - Liminality

So much of what we know
Lives just below the surface.
Half of a tree
Spreads out beneath our feet.
Living simultaneously in two worlds,
Each half informing and nurturing
The whole.
A tree is either and neither
But mostly both.

I am drawn to liminal spaces,
The half-tamed and unruly patch

Where the forest gives way
And my little garden begins.
Where water, air and light overlap
Becoming mist on the morning pond.

I like to sit on my porch steps,

barn jacket and boots
In the last long exhale of the day,
When bats and birds loop in and then out,
One rising to work,
One readying for sleep.

And although the full moon calls the currents,
And the dark moon reminds me

that my best language

Has always emerged out of the silence,
It is in the waxing and waning
Where I most often live,
Neither here nor there,
But simply On the way.

There are endings and beginnings
One emerging out of the other.
But most days I travel in an ever present
And curious now.
A betwixt and between,
That is almost,
But not quite,
The beautiful,
But not yet.

I’ve been learning to live with what is,
More patient with the process,
To love what is becoming,
And the questions that keep returning.

I am learning to trust
The horizon I walk toward
Is an orientation
Not a destination
And that I will keep catching glimpses
Of something great and luminous
From the corner of my eye.

I am learning to live where losses hold fast
And grief lets loose and unravels.
Where a new kind of knowing

can pick up the thread.

Where I can slide palms with a paradox
And nod at the dawn,
As the shadows pull back
And spirit meets bone.

Carrie Newcomer, from Until Now: New Poems

Thank you to my friend Frances at Beautiful Strangers for reminding me about Carrie's exquisite poem. I had forgotten about its existence.

Wordless - Mellow Yellow

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.

Sequestered, 369 (CCCLXIX)

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!