Touched By Winter

Friday Ramble - Winter

This week's word probably originates in the Proto-Indo-European (PIE) *gheim- meaning winter or cold, also the source of the Sanskrit, Greek and Latin words for winter. The PIE root is the origin of the English words chimera, hibernial and hibernate, and it also forms part of the name of mightiest mountains on earth, the Himalayas. 

Proto-Indo-European (PIE) is the reconstructed common ancestor of the whole Indo-European language family, and its daughter languages include English, Spanish, Sanskrit, Russian, Greek, and Persian, to name just a few. Ancestral PIE speakers lived six thousand years ago (between about 4500 and 2500 BCE), and since they did not possess written communications, no physical evidence of their language exists. The first recorded Indo-European language (cuneiform) did not come into being until much later, around 1600 BCE.

Etymological scholars follow the trails of linguistic breadcrumbs in documented ancient and modern languages to resurrect what may be the first spoken language of them all. Scratch the surface of a word in English (or many other languages), and you will likely find a PIE root. That means all my wordy fumbling about here connects me to ancestors long ago and far away, and I absolutely love that.

Whether or not winter involves snow and icy temperatures or just a hatful of rain, most cultures on island earth have a word for it, and it has a singular place in our thoughts, dancing in a stronger light than its other, more moderate kin. Those of us who live in the north tend to predicate our activities in spring, summer and autumn on making ready for the long white season.

For the Celts, winter began at Samhain (October 31) and ended on Imbolc (February 1), when springtime arrived. The Winter Solstice on or about December 21 marked the shortest day and longest night of the year, and it was a rowdy celebration with much boozy merrymaking. From that day onward, the light of the sun would return, a little more every day until the Summer Solstice in June. The legendary King Arthur was believed to have been born on the Winter Solstice, and Druids sometimes refer to the Winter Solstice as Alban Arthuan ("The Light of Arthur").

Hardy northerners that they were, the Norse knew all about winter. They counted their years in winters and thought the world would end after the mightiest winter (the fimbulvetr) of them all. Their beliefs, compiled in the 13th century Icelandic Edda, contain a wealth of oral material from much earlier sources, and the collection is the main source of everything we know about Norse literature, beliefs, customs, deities and creation mythologies. One of these days, I will work my way through the Edda again, and doing it in winter seems appropriate.

It all comes down to cosmic balance. We owe the lineaments of our existence in the Great Round to a tilt in the earth's axis as it spins merrily in space. When winter reigns here in the north, the happy lands south of the equator are cavorting in summer, and I cling tenaciously to that thought in January. Somewhere in the world, it is warm and sunny, and sentient beings are kicking up their heels in the light.

Winter gifts us with the most brilliantly blue skies of the year by day, the most spectacular stellar expanses by night. There is nothing to compare with the sun shining through frosted trees on a cold morning. with the sound of falling snow in the woods, with clear nights when the stars seem so close one can almost reach up and touch them. Winter star gazing is a chilly business, but I would not miss it for anything.

When winter beckons, I ponder moving further south, but it isn't going to happen. Instead, I pile up books and music and accumulate tea. I stir curries, make bread and stews, ponder the ranks of jams and pickles in the household larder. I ready boots, snowshoes and skis for treks in the woods. In foul weather, our rambles are brief, but Beau and I will be taking them, together every step of the way.

There is comfort in knowing that the winter fields and forests of my native place will remain long after I have gone on, their snows unmarred by the clumsy footprints of this old hen and her canine companion. To know the north woods, one has to wander through them in winter, trace the shapes of the sleeping trees with eyes and lens, listen to snow falling among them, perhaps become a tree herself.

Thursday Poem - Instructions in Magick

You don’t need candles,
only the small slim flame in yourself,
the unrevealed passion
that drives you to rise on winter

mornings remembering
summer nights.

You don’t need incense,
only the lingering fragrance
of the life that has gone before,
stew cooking on an open fire,
the good stars, the clean breeze,
the warmth of animals

breathing in the dark.

You don’t need a cauldron,
only your woman’s body, where
where so many of men’s fine ideas

are translated into life.

You don’t need a wand,

hazelwood or oak, only

to follow the subtle and impish
leafy green fellow
who beckons you into the forest,
the one who goes dancing
and playing his flute
through imperial trees.

And you don’t need the salt of earth.
You will taste that soon enough.

These things are the trappings,
the tortoise shell, the wolf skin,

the blazoned shield.
It’s what’s inside, the star of becoming.
With that ablaze, you have

everything you need to

conjure up new worlds.

Dolores Stewart, from The Nature

of Things (reprinted with the late

poet's kind permission)

Wordless Wednesday - Frosted

Islands in the Autumn Stream

Beau and I wandered about in the murk the other morning, the thermometer hovering around zero, a raw wind blowing down our necks, leaves crunching underfoot as we ambled along. We thought wistfully about home and were considering our options for when we returned: hot tea, a comfortable chair, a good book, a lighted, wonderfully smelly candle. They all exerted a sovereign tug. 

Then the clouds moved away, and the day was bathed in sunshine. The sky over our heads was brilliantly blue, and the little river at our feet was a sea of light adrift in tiny, dazzling leaf boats. We felt like raising our arms and shouting hallelujah.

Out of such doings, a thoughtful (and oftentimes joyous) life is made.

Sequestered, 378 (CCCLXXVIII)

Sunday, Saying Yes to the World

Rootedness is a way of being in concert with the wilderness—and wildness—that sustains humans and all of life. The rooted pathways offered here are not meant as a definitive list but as way markers and fortifications for all of us seeking our unique, bewildering, awkward way through the essential question of how to live on our broken, imperiled, beloved earth. It is the question Thoreau asked. The one that Mary Oliver, who passed just before I wrote these words, has perhaps framed most beautifully: Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?

Lyanda Lynn Haupt, Rooted: Life at the Crossroads of Science, Nature, and Spirit

By the Trail Into the Woods

Friday Ramble - Twenty-One Years On

Last Sunday morning, clocks in the village turned back an hour, and Daylight Saving Time embraced the void until next year. Its departure marked the end of gardening and gathering, and it also marked twenty-one years of blogging here. I like the fact that the two events are aligned after a fashion.

The Beech Mother is at the top of this morning's post, and so she should be. For many years, we (Beau and I) have passed through her alcove on our morning walks, and we greet her and give her a pat whenever we do. Our old friend is beautiful all year long, but she is absolutely breathtaking in late autumn and early winter.

For twenty-one years, I have been logging on here mornings and posting an image or two. Before that, there were notebooks - I still have a whole shelf of beautiful notebooks I never got around to using. Some days, I manage a few paragraphs to go along with the visual elements, and occasionally I spill my cuppa on the keyboard. I am still astonished that I had the cheek to set this place up, let alone post faithfully for twenty-one years in a row. Once in a while I am OK with my efforts, but mostly I am not. When I look at stuff I wrote here years ago, I am appalled. Yuck.

However lacking they are (and they are certainly that), these are my morning pages, and chances are they will remain pretty much as they are in the coming year. There may be a bit of font and banner tinkering, but that is all. I don't foresee significant changes to this place, and I expect blogging life will simply go on as it has been doing so far, photos and scribblings and quotations and bits of poetry.

On November 30, 2019, my soulmate passed away after many years together, and life without him is still rough going. A the end of this month, he will have been gone for seven years, and most of the time, I still feel as though I am just clinging to the wreckage and paddling frantically to stay afloat. I keep lurching onward anyway, putting one paw in front of the other, whatever it takes. 

It is good to be here (most of the time anyway) and wrapped up in the toings and froings of what I like to call "the Great Round". Beau and I stay busy, and we go rambling in all weathers. Sometimes, I just tuck the cell phone in my pocket (along with a few of those snazzy little green bags), and off we go, heads down and collars turned up against the wind. Hoary old Boreas has not settled in to stay yet, but he makes his bone-chilling presence felt from time to time. 

We wander along at our own pace, conversing with the great maples and beech mothers, watching leaves dance in the woods, feasting our eyes on the sun going down in flames over the river, on skies alight with winter stars and moons that seem almost close enough to reach up and touch. My departed love is always with us in spirit, resting easy in a pocket of my tatty old jacket, the one closest to my heart. The man loved rambling, and he was usually the first person out the door.

The road goes ever on, and there is magic everywhere if we have the eyes to see it and the wits to acknowledge it, the grace and simple courtesy to show respect and say thank you. The small adventures of our wanderings will continue to make their way here every morning and get spilled out on the computer screen with a bad photo or two and a whole rucksack of wonder. The world is an achingly beautiful place, and sometimes an image says everything that needs to be said, all by itself, no words needed from this Old Thing. Mary Oliver said it best:

The years to come—this is a promise—

will grant you ample time

to try the difficult steps in the empire

of thought where you seek 

for the shining proofs you think

you must have.

But nothing you ever understand will be

sweeter, or more binding, than this

deep affinity between your eyes

and the world.

(excerpt from "Terns")

She also wrote that sometimes one needs only to stand wherever she is to be blessed, and that is something Beau and I try to remember as we potter along together. Thank you for being with us on the trail this year. You are treasured more than you know. Be well. Be peaceable. Be kind to each other. Be happy.

Thursday Poem - Sometimes I am Startled Out of Myself

like this morning, when the wild geese came squawking,

flapping their rusty hinges, and something about their trek

across the sky made me think about my life, the places

of brokenness, the places of sorrow, the places where grief

has strung me out to dry. And then the geese come calling,

the leader falling back when tired, another taking her place.

Hope is borne on wings. Look at the trees. They turn to gold

for a brief while, then lose it all each November.

Through the cold months, they stand, take the worst

weather has to offer. And still, they put out shy green leaves

come April, come May. The geese glide over the cornfields,

land on the pond with its sedges and reeds.

You do not have to be wise. Even a goose knows how to find

shelter, where the corn still lies in the stubble and dried stalks.

All we do is pass through here, the best way we can.

They stitch up the sky, and it is whole again.

Barbara Crooker, from Radiance

Wordless Wednesday - First Clementines

The Season of Last Things

This is the season of last things, and how poignant they are in their shapes and vibrant tints. What a joyous, unfettered performance the leaf and vine people put on, even as they fade and tatter, dwindle and fall away.

Scarlet Virginia creepers wrap the wooden fence in the garden, and sometimes their berries are touched with frost at first light. Oak and maple leaves flutter through the air like birds, coming to rest on veranda railings and the chilly dark earth below. The Samhain jack-o-lanterns have already been cut up, their seeds spread on the deck for the sparrows, finches and chickadees, the shells and innards tucked in the empty veggie patch for crows and squirrels to squabble over.

In the village, a few wild grapes still dangle in hedgerows, but most of this year's fruit has already been picked by frugal locals and turned into jelly and wine. A few withered crabapples and hawthorn berries remain, but most of the drupes have been liberated by flocks of migrating birds. The towering sunflowers around the corner have gone to seed at last and are happily flinging their bounty at anyone who will take it. Indoors, summer's herbs have been through the dehydrator, and the last toms are ripening on the table in the dining room. Kale loves cooler weather, and the plants in the garden grow taller and sweeter every day.

I love autumn, but the last weeks of the season always take some getting used to, and I am working on it again this time around. There have been many farewells to departing (or hibernating) wild kin during the last few weeks, and I have tried to remember to say thanks to the myriad entities who enriched our lives this year and have now passed away.

Bees, bumbles, dragonflies and cicadas, veggies, roses and berries - wherever their dancing particles alight in their journey, and whatever they come to be the next time around, may they all be well and happy.

It is time to edit the labels for this place, remove autumn from the sidebar (Shelves in This Library) and tuck in winter instead. I find myself reluctant to say goodbye to my favorite season of the year, but label editing day is not far off.

Sequestered, 377 (CCCLXXVII)

Sunday, Saying Yes to the World

You cannot buy the revolution.

You cannot make the revolution.

You can only be the revolution.

It is in your spirit or it is nowhere.

Ursula K. LeGuin, The Dispossessed

Merry Samhain (Hallowmas)

Friday Ramble - Samhain Thoughts

Here we are again, nearing my favorite festive observance in the whole turning year. Tomorrow is the eve of Samhain, or in popular parlance, Halloween.

On morning walks, there's a chill in the air that cannot be ignored. Daylight arrives later with every passing day, and dusk makes an earlier appearance, village street lamps turning themselves on one by one, hours before they used to. The shorter days and longer nights are all too apparent to a crone's fierce and gimlet eye, at least to this crone's eye. How did we get here so swiftly?

The last days of October have a beauty all their own. In the great wide world, crops and fruit have been gathered in and stored, farm animals tucked into barns, stables and coops readied for the long white season. Rail fences wear frost crystals, and nearby field grasses crunch pleasingly underfoot. Wild beasties are frantically topping up their winter larders and preparing warm burrows for winter.

Most trees have already withdrawn into themselves for the long white season, and their leaves have fallen, but the great oaks on my favorite hill are reluctant to part with their finery, and they are hanging on to every leaf. A north wind scours the wooded slopes and sweeps fallen fragments into rustling drifts and heaps. The air is spicy and carries the promise of deep cold days to come.

This festival (cross quarter day) marks “summer's end', the beginning of the dark half of the year. According to the old Celtic two-fold division of the year, summer was the interval between Beltane and Samhain, and winter the interval from Samhain to Beltane. It was also the gate between one year and another. For the ancestors, the old year ended at sunset on October 31st, and a new year danced into being.

Some of us are enchanted by seasonal turnings in the Great Round and the old ways. Some of us love spooky "stuff", the fey, the mysterious and the unknown. Some like Halloween "clobber" and dressing up. Others are fascinated by the myriad ways in which the human species has measured the passage of time over the centuries.

The festival doings of the ancients celebrated pivotal cosmic points in their year, and Samhain was sacred to them. It was a fey interval in which the natural order dissolved back into primordial chaos for a brief unruly fling before regenerating, burnished and newly ordered for another journey through the seasons. They believed the veil between the living and the dead was thin on Samhain night, and that one's beloved dead could return for a visit. All the old festivals celebrate the cyclical nature of existence, but October 31st does so more than any other.

In recent years, many of my loved ones have left this plane of existence and gone on ahead. While they were here, they loved this world fiercely, and they treasured its innate abundance and wildness, its grandeur, grace and reciprocity. Lit from within, they blazed with life and passion wherever they went, and they lighted up every room they entered—places were always a little darker when they left. Somewhere beyond the here and now, my departed ones are still alight, and I try to remember that. My Samhain altar gets more crowded with every passing year, but there is always room for them all, and places will be set for everyone at the table.

Three cheers for trick-or-treating, tiny guisers and goblins on the threshold. What's not to love about witches, ghosts and goblins, grinning jack-o-lanterns, the colors orange and black? As I dole out treats to wee neighborhood friends tomorrow night, I will reflect on the old year and tuck it away under a blanket of fallen maple leaves. I will think good thoughts about the cycle that is coming into being, and I will remember that endings and beginnings are natural and ordained parts of earthly existence, not something to be feared.

Bright blessings to you and your clan. May your jack-o-lanterns glow brightly, and throngs of tiny costumed guests attend your threshold. May your home be a place of warmth and light, and your hearth a haven from things that go bump in the night. May there be laughter and merriment at your door, music and fellowship in abundance. May all good things come to you and your clan.

Thursday Poem - All Hallows Eve

Night of the void between the worlds,
night when the veil between the worlds is
stirring, lifting, when the old year shrivels and
fades, and the new year has not yet begun,

when light takes the form of darkness,

when the last light sinks into darkness

like spilled water, disappears in the leaves,

in the hot secret runs of earth underneath.

when grandmothers rise like mist, the silent

grandmothers with soft tongues of fog

in the ear, claiming nothing for themselves,

or complaining that they were abandoned,

when children go out clothed in darkness,

the children with sweet orange lips slip among

whispers, go out with wavering candles

among crosses and mossy eyes in stone,

when children go out in the mist, the

children tasting of candy, of carelessly

spilled dreams, the children like faraway

stars flaming into the soft folds of darkness.

Dolores Stewart (Riccio), from Doors to the Universe

Wordless Wednesday - Adorned

Hot Stuff and Floating Stars

It is a darkling days thing for sure - the yen to add steamed milk, vanilla, cinnamon sticks, cardamom pods and anise stars to whatever I happen to be drinking. There is something comforting and uplifting about seeing anise stars floating in a fragrant sea of masala chai or London Fog or whatever. No doubt about it, I have a  thing about anise. Ditto cinnamon sticks, clove buds and cardamom pods. Yum.

Such aromatic experiences put a pleasing spin on cold mornings when I awaken feeling as though I have been trampled by a herd of elephants. At such times, what I really want to do is pull the quilt over my head and go back to sleep for a while.

The great wide world an do just fine without me for another hour or two.

Sequestered, 376 (CCCLXXVI)

Sunday, Saying Yes to the World

I would say that there exist a thousand unbreakable links between each of us and everything else, and that our dignity and our chances are one. The farthest star and the mud at our feet are a family; and there is no decency or sense in honoring one thing, or a few things, and then closing the list. The pine tree, the leopard, the Platte River, and ourselves - we are at risk together, or we are on our way to a sustainable world together. We are each other's destiny.

Mary Oliver, Upstream: Selected Essays

Seeing Red

Friday Ramble - Memory

This week's word has been around since the thirteenth century, coming from the Middle English memorie, Anglo-French memoire and Latin memoria/memor meaning "mindful". Further back are the Old English gemimor meaning "well-known", the Anglo-Saxon gemunan, the Greek mermēra meaning "care", and the Sanskrit smarati meaning "that which is remembered" - in the Vedas, the word smarati is used to describe teachings handed down orally from the ancients and never written out. At the beginning of it all is the Proto-Indo-European (PIE) root form (s)mer- meaning to keep something in mind.

One of the late autumn entities that always tugs at my heartstrings is the last heron of the season, he or she haunting leaf-strewn shallows in solitary splendor and hoping to find a few fish, frogs and water beetles to fuel the long trip south. It's an arduous journey from here to there - all the way to the southern states, Cuba, Colombia, Honduras, Mexico, Venezuela, and the Galapagos Islands. Having a few omega-rich meals before starting out is a very good thing.

I have already written here about a long ago autumn morning in northern Ontario when the heron migration was in full swing. The great birds had gathered in predawn darkness to feed before flying onward, and hundreds stood almost side by side in the foggy waters of the Mississagi river near the town of Iron Bridge. As we moved along the shoreline, their silhouettes appeared one by one out of the mist, and it was breathtaking, wild magic of the finest kind. I have never forgotten it.

There is enough enchantment in such tatterdemalion snippets to last many lifetimes, and I would like to retain the memory of that morning for the rest of my earthly days and beyond, no matter how many other mind scraps embrace the void somewhere along the road. I've always loved the "great blues", and I revisit the scene often in my thoughts, always a place of tranquility and stillness. We need as many peaceful places as we can find in these troubling times.

For whatever reason, archaic English refers to a group of herons together, not as a colony or a flock, but as "a sedge of herons". Every summer I watch herons standing regally in the shallows along Dalhousie Lake and think that if there were no other teachers about, I would be just fine with a sedge of herons to show me the way. I don't usually think of a group of Great Blues as a sedge though.

For those of us who love herons and can't fly south with them, the right expression for a gathering of our favorite birds is surely "a memory of herons".

Thursday Poem - Song for Autumn

In the deep fall

    don't you imagine the leaves think how
comfortable it will be to touch
    the earth instead of the
nothingness of air and the endless
    freshets of wind? And don't you think

the trees themselves, especially those with mossy,

    warm caves, begin to think

of the birds that will come—six, a dozen—to sleep

    inside their bodies? And don't you hear
the goldenrod whispering goodbye,
    the everlasting being crowned with the first
tuffets of snow? The pond
    vanishes, and the white field over which
the fox runs so quickly brings out
    its blue shadows. And the wind pumps its

bellows. And at evening especially,

    the piled firewood shifts a little,
longing to be on its way.

Mary Oliver, from Devotions

This is probably my favourite autumn poem ever.

Wordless Wednesday - Reflection

Along the Reeded Shore

What could I ever say (or write) here that would add anything to this scene or even get a start on describing it? The reeds, the water, the reflection, the trees turning red and gold across the pond. Together, balanced,  exquisite and rather poignant. 

No words are needed from this old hen at all. She can just stand here and hold the camera, get out of its way and let the lens linger with loving eyes on the elements of this quiet day. Chilly out here, but she doesn't mind a bit.

 

Sequestered, Week 376 (CCCLXXVI)

Sunday, Saying Yes to the World

There are ways in, journeys to the center of life, through time; through air, matter, dream and thought. The ways are not always mapped or charted, but sometimes being lost, if there is such a thing, is the sweetest place to be. And always, in this search, a person might find that she is already there, at the center of the world. It may be a broken world, but it is glorious nonetheless.

Linda Hogan, The Woman Who Watches Over the World: A Native Memoir

And There in the Ash Tree...

Cooper's Hawk (Astur cooperii)

The hawk perched in an ash tree behind the garden shed, and she had a perfect view of the feeders in the garden. She probably thought she was invisible and that a good meal was only a matter of time, but not a single chickadee, cardinal, sparrow or nuthatch appeared while she was there, and after a while, she left.

Judging by the arty streaking on her breast (rather than barring), my visitor was a juvenile female, considerably larger than a male bird of the same age would have been. Her markings were exquisite, and I was delighted to see her. 

Friday Ramble - Gimme Shelter

Shelter's a word dear to a cronish heart in the darkling time of the year. When daylight hours wane, I retreat to books, lighted candles, shawls, mugs of hot stuff and a comfy chair. At dusk, I pull the draperies closed, plump up the pillows, put on the kettle and tune out the cold and the darkness beyond the windows.

In its present form, this week's word has been around since the late sixteenth century, possibly coming from the Middle English sheltroun, sheltron or sheldtrume and Old English scyldtruma or scield.  All forms mean shield, protector or something similar. The most likely Proto-Indo-European (PIE) root form is skel meaning “to cut". Early shelters were likely assembled from military shields fitted closely together, and the earliest shields in use would have been rounded plates of wood. The origins of our word are disputed by linguistic scholars, but there is no doubt that shelter and shield are inextricably linked. 

A shelter is an enclosure of some sort, a cabin, a cave or a hollow, an embracing tree or thicket, a harbor shielded by guardian hills and out of the wind. We all have shelters and sanctuaries, and their shapes and trappings are highly personal. For deer and wild turkeys, shelter is the protection and nourishment afforded by woodland cedar groves in winter. For bears, it's the secluded leaf-strewn dens where they sleep through the long white season. For rabbits and hares, it's snug burrows in the earth and the overhanging branches of evergreens protecting them from icy temperatures and the attention of ravenous predators. For this old hen, it's a fire on the hearth or a lighted candle, a shawl, a mug of Earl Grey or a dear little beaker of espresso, a big fat book (better still a heap) and a comfortable chair. 

One does whatever she has to do to drive the dark away, or at least hold it at bay for a while. Hours are spent dreaming up tankards of steaming goodness, and everything brewed up seems to contain little moons of fragrant orange, clove nubbins, cinnamon sticks, cardamom pods or anise stars, sometimes all at once. A mug of tea always lifts my spirits, and posing creations on the sideboard is a labour of love.

I season my potions with abandon and stir them deosil (clockwise) with a balsam twig or a wand of rosemary from the pot in my kitchen - the mother plant once lived in my herb garden and will be rehomed there with great pomp and circumstance next spring when the earth warms. A small evergreen plant member of the mint family, Salvia rosmarinus is native to the Mediterranean and does not overwinter outside this far north. It does (however) like the light in my south facing kitchen.

In the dusky weeks between now and Yule, I turn inward and find myself thinking about the tiny flame at the heart of things, its tender bloom promising warmth, sunlight and longer days somewhere up the trail, if we can only hang on. Alas, there are many weeks to go before the light returns, at least noticeably so. After December 21st, days will begin to lengthen again, but we will be well into the new year before the change is apparent. Thank Herself for tea and books and warm socks!