Autumnal sun streams through
these yellow maple leaves
translucent as stained glass.
The ground beneath my feet
is strewn with pine cones, acorns.
The random pattern of continuance.
Etched columns of pine and oak.
Incense of resin and fungi.
Great glacial stones for altars.
High winds and choirs of
minor breezes, the whispering hush.
It is the Sabbath. It is enough.
Dolores Stewart
from The Nature of Things
(reprinted here with the late poet's kind permission
This is the season of last things, and how poignant they are in their shapes and colors, in every fiber of their being.
The last antique roses are blooming in our garden, and the last ripening tomatoes cling to their vines in the veggie patch. The last purple grapes of the season dangle in local arbors, about to be picked and turned into jelly and wine. Scarlet Virginia creepers wrap old wooden fences in the village, and the last crimson berries sway on our hawthorn, most of them already carried off by birds and squirrels. Maple, oak and beech leaves from old trees flutter through the air like birds, coming to rest on veranda railings and the chilly dark earth below.
As much as I love autumn, this season always takes some getting used to, and I am working on it again this time around. Many farewells were said this week, and I tried to remember, too, to say thanks to the myriad entities who enriched our lives this year and are now passing away. Bumbles, dragonflies and cicadas - wherever they alight in their journey, and whoever (or whatever) they come to be the next time around, may they all be well and happy.
At first light, autumn hedgerows wear spiderwebs from here to there, swaying and glistening and hung with dew like pearls. I remember an October morning a few years ago when a neighbor in the village rang our doorbell a few minutes after sunrise, breathless and wide-eyed and ecstatic. While walking her dogs in a nearby field, she had discovered a vast and dewy orb weaver's web that I just had to come out and capture with Pentax and macro lens. My friend is now in an assisted living accommodation, and I think of her whenever I pass the cedar hedge where we stood wondering together at the break of day, as happy as two hoary old clams can ever be.
. . . 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
This week's word has been around since the eleventh century, making its way down to us through the Middle English egge, the Old English ecg, the Old French aiglent and the Old Germanic ecke, all meaning "corner". It is also related to the Latin acer meaning "sharp", and the Greek akmē meaning "point". At the root of it all is the Proto-Indo-European (PIE) ak- meaning "sharp". Kindred words in the English language include acerbic, acid, acrid, acumen, acupuncture, acute, eager, ester, exacerbate, hammer and selvedge as well as eglantine (or sweetbriar), an old world rose known for its thorns.
An edgy time is this, for the old Celtic year is passing away, and we stand on the threshold of a brand new year, in the north a chilling contraption of fallen leaves and freezing earth, short days, darkness, frost and wind.
The eastern Ontario highlands always seem empty at this time of the year and rather lonesome. Except for Canada geese, migratory birds have (for the most part) departed for warmer climes. and most of our wild and furry "year round" residents are either already hibernating or thinking about doing it.
On trips into the woods, the long shadows falling across our trail have edges as sharp as the finest examples of the blade smith's craft. The earth under our boots is firm, leaves are crunchy, and puddles along our way are rimed with ice. For all the emptiness, frost and morning sunlight change the Two Hundred Acre Wood into something rich and elegant and inviting: glittering weed fronds artfully curved and waving in the fields, milkweed sculpted into pleasing shapes, bare trees twinkling like stars, the margins of blackberry leaves rosy and sparkling with frost crystals. The air is fragrant with cedar, spruce and pine.
These weeks always seem chthonic to me. That engaging word with its bewildering arrangement of vowels and consonants springs from the Greek khthonios, meaning "of the earth", and it is usually employed in describing subterranean matters and deities of the underworld. When we use the adjective to describe something, we are focusing on what is deeper or within, rather than that which is apparent at first glance or resting on the surface. Implicit in the adjective are notions of rest, sleep, fertility and rebirth - mortality and abundance coexisting and enfolding each other in a deep embrace.
when the light leaves early, sun slipping down
behind the beech trees as easily as a spoon
of cherry cough syrup, four deer step delicately
up our path, just at the moment when the colors
shift, to eat fallen apples in the tall grass.
Great grey ghosts. If we steal outside in the dark,
we can hear them chew. A sudden movement,
they're gone, the whiteness of their tails
a burning afterimage. A hollow pumpkin moon rises,
turns the dried corn to chiaroscuro, shape and shadow;
the breath of the wind draws the leaves and stalks
like melancholy cellos. These days are songs, noon air
that flows like warm honey, the maple trees' glissando
of fat buttery leaves. The sun goes straight to the gut
like a slug of brandy, an eau-de-vie. Ochre October:
the sky, a blue dazzle, the grand finale of trees,
this spontaneous applause; when darkness falls
like a curtain, the last act, the passage of time,
that blue current; October, and the light leaves early,
our radiant hungers, all these golden losses.
Barbara Crooker, from Radiance
Water, sky and morning light, drifting fog and reeds, rocks and hills in the distance, trees turning red and yellow on the far shore...
What more does one need on the trailing edge of a day on October's middling pages? A heron or three in the shallows would be grand, perhaps a few loons calling from the center of the lake, a bald eagle overhead.
That is all. Everything else is already here.
This is Thanksgiving Day in Canada, and preparations for a festive dinner are already underway.
There is a free range turkey ready to go in the oven, cranberry sauce made with berries from a local bog and maple syrup, stuffing made with our own bread, a potato souffle, gravy, salad and all the trimmings. a fresh raspberry pie for dessert with homemade gelato. Will there be leftovers? Probably not....
If you live above the 49th parallel, Happy Thanksgiving. If not, come celebrate with us anyway - there is plenty of room around the old oak dining table, and there are lots of (mismatched but comfortable) chairs.
I don’t think there is anything as powerful as an active heart. And the activists I know possess this powerful beating heart of change. They do not fear the wisdom of emotion, but embody it. They know how to listen. They are polite when they need to be and unyielding when necessary. They remain open, even as they push boundaries and inhabit the margins, understanding eventually, the margins will move toward the center. They are tenacious, informed, patient, and impatient, at once. They do not shy away from what is difficult. They refuse to accept the unacceptable. The most effective activists I know are in love with the world.Terry Tempest Williams
There is an element of impatience in the voices of Canada geese as they fly over the house, and the other migratory beings who are still here seem agitated and anxious to be off on their adventures.
I'm restless too, and words alone don't quite "do it" for me; nor do images, at least most of the time. Morning after morning, I scribble a few words and regard them with mild disdain. I prowl through old photos, looking for an image that adequately describes the dark foggy daybreak beyond the windows, the frosted garden grasses and wilting shrubbery, the bare and eloquent trees. Archive prowling at the break of day is a perilous undertaking through volume after volume of photo archives and disk after disk of stored images, all leaving something to be desired. At times, I consider tossing everything out, flogging the cameras to a pawn shop and taking up soap operas or macrame.
What I need at such times is sunlight and clear skies, a fine crunchy frost and an hour or two of wandering around the woods, camera around my neck, vest pockets crammed with filters, lenses and other photographic trappings, seed for the birds and Beau's homemade doggy biscuits. For various reasons, my ramblings are brief this fall, but I often wander the eastern Ontario highlands in my thoughts. There are years of autumn rambles to revisit when I can't get out to the woods, and every step I take is a step through treasure.
Sometimes, what we need is already here and has simply been waiting for us to acknowledge it. When we wake up and notice, we are stopped right in our tracks, so taken by the breathtaking wonders before us that we can hardly draw in air. Old barns and whiskery trees, towering crags and limpid streams, sandhill crane couples slow dancing in frosted farm fields at sunrise, herons and loons calling goodbye as they rise from their summer haunts and head south. Timeless, enchanted and liminal, all of it, and if we are lucky, from time to time, elemental magics rub off on us as we wander about in wild places.
Out of the north wind, there's fine blue stillness and pools of articulate silence, long resonant conversations with dreaming trees and old stones. Camus wrote that in the depths of winter, he discovered within himself an invincible summer. I suspect that for this old hen, what lies invincible within is an early highland winter in all its grace and grandeur. Health issues notwithstanding, frosted leaves underfoot, geese overhead and treed hills with morning light shining through them still catch me by the throat and leave me breathless, every single time. I just wish I could find a way to say it as it ought to be said.
October. Its brilliant festival of dry
and moist decay. Its spicy, musky scent.
The church's parking lot deserted
except for this one witness,
myself, just resting there.
Somewhere a radio plays Flamenco.
A spotlight of sunshine falls on the scattered debris.
Blood-red and gold, a perfect circle of leaves
begins to whirl,
slowly at first, keeping the pattern,
clicking against the blacktop
like heels and castanets,
then faster, faster, faster. . .
round as a ruffle, as the swirling
skirts of an invisible dancer.
Swept off into the tangled woods
by the muscular breeze.
The hoarse cheering of crows.
Inside the dark empty church,
long cool shadows, white-painted wood,
austere Protestant candles thriftily snuffed,
Perhaps a note on the altar,
Gone dancing. Back on Sunday
Dolores Stewart, from The Nature of Things
In the village, scarlets, plums and deep inky blues are creeping into view, their emergence out of summer's dusty greens motivated by much cooler evenings and gently ruffling winds at nightfall. Last night, there was frost in the village, and when Beau and I went out briefly around four o'clock this morning, there were glossy coins of frost from one side of the deck to the other.
In summer, a small gasp of koi or nishikigoi (錦鯉, "brocaded carp") makes its home in the shaded pond underneath this Japanese maple, but the fish have been moved to indoor tanks for the winter, and the pond is a different place, still and silent. I didn't know until recently that a colony of koi is called a gasp. Beau and I visit the maple and her pond on our walks until all her leaves have fallen, and the waters below her branches are covered with snow.
As often as I witness the turning of the seasons and the vivid entities coming into being, the morphing of the village into deeper and more intense hues is always enchanting. It takes us (and the camera) by surprise each and every year. Autumn transformations are magics of a wilder kind, and I can't imagine living this old life without being among them and watching as they flare and swirl and dance, remaking the world in elemental colors.
Northern light dazzles the eyes, and it lingers lovingly on everything it touches in its journey across the eastern Ontario highlands. I wish I could paint everything it touches. Come to think of it, that is just what my lens is doing.
Ultimately, to live an enchanted life is to pick up the pieces of our bruised and battered psyches, and to offer them the nourishment they long for. It is to be challenged, to be awakened, to be gripped and shaken to the core by the extraordinary which lies at the heart of the ordinary. Above all, to live an enchanted life is to fall in love with the world all over again. This is an active choice, a leap of faith which is necessary not just for our own sakes, but for the sake of the wide, wild Earth in whose being and becoming we are so profoundly and beautifully entangled.
Sharon Blackie, The Enchanted Life, Unlocking the Magic of the Everyday
It's the reds that grab all the attention in September and October. Maple leaves have turned, and the eastern Ontario highlands are ablaze with color in every valley, hill and cove. Other trees are dazzling in their own right, but every year their earthier hues are upstaged by the riotous, cavorting red maples.
When autumn arrives, chlorophyll production in trees slows down, and sugar levels surge, permitting the anthocyanin and carotenoid pigments in leaves to come into their own. Leaves with high levels of anthocyanins and low levels of carotenoids turn scarlet, and those containing high levels of both flash bright orange. Leaves with high levels of carotenoids and low levels of anthocyanins do a sky dance in honeyed golds and yellows. When both anthocyanins and carotenoids are absent, native tannins rule, giving us the burnished russets, ochres, umbers and bronzes of the great oaks, hickories and beeches.
I have a passion for carmine, claret and ruby, but it always seems to me that the golds, bronzes and russets of other native tree species don't get the attention they deserve in autumn. The oro (gold) on display here is anything but pallido (pale or light). It dazzles the eye; it sings and dances, kicks up its heels. It rocks.
Aspens, ashes, elms and birches are dressed in radiant saffron, and so are ginkgo trees in the village. Beech leaves are coppery coinage, and oak leaves turn an alluring rosy bronze. Groves of poplar and feathery larch (tamarack) down by the beaver pond wear a delightful buttery gold.
Late blooming goldenrod sways back and forth until it goes to seed and offers its fuzzy children to the wind. A few yellow daisies and hawkweed still bloom in protected nooks. 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, 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.
This morning is for the glorious golds of the fall panoply. When the long white season arrives, it is the golds that will turn up in my dreams. Long may they delight in dazzling array.
