Thursday, February 06, 2025

Thursday Poem - Everything Is Waiting for You


Your great mistake is to act the drama
as if you were alone. As if life
were a progressive and cunning crime
with no witness to the tiny hidden
transgressions. To feel abandoned is to deny
the intimacy of your surroundings. Surely,
even you, at times, have felt the grand array;
the swelling presence, and the chorus, crowding
out your solo voice. You must note
the way the soap dish enables you,
or the window latch grants you freedom.
Alertness is the hidden discipline of familiarity.
The stairs are your mentor of things
to come, the doors have always been there
to frighten you and invite you,
and the tiny speaker in the phone
is your dream-ladder to divinity.

Put down the weight of your aloneness and ease into
the conversation. The kettle is singing
even as it pours you a drink, the cooking pots
have left their arrogant aloofness and
seen the good in you at last. All the birds
and creatures of the world are unutterably
themselves. Everything is waiting for you.

David Whyte, from River Flow: New and Collected Poems

Wednesday, February 05, 2025

Tuesday, February 04, 2025

Out of the White Stuff, a Reminder


For all our weariness of the long white season and its trappings, it gifts us with a surprise now and then, occasionally something like this morning's image.

Pleasing bits of gnarly enchantment protrude from the snow now and again, and they are wonderful to see, powerful reminders of the vanished season's warmth and light, its glorious coloration and fragrance. They always seem to awaken something within, and I am reminded of a quote from Albert Camus. “In the midst of winter, I found there was, within me, an invincible summer."

The dried fronds, wands and seed heads emerging from the snow and coming back into the light are wonderfully bendy, and they have curving, sinuous shapes. There is just a hint of the vibrant hues they once wore. Perhaps their appearance out of the white stuff is a sign that winter is "getting old" and warmer days are not far off? We perch in towering snowdrifts and wave at other villagers going by. We watch for signs of winter departing. We think about springtime and nesting owls, about maple syrup gathering, snowdrops and songbirds. We rattle and creak and go on.

Perceptions totter and fade, and they take on strange shapes in late winter. At this time of the year, we need small gifts from the Old Wild Mother (Earth) and reminders of her indwelling wonder and magic, her infinite capacity for change. This morning's aide-mémoire was just a strand of last summer's common tansy poking out of a snowdrift, but it was poignant stuff, and I needed to see it. There has been a lot of wind around here this winter, and I am surprised this one was still standing. 

This evening there was a knock at the door, and I answered it to find a neighbor and his young sons standing on the threshold with their shovels. It snowed today, and the kids thought they would clear my driveway but wanted to ask permission before they started to fling the white stuff about with their father.  That is what living in the village is all about. We watch out for each other. We take care of each other. In these dark and troubling times, that is something to cherish and crow about. 

Monday, February 03, 2025

Sunday, February 02, 2025

Sunday, Saying Yes to the World


What we need, all of us who go on two legs, is to reimagine our place in creation. We need to enlarge our conscience so as to bear, moment by moment, a regard for the integrity and bounty of the earth. There can be no sanctuaries unless we regain a deep sense of the sacred, no refuges unless we feel a reverence for the land, for soil and stone, water and air, and for all that lives. We must find the desire, the courage, the vision to live sanely, to live considerately, and we can only do that together, calling out and listening, listening and calling out.

Scott Russell Sanders, Writing from the Center

Saturday, February 01, 2025

Friday, January 31, 2025

Friday Ramble - For Imbolc (Candlemas)

Here we are on the last day of January, and the eve of Candlemas or Imbolc. Strange to relate, this observance in the depths of winter celebrates light and warmth, the stirring of new life in the earth and the advent of springtime.

In many French speaking countries, February 2nd is also La Chandeleur, a Christian feast commemorating the presentation of the infant Jesus Christ in the temple and the purification of his mother, forty days after she had given birth. The occasion is marked by the blessing of candles, also by dining on crepes which represent the sun and the return of the light to the northern hemisphere.  

For those of us of Celtic lineage, the day is called Imbolc or Candlemas, sometimes the Féile Bride (Festival of St. Brigid) or "Bride's Day". It is consecrated to Brigid, honored as an Irish saint in modern times, but hallowed as a Tuatha Dé Danann goddess many centuries before the coming of Christianity. Brigid is a deity of fire and creativity, wisdom, eloquence and craftsmanship, patroness of the forge and the smithy, poetry, fertility and the healing arts, especially midwifery. Light is her special province. Hers are the candle, the hearth and the blacksmith's forge.

Made of light ourselves, we are Brigid's unruly  children. We were forged from the dust of stars which lighted the heavens billions of years ago, went super nova at the end of their time and dissolved back into the cosmos. Within the radiant motes of our being are encoded the wisdoms of the ancient earth and all its cultures, the star knowledge of unknown constellations and "The Big Bang" which created not just our own precious world, but the whole cosmic sea in which it floats..

We are recycled matter, our dancing particles having assembled into diverse life forms over and over again, lived and expired as those life forms, then vanished into the stream of existence to emerge as something else.  The universe never wastes a thing, and we could learn a lot from her.  In our time, “we” have been many things, worn many shapes and answered to many names. In this lifetime I exist as a tatterdemalion, specific and perhaps unique collection of wandering particles called Catherine or Cate, but in previous incarnations, I was someone or something altogether different.

Buddhist teacher and deep ecologist Joanna Macy has written that since every particle in our being goes back to the first flaring of space and time, we are as old as the universe itself, about fifteen billion years. We are the universe, and it is us.

I cherish my small festival observances. Food is made with ingredients associated with sunlight and abundance: eggs, butter, saffron and honey, sweet potatoes, a little greenery to invoke springtime. Such things often feature in my culinary efforts anyway, so there may be a ritual element in my kitchen doings all year long. I like to think so. There will be lunch with a dear friend today, and small gifts will be exchanged. I will light a candle at nightfall and nest it in a snowdrift in the garden. Wading into the white stuff with a candle and matches will be good fun.

Happy Imbolc to you and your clan, happy Candlemas and St. Brigid's Day. May warmth and the manifold blessings of Light be yours.

Thursday, January 30, 2025

Thursday Poem - The Road


Here is the road: the light
comes and goes then returns again.
Be gentle with your fellow travelers as they
move through the world of stone and stars
whirling with you yet every one alone.
The road waits.
Do not ask questions but when it invites you
to dance at daybreak, say yes.
Each step is the journey; a single note the song.

Arlene Gay Levine
(from Bless the Day: Prayers and Poems to Nurture Your Soul)

Wednesday, January 29, 2025

Tuesday, January 28, 2025

In My Cups


It is still dark outside, and through the window comes the clatter of the wind across the roof, the susurrus of snow falling in the engulfed garden. Here in the kitchen, there is the burble and hiss of the De'Longhi espresso machine, the rattle and hum of the refrigerator in the corner. 

By rights, there should be the sound of a toaster too, but it will be an hour or so before I can even think about toast. I have awakened with a migraine - thought about doing prescription meds when I opened my eyes but opted for a beaker of industrial strength espresso instead. The stuff in my cup approaches the consistency of solid propellant rocket fuel and could be dispatched with a fork. Steam rises in arty curls from the surface, and a splendid darker froth rings its shores. The fragrance of freshly ground Cafe Union espresso beans from their roastery in Montreal is ambrosial. Think I will draw pictures in the foam. Yup, I can do this.

Why is it my thoughts always turn to Paris when the weather is like this? With badass beaker in hand, I am looking through my rainy day "stash" of Cavallini rubber stamps, vintage postcards and notebooks - the little ones with maps of France, old French postage stamps or the Eiffel tower gracing their covers. Then there is a recent (bargain) addition to my cookbook collection, François-Régis Gaudry's loving tribute to the culinary treasures of his hometown, "Let's Eat Paris". His creation is worth it for the Leeks Vinaigrette and Béarnaise recipes alone. 

When the migraine has expired in my espresso sea, I will curl up in a corner and read something in French, perhaps the latest Fred Vargas.

Monday, January 27, 2025

Sunday, January 26, 2025

Sunday, Saying Yes to the World


We are all longing to go home to some place we have never been—a place half-remembered and half-envisioned we can only catch glimpses of from time to time. Community. Somewhere, there are people to whom we can speak with passion without having the words catch in our throats. Somewhere a circle of hands will open to receive us, eyes will light up as we enter, voices will celebrate with us whenever we come into our own power. Community means strength that joins our strength to do the work that needs to be done. Arms to hold us when we falter. A circle of healing. A circle of friends. Someplace where we can be free.

Starhawk, Dreaming the Dark

Saturday, January 25, 2025

Friday, January 24, 2025

Friday Ramble - Seeing Red


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

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

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

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

Thursday, January 23, 2025

Thursday Poem - Straight Talk From Fox


Listen says fox it is music to run
over the hills to lick
dew from the leaves to nose along
the edges of the ponds to smell the fat
ducks in their bright feathers but
far out, safe in their rafts of
sleep. It is like
music to visit the orchard, to find
the vole sucking the sweet of the apple, or the
rabbit with his fast-beating heart. Death itself
is a music. Nobody has ever come close to
writing it down, awake or in a dream. It cannot
be told. It is flesh and bones
changing shape and with good cause, mercy
is a little child beside such an invention. It is
music to wander the black back roads
outside of town no one awake or wondering
if anything miraculous is ever going to
happen, totally dumb to the fact of every
moment's miracle. Don't think I haven't
peeked into windows. I see you in all your
seasons making love, arguing, talking about
God as if he were an idea instead of the grass,
instead of the stars, the rabbit caught
in one good teeth-whacking hit and brought
home to the den. What I am, and I know it, is
responsible, joyful, thankful. I would not
give my life for a thousand of yours.

Mary Oliver, from Redbird

Wednesday, January 22, 2025

Tuesday, January 21, 2025

Espresso, Icicles, Words Gone Walkabout


I awaken before sunrise and brew a lovely espresso in the De'Longhi, then stumble into the study to write a blog post, trying not to drop the dear little beaker clutched in my arthritic paws. The crema on this morning's effort is to die for, and so is the sumptuous fragrance. Pleasing curls of steam rise from the surface. Yum.

One or two recent photos are OK, but I can't for the life of me figure out what to say about them. The words simply will not come. For someone who spends so much time with her nose in a book or thinking about the provenance of words, their reluctance to show up and pirouette into place is a distressing state of affairs. 

Perhaps the biting cold has something to do with it. When Beau and I ventured out into the sleeping garden this morning, dark clouds obscured the sky, and the thermometer out on the deck registered a temperature way below zero.  It is sunny now, and the skies overhead are brilliantly blue, but oh, the antarctic contours of the day...

During the present cold snap, older houses in the village have grown some fabulous icicles. When sunlight shines through them, they shimmer and dazzle, and they seem to hold the whole universe within their glossiness. One can almost forget what a gelid and windy undertaking it is, the restless enterprise of trying to capture them with a camera. The best place to take photos of icicles is often right underneath them, and doing such a thing is reckless, but sometimes I do it anyway. Beau (of course) sits several feet away and is safe from falling ice.

Monday, January 20, 2025

Sequestered, Week 248 (CCXLVIII)


When all else fails, toss cinnamon, bits of fruit and anise stars into a mug of something or other hot, a few cloves too. Stir it deosil (sunwise or clockwise) and mutter a few words over it. Such exercises are small magics invoking sunlight, warmth and gentle breezes at a time when summer is still months away. More fun than laundry and dusting and doing dishes for sure. Meh.

Looking into my fragrant cup, I can almost forget the darkness, icy temperatures and biting wind beyond the windows, a fine and comforting thing on an arctic January morning. Where is my book? Where are my shawl and spectacles?

Sunday, January 19, 2025

Sunday, Saying Yes to the World


The universe is still and complete. Everything that ever was, is; everything that ever will be, is - and so on, in all possible combinations. Though in perceiving it we imagine that it is in motion, and unfinished, it is quite finished and quite astonishingly beautiful.

In the end, or rather, as things really are, any event, no matter how small, is intimately and sensibly tied to all others. All rivers run full to the sea; those who are apart are brought together; the lost ones are redeemed; the dead come back to life; the perfectly blue days that have begun and ended in golden dimness continue, immobile and accessible; and, when all is perceived in such a way as to obviate time, justice becomes apparent not as something that will be, but something that is.

Mark Helprin, Winter's Tale 
(One of the most beautiful books ever written)

Saturday, January 18, 2025

Friday, January 17, 2025

Friday Ramble - Little Blue


Weary of deep snow and icy cold, we (Beau and I) are a little tired of the color blue at times too, no matter how intensely blue the sky, shadows, snowdrifts,spruce trees or the cast iron crane standing out on the deck. Its migratory kin have been gone for months now, but our splendid metal bird is frozen in place, and it is well and truly stuck out there until springtime rolls around again. We like seeing it when we pull the draperies open in the morning.

There are some lovely words for blue in the English language: azure, beryl, cerulean, cobalt, indigo, lapis lazuli, royal, sapphire, turquoise, ultramarine, to name just a few. I recite them like a litany under my breath as I look out at our sleeping garden with mug in hand or break a trail into the woods.

Just when one is all wintered out and decides not to sketch another icicle or frame another photo of such things, another eloquent winter composition presents itself to the eye. Something curved or fragile or delicately robed in snow shows up and begs rapt and focused attention. Glossy bubbles dance in the icicles above a frozen creek in the Lanark highlands. Snow crystals adorn the evergreens overhead and make them blaze like diamonds. As Beau and I wander along, the last faded and tattered oak leaves from last autumn flutter down to lie on the trail at our feet. Pine and spruce cones cast vivid blue shadows in pools of early morning sunlight. Is there anything on the planet as fine as the scent of snowy spruce boughs in late January? Look closely, and every needle is wearing stars.

Small and perfect, complete within itself, each entity conveys an elemental serenity and equilibrium, lowers the blood pressure and stills the breathing, returns eyes and focus to simplicity and grace and just plain old being here. Beau looks up at me, grinning and wagging his tail, and for a minute or two, my doldrums take a step backward. These scraps of time on the edge of the woods will have to be enough, and they are. They are more than enough.

There are worlds great and small everywhere, worlds within and worlds without. Each and every one is a wonder to behold, to remember with my eyes and patient recording lens. Surely, I can do this for a little while longer.

Thursday, January 16, 2025

Thursday Poem - The Moment


The moment when, after many years
of hard work and a long voyage
you stand in the centre of your room,
house, half-acre, square mile, island, country,
knowing at last how you got there,
and say, I own this,

is the same moment when the trees unloose
their soft arms from around you,
the birds take back their language,
the cliffs fissure and collapse,
the air moves back from you like a wave
and you can't breathe.

No, they whisper. You own nothing.
You were a visitor, time after time
climbing the hill, planting the flag, proclaiming.
We never belonged to you.
You never found us.
It was always the other way round.

Margaret Atwood,
from Morning in the Burned House

Wednesday, January 15, 2025

Tuesday, January 14, 2025

The Measure of Our Winter Days


Beau and I are out and about early on winter mornings, but salt and icy pavement are not kind to his toes so we keep our ramblings brief. After our first outing, we return home and fill bird feeders in the garden. Then we put a little something out for the squirrels who are having a difficult time too. When I pull draperies open in the morning, the first thing I see is their delicate footprints in the snow on the deck.

Indoors, heaps of reading material, candles, potions, puckish pursuits and small eccentricities are the measure of our winter days. Ditto sketchbooks, baking, baskets of mending, researching oddities like building igloos and straw houses, pottery, spinning, making authentic French pâtés and pasta. The soup cauldron has a place of honour on the stove in winter, and there is always a pot of something or other bubbling away on it. Then there is the old "what else can I do with this eggplant" exercise. Failing anything else, I plot another garden bed, pummel bread or make scones. Out of my midwinter restlessness, good and comforting things occasionally come.

If the weather was a little warmer, we would be checking out local bookshops and shopping for art supplies like sketchbooks and watercolor pens, but that is unlikely to happen for a while. Thankfully, shelves in the study contain a lovely stash of yarn, scraps of fabric (the powsels and thrums of Alan Garner's incandescent memoir), ribbon, paper, paint, and sticky stuff to keep us out of trouble. First and foremost (of course), there are books. There are never too many about, and passing a tottering heap of friends as yet unknown is always a happy thing. 

It is tempting to embrace the notion that life becomes smaller in winter, but that is simply not so. Like our magnificent universe, like this dear little blue world, like the Great Round of time and the seasons in which we spend our allotted days, life continues to expand - we are simply reaching outward in different ways.

Monday, January 13, 2025

Sequestered, Week 247 (CCXLVII)


It has been cold here in recent days, and icicles in the village grow longer and longer, impressive and a little scary. They chime like tubular bells when the north wind blows through them, and there is quite a performance going on. Does anyone remember that fabulous recording by Mike Oldfield?

Occasionally, ice stalactites shatter and plummet into the snowdrifts below, depositing what appear to be shards of glass. A noisy business, their journey to earth drowns out everything else around here: vehicles in the street, the wind blowing along the fence, hungry birds clamoring for food, squirrels chattering in the hedge.

Our roof is well insulated and does not produce many icicles, but it sports a few. The roistering wind dislodges them occasionally, and down they go, clanging and clattering. A little later this morning, I will wrap up warmly and go out to collect the shards before they impale themselves in Beau's paws. The fallen bits are wickedly sharp, and they are a hazard for canine toes. I will also use a broom to prune the icicles dangling over the back door, the deck and our path down to the sleeping garden. Me lurching about and brandishing a broom skyward - now there is a picture. 

This is a fine day for reading, thinking, drinking tea and just looking out the window. Why is that noble exercise called woolgathering? The only woolly stuff festooning this elderly person is a tattered (and much loved) old red shawl, and it has already been well and truly gathered. Everything else is cotton, layer upon layer of it.

Sunday, January 12, 2025

Sunday, Saying Yes to the World


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

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

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

Saturday, January 11, 2025

Friday, January 10, 2025

Friday Ramble - A Colder Abundance

It may seem odd to be writing about abundance in January, but here we are in January, and that is just what I am doing.

This week's word appeared in the 1400s, coming to us through Middle English and Old French, thence from the Latin abundāns, all meaning "full or overflowing". There are lovely synonyms for the noun: affluence, bounty, fortune, plenty, plethora, profusion, prosperity, riches, wealth. As adjectives, Roget offers us the aforementioned "full and overflowing", as well as lavish, ample, plentiful, copious, exuberant, rich, teeming, profuse, bountiful and liberal.

We use the word abundance (or the adjective, abundant) in late summer and early autumn as we weed and reap and gather in, turn the earth for next year's sowing, harvest the bounty of the season and store it for consumption when the snow flies. Winter lies at the end of our labors but we try not to think of it at all.

Winter's eyes are as ardent as those of spring, summer and autumn, but they view the world differently, taking in frosted evergreens against the clouds, the light falling across old rail fences, deep blue shadows on snow, bleached and tattered leaves dancing in the wind, the thousand-and-one worlds resting easy in glossy icicles down by the creek. When sunlight touches them, the icicles are filled with blue sky and possibility, and they seem to hold the whole world in their depths. Cloaked in white, the round bales of hay abandoned in winter fields are the currency of summer, not simply photo opportunities but eloquent reminders of seasons passed. Each element cries out for attention, for patient eyes and a recording lens, for recognition, remembrance and a slender scrip of words, for connection, perhaps for love.

The long white season is about harvest and abundance too, but the gathering is inward, the abundance quieter and sprinkled with questions. Around this time of year, I always seem to find myself querying the shape of my journeying, the slow passage across the eastern Ontario highlands with camera and notebook in hand, the sheaves of images captured and carefully archived, even the eyes with which this old hen is seeing the world. The bright spirit with whom I did my wandering for so many years is no longer beside me. Beau and I hold him in our thoughts, and we go on.

Big life stuff, emotional ups and downs, questions and more questions—all are a kind of harvesting too. There is not the slightest chance that I will ever capture even a scrap of the snowy wonder and grandeur around me, and these days on the good dark earth are numbered, but in the warm darkness of my questions and my uncertainty, I gather everything in and rejoice.

Abundance is tea and cookies with an old friend. It's a ramble in the woods on snowshoes, a good book or three (or better still a towering stack) on the library table. It's a cauldron of soup simmering on the back of the stove, a bowl of clove studded clementines on the sideboard, Mozart's Die Zauberflöte (The Magic Flute) on the sound system. Small things perhaps and not exciting, but they are good and comforting things in a time when greed, cruelty, sorrow and disease are ravaging the world.

May there be light and abundance in your own precious lives this year. May there be peace. May there be kindness.

Thursday, January 09, 2025

Thursday Poem - Snowy Night


Last night, an owl
in the blue dark
tossed
an indeterminate number
of carefully shaped sounds into
the world, in which, 
a quarter of a mile away, I happened
to be standing.
I couldn't tell'
which one it was
the barred or the great-horned
ship of the air - 
it was that distant, but anyway
aren’t there moments
that are better than knowing something,
and sweeter? Snow was falling,
so much like stars
filling the dark trees
that one could easily imagine
its reason for being was nothing more
than prettiness. I suppose
if this were someone else’s story
they would have insisted on knowing
whatever is knowable – would have hurried
over the fields
to name it – the owl, I mean.
But it’s mine, this poem of the night,
and I just stood there, listening and 
holding out my hands to the soft glitter
falling through the air. I love this world,
but not for its answers.
And I wish good luck to the owl,
whatever its name –
and I wish great welcome to the snow,
whatever its severe and comfortless
and beautiful meaning.

Mary Oliver 

Thursday Poem - The Snowman

One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;

And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter

Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,

Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place

For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

Wallace Stevens, from Harmonium