Friday Ramble - Though the Month Be Short

February is a short month and usually very cold, but there are astonishing things to be seen at night, if one can bring herself to wrap up and go outside for a bit of stargazey stuff. The sky is deep, inky velvet, the moon an icy orb framed by the vague shapes of sleeping trees and attended by a tapestry of faraway stars. On full moon nights in winter, Lady Moon always seems to be cradled in the whiskery branches of the old ash tree in the garden, and I never tire of looking at her.

Capturing  cold night skies with camera and notebook is an uncomfortable business in winter, but we (Beau and I) wrap up warmly and go outside anyway. It is our way of "saying yes to the world", to the innate wildness of life in the Great Round of time, to the grandeur of the starry, starry night over our heads.

This month just has to be about owls. In early February, the Great Horned Owl (Bubo virginianus), claims a nest in the woods with its lifelong mate and settles down to the arduous business of raising another brood. The great "hornies" are among my favorite birds, and it is enchanting to hear a couple calling to each other across the snowy forest in winter. Northern residents to the core, the great owls thrive in cold climates, and the further one travels toward the Arctic, the bigger they grow. 

The Saw-whet Owl or sugar bird (Aegolius acadicus) will not be far behind the great hornies in its own courtship rituals, and neither will the  other owls of the Lanark highlands. There is love, fertility and parenthood in the air at this time of the year, among northern owls anyway. The rest of us are just trying to stay warm and not succumb to complete and utter madness before spring gets here.

Life can be stressful for those who lack feathers and dine not on mice and voles. Wolves and coyotes howl plaintively, across the snow dunes. Deer are yarded up in the woods and rapidly running short of cedar browse. Even the squirrels and rabbits in the garden look hungry and a little worried. No doubt about it, hunger is a beast well known in these northern snowbound places.

If we can just manage to hang on for several weeks longer, there are better and brighter times ahead. March promises slightly milder temperatures, relief and incomparable sweetness. Perhaps the ambrosial alchemy of the maple syrup season will be in full swing when the next full moon makes its appearance.

Thursday Poem - Storytelling

Come in where the fire casts shadows

of longing. Sit near each other.

Hold hands

while I tell you a story that has never been

told, a story with music, a flute and singing,

a drum and dancing, a story of life’s circle

and the hungry wolves

waiting for caribou, and the caribou lingering
over a feast of lichen, and ravens

poised in the trees at the edges

of the wolves’ eyes,

a story with a grandmother spider
stealing a piece of the sun,
a story with medicine plants

and sacred weeds,

a story of how men and women

found each other, of how coyote

got his cunning, of arrow boy,

of the owl's beak tapping, always

the owl, the death bird,

and the mouse, timorous, scuttling

into its den, a story of you, and you,

and you. What does it mean

this dream fruit?

Nothing more than to peel and eat
the sweet juicy flesh, to let its seeds
become part of your spirit.

Long after I am gone you will

remember a story that never happened
how things that never were

came into being.

Dolores Stewart, from Doors to the Universe

Wordless Wednesday - Imbolc Light

WIshfully Stirring Something or Other

Another frigid winter morning, motes of sunlight scattering like stars in the cold air, snow everywhere, an icy wind that goes right to the bones. Underwhelming to say the least, and I am not alone in my disgruntlement. When I tried to entice Beau into going outside a few minutes ago, he looked into the garden, gave me a filthy look, then turned his back on the door (and me) and trotted back to bed.

At times like these, exotic spices and culinary offerings from faraway places go dancing through my sconce, clattering their cymbals and shaking their tambourines in the depths of the pantry. How to begin? The day's opening gambit is a beaker of Logdriver espresso (strong enough to walk on) and a stack of cookbooks. 

I feel a major stirring exercise coming on. Whatever happens in the kitchen this morning, it will be an impromptu creation and redolent of aromatic spices, something containing saffron, perhaps a few pomegranate arils, an anise star or two.

Just seeing a dish of saffron threads always cheers me up, and I wish I had enough hair to tint that fabulous color. Since I don't, I painted the front door of the little blue house in the village the precise scarlet of a bowl of saffron threads.

My culinary adventures will conjure sunlight and warmth and comfort, all three welcome on a deep freeze day when one can't wander about freely, and her canine companion won't go out anyway. There is an element of ritual to this morning's activities - perhaps my wishful stirrings will entice Lady Spring into making an early appearance. If not, the dazzling reds and golds make my heart glad.

Happy Imbolc/Candlemas

Why a sheep here this morning? The name Imbolc is taken from an Old Irish expression meaning "in the belly", a respectful nod to the ewe sheep who are pregnant in early February. This day is sometimes called "Oimelc", meaning "ewe's milk".

The livelihood and status of ancient tribes depended on the fertility of their livestock, and the ancients considered raiding other tribes for prime specimens quite acceptable. Ballads were sung to celebrate the more daring thefts, and wars were sometimes waged to regain the ownership of prized animals which had been pilfered.

Today's festival celebrates fertility, springtime, and the lambing season about to begin in so many corners of the northern hemisphere. No lambs will be born in the eastern Ontario highlands for several weeks, but here is a contented face from another lambing season. This morning, we are halfway between winter and spring, and that is something to celebrate.

Happy Imbolc, happy Candlemas! May there be light in your life.

Sunday, Saying Yes to the World

Grace is the celebration of life, relentlessly hounding all the non-celebrants in the world. It is a floating, cosmic bash shouting its way through the streets of the universe, flinging the sweetness of its cassations to every window, pounding at every door in a hilarity beyond all liking and happening, until the prodigals come out at last and dance, and the elder brothers finally take their fingers out of their ears.

Robert Farrar Capon, from Between Noon & 
Three: Romance, Law and the Outrage of Grace

Beech Daughters in Winter

Friday Ramble - Thoughts Before Imbolc

Here we are on the closing pages of January, nearing the eve of Candlemas or Imbolc. The festival falls on Monday, February 2nd, beginning at sundown on the evening before (Sunday, February 1st). 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 called La Chandeleur, a Christian feast honoring the presentation of the infant Jesus Christ in the temple and the purification of his mother, forty days after she had given birth. The festival's name comes from the Latin festa candelarum, meaning "the festival of candles", and there are links to the ancient Roman purification feasts known as the Lupercalia. The modern observance is marked by blessing candles and eating festive 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. 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, 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 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 have my own small festival observances, and I cherish them. Food is prepared using ingredients associated with sunlight, sweetness and abundance: eggs, butter, saffron and honey, a little green to invoke springtime. Since such things often feature in my culinary efforts anyway, perhaps there is a ritual element in my kitchen doings all year long, and I like to think so. There will be a festive lunch with a dear friend, and small gifts will be exchanged. I will light a candle at nightfall and nest it in a snowdrift in the garden. We are up to our eyebrows in white stuff this year, so clambering up on a snowdrift with a candle and matches will be good fun.

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

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 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

Wordless Wednesday - Snow People

Just Hanging In...

It was bitterly cold yesterday morning. Several inches of white stuff had fallen overnight, and ice lurked under every frill and flake and mound. Vehicles in the village had almost disappeared from view and were only visible as vaguely rounded shapes in the murk. The music of the day was plows roaring about and depositing the results of their efforts in places where they did not belong, like my driveway where they blithely dumped about two feet of hard rocky snow. Harumph.

According to the day's forecast, we were headed for another squall and several more inches of snow fell as predicted. High winds and minimal visibility were in the cards, and the weather pundits were right about that too. Lucky us. A fair bit of time was spent outside pushing snow about and exchanging banter with my neighbors who were all outside tossing white stuff around too.

What else to do on such a day? While the storm raged, sourdough bread, molasses cookies, cornbread and a cauldron of minestrone soup were conjured up. A fair amount of time was also spent huddled in a comfortable corner with Beau, a mug of tea, a good book and a shawl.  Once in a while, I looked out at the falling snow, shrugged and went off to pour another mug of something hot.

The day was one of quiet contentment, and surprisingly, it was not adversely affected by the weather conditions—it tickled me greatly that the day was enjoyable and I was not letting  Old Man Winter (Boreas) bring me down. Fimbulwinter or no, we (Beau and I) can do this, and by golly, we are doing it. Having said that, the aches and pains at the end of the day from flinging snow about are something else entirely.

Sequestered, Week 328 (CCCXXVIII)

Sunday, Saying Yes to the World

Existential loneliness and a sense that one’s life is inconsequential, both of which are hallmarks of modern civilizations, seem to me to derive in part from our abandoning a belief in the therapeutic dimensions of a relationship with place. A continually refreshed sense of the unplumbable complexity of patterns in the natural world, patterns that are ever present and discernible, and which incorporate the observer, undermine the feeling that one is alone in the world, or meaningless in it. The effort to know a place deeply is, ultimately, an expression of the human desire to belong, to fit somewhere.

The determination to know a particular place, in my experience, is consistently rewarded. And every natural place, to my mind, is open to being known. And somewhere in this process a person begins to sense that they are becoming known, so that when they are absent from that place they know that place misses them. And this reciprocity, to know and be known, reinforces a sense that one is necessary in the world.

Barry Lopez, from Embrace Fearlessly the Burning World

And Away We Go...

Friday Rambles - Little Blue

Weary of deep snow and icy cold, I am a little tired of the color blue at times too, no matter how intensely blue the sky or snow drifts or spruce trees or the cast iron crane out on the deck. Its migratory kin have been gone for months, but our splendid metal bird is frozen in place, and it is well and truly stuck until springtime rolls around again. I like looking at it.

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 I decide that I am all wintered out and will not 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 over my head and make them blaze like diamonds. As Beau and I wander along, faded and tattered oak leaves 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 blue 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 sadness takes a step backward. These scraps of time on the edge of the woods will have to be enough. They are, and they are more than enough.

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

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)

Wordless Wednesday - Blowing

Let There Be Blue

That dazzling blue . . . Sky, clouds, fields and trees, are rendered in exquisite shades of blue, and when the sun touches them, they sparkle like a dragon's hoard. A dragon's hoard composed only of blue stones that is: topaz, sapphire, tourmaline, turquoise, tanzanite, labradorite and lapis lazuli, amethyst too. The sheer "blueness" of this snowy day in January's middling pages is a marvel.

When I come here, I let the wind and the light and the stillness enfold me, and I just breathe in and out for a while. This is the place of my belonging, magical in every season, but particularly so in winter. An old friend, it quiets a weary, aching heart.

Sequestered, Week 327 (CCCXXVII)

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)

Making Trail

Friday Ramble - The SIsterhood of Eye and Leaf

Little things leave you feeling restless in mid January. You ramble through stacks of gardening catalogues, plotting another heritage rose or three, new plots of herbs and heirloom veggies. You spend hours in the kitchen summoning old Helios with cilantro, fragrant olive oils and recipes straight from Tuscany. You burn candles and brew endless pots of tea, sunlight dancing in every china mug.

You play with filters, apertures and shutter speeds, entranced (and occasionally irritated) with the surprising transformations wrought by your madcap gypsy tinkerings. Camera in hand or around your neck, you haunt the woods, peering into trees and searching for a leaf somewhere, even a single bare leaf. You scan the cloudy evening skies, desperately hoping to see the moon, and you calculate the weeks remaining until the geese, the herons and the loons come home again.

It may not seem like it, but change is already on its way. The great horned owls who reside on the Two Hundred Acre Wood are repairing their nest in an old beech tree about a mile back in the forest, and they are getting ready to raise another comely brood. It makes me happy to think it is all happening again.

This morning, a single oak leaf was teased into brief flight by the north wind, and it came to rest in the birdbath in the garden. A simple thing perhaps, but the pairing of pumpkiny orange leaf and blue snow was fetching stuff indeed, and the leaf bore in its poignant wabi sabi simplicity an often and much needed reminder. This is the sisterhood of fur and feather, of snowbound earth and clouded sky, of wandering eye and dancing leaf. Out of my small and ice rimed doings, a mindful life is made.

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

Wordless Wednesday - The Quiet Guest

Words or No Words

I was up before sunrise this morning and brewed up a dear little beaker of espresso in the Di Longhi, then lurched in here to write a blog post.

There were one or two recent photos I thought were OK, but I couldn't for the life of me figure out what to say about them. The words simply would not come. For someone who spends so much time with her nose in a book and thinking about word origins, the absence is a shocking state of affairs. Perhaps the cold has something to do with it. Has my brain succumbed to the elements and ossified? 

One thing about this winter - the village is growing some fabulous icicles. When sunlight shines through them, they shimmer and dazzle, and they seem to hold the whole universe. One can almost forget what a nippy undertaking it is, the glacial business of trying to capture them with a camera.

Sometimes, the best thing one can do is get out of the way and let the camera do its thing. No need to find words to go with the image - let it speak (or sing) for itself.

Sequestered, Week 326 (CCCXXVI)

Sunday, Saying Yes to the World

To hope is to gamble. It's to bet on the future, on your desires, on the possibility that an open heart and uncertainty are better than gloom and safety. To hope is dangerous, and yet it is the opposite of fear, for to live is to risk. I say all this to you because hope is not like a lottery ticket you can sit on the sofa and clutch, feeling lucky. I say this because hope is an ax you break down doors with in an emergency; because hope should shove you out the door, because it will take everything you have to steer the future away from endless war, from annihilation of the earth's treasures and the grinding down of the poor and marginal. Hope just means another world might be possible, not promised, not guaranteed. Hope calls for action; action is impossible without hope.

Rebecca Solnit, Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities

A Little Melting Going On

Friday Ramble - January's Performing Arts

 

A rowdy north wind cavorts across the roof, rollicking through sleeping trees and shrubberies in the garden, making the frozen branches creak like old wooden sailing ships. The icicles suspended from the eaves behind the house are abstract glossy confections, streaked with gold and silver and filled with tiny bubbles. Ebullient gusts of wind shake them loose from their moorings, and the glassy shards plunge clattering into the pillowy snowdrifts wrapping the house.

Advised to remain indoors, I slip outside for a few minutes anyway and snap photos of nearby trees and icicles, chimneys and sky. Wrapped up and looking for all the world like a yeti (or an abominable something anyway), I stand in the pebbled snow in the garden and capture a few images, try to figure out how in the world I can describe everything, the perfect light, the burnished hues of the icicles, the emeralds of the evergreens, the blues and violets of the snow, the buttery siding on my neighbor's kitchen wall, the scarlet of a male cardinal as it flies into the cedar hedge.

The icicles communicate the colors and shapes of this day without any help from me at all. They rattle, chatter and chime, sing Gilbert and Sullivan duets with the wind (mostly bits from Iolanthe), pretend they are tubular bells at times or recite epic stanzas from the Poetic Eddas. The Norse elements of their performance seem fitting - at times it has been cold enough here for Ragnarök, and we wondered if this is the Fimbulwinter, the walloping winter to end them all.

With all the elemental performances being given this morning, few words are actually needed from this old hen. I can just stand here in a snowdrift with the camera, get out of its way (and my own) and let it see the world without trying to impose my questionable taste on its thoughtful and loving journey.

Out of the blue, a thought comes as I turn to go back inside before anyone notices that I am no longer in there, but rather out here. It is the images that are capturing me this morning, and not me capturing them. Methinks it's a Zen thing.

Thursday Poem - The Greatest Grandeur

Some say it’s in the reptilian dance
of the purple-tongued sand goanna,
for there the magnificent translation
of tenacity into bone and grace occurs.

And some declare it to be an expansive
desert—solid rust-orange rock
like dusk captured on earth in stone
simply for the perfect contrast it provides
to the blue-grey ridge of rain
in the distant hills.

Some claim the harmonics of shifting
electron rings to be most rare and some
the complex motion of seven sandpipers
bisecting the arcs and pitches
of come and retreat over the mounting
hayfield.

Others, for grandeur, choose the terror
of lightning peals on prairies or the tall
collapsing cathedrals of stormy seas,
because there they feel dwarfed
and appropriately helpless; others select
the serenity of that ceiling/cellar
of stars they see at night on placid lakes,
because there they feel assured
and universally magnanimous.

But it is the dark emptiness contained
in every next moment that seems to me
the most singularly glorious gift,
that void which one is free to fill
with processions of men bearing burning
cedar knots or with parades of blue horses,
belled and ribboned and stepping sideways,
with tumbling white-faced mimes or

companies of black-robed choristers;

to fill simply with hammered silver teapots

or kiln-dried crockery, tangerine and

almond custards, polonaises, polkas,

whittling sticks, wailing walls;

that space large enough to hold all
invented blasphemies and pieties, 10,000
definitions of god and more, never fully
filled, never.

Pattiann Rogers, from Firekeepers