On the River Tay

Not the Scottish Tay, but a lovely winding  river that flows through the Lanark highlands of eastern Ontario, Canada. The views here are of (and from) a bridge over the river in the beautiful town of Perth. 

The name by which the river was known to the Mississauga First Nation (Ojibwe) who controlled the area when European settlers arrived is unknown, but the tribe had been there for centuries, hunted the lands along its shores and harvested wild rice on its lakes. In the early nineteenth century, homesick Scottish settlers renamed it for their beloved River Tay in Scotland.  

Like the the St. Lawrence Seaway, Lake Champlain, the Lake of Two Mountains and the lower Saguenay river, our Tay was once part of the ancient Champlain Sea formed by melting ice sheets during the last glacial cycle, and our river came into being when the Champlain retreated. In the now, the Tay makes its way to the Ottawa river via the Rideau and merges with the mighty Saint Lawrence at the end of its journey.

This was a perfect place to hang out on hot summer afternoons with a waffle cone from local ice cream factory. I have no idea how many hours have been spent hanging out on the bridge over the years or how many cones Irv and I demolished while leaning over the railing. The tart cranberry ice cream was a particular favourite, and we always got a scoop of something frozen for our dogs. 

I have a thing about rivers. When I am near the Tay, I think of poet/priest Father John O'Donohue's wish that he might live his life as a river flows, carried by the surprise of its own unfolding. What a wonderful way to go along.

Sequestered, 359 (CCCLIX)

Happy Midsummer/Litha

Happy Litha/Midsummer! This is the longest day of the year. After today, sunlight hours will wane until Yule (also called Midwinter or the Winter Solstice) in late December.

Cherish this golden day in the heart of the year! Be outside at sunrise and watch the sun come up - capture the moment with your camera or cell phone. Sip a mug of sunchoke tea in your garden as the sun rises and drink in the rising light.

Make a sun wheel or sun mandala out of flowers. Arrange sunflowers in a vase and place it in a prominent place your home. Put a pot of something sunny and golden on your threshold. Mums? Marigolds?

Float a wreath of wildflowers on a pond or river and watch the current carry your offering away. Build a fire on your favorite beach after darkness falls and and toast sweet "stuff" in the dancing flames.

May all good things come to you on this longest day of the year!

Looking Through

Litha (Midsummer) Thoughts

Here we are, just a day or so away from Midsummer or the Summer Solstice. Tomorrow night is the eve of Litha, and the following day (Sunday, June 21st) is the longest day of the calendar year, the Sun poised at its zenith or highest point and seeming to stand still for a fleeting interval before starting down the long slippery slope toward autumn, and beyond that to winter. Actually it is we who are in motion and not the magnificent star at the center of our universe. Helios stays right where he is.

This morning's image was taken near the front gate of our Two Hundred Acre Wood in the Lanark highlands some time ago, and it is one of my favorites, capturing the essence of midsummer beautifully with towering trees and hazy sky in the background, golden daisies and orange hawkweed, purple bugloss and silvery meadow grasses dancing front and center.

It seems as though summer has just arrived, but things are all downhill from here. After Sunday, daylight hours will wane until Yule (December 21) when they begin to stretch out again. The ebbing of daylight hours is bittersweet, but the longer nights during the last half of the calendar year are something to celebrate for those of us who are moonhearts, stargazeys and ardent backyard astronomers. The Old Wild Mother strews celestial wonders by generous handfuls as the year wanes, spinning luminous star spangled tapestries in the velvety darkness that grows deeper and longer with every passing twenty-four hour interval. It is all downhill from here until December, but what a fabulous trip!

The eight festive spokes on the old Wheel of the Year are all associated with fire, but the summer solstice more than any other. Centuries ago, all Europe was alight on Midsummer eve, and ritual bonfires climbed high into the night from every village green. Midsummer festivities included morris dancing, games of chance and storytelling, feasting, pageantry, and candlelight processions after dark. Prosperity and abundance could be ensured by jumping over Midsummer fires, and its embers were charms against injury and bad weather at harvest time. Embers were placed at the edges of orchards and fields to ensure good harvests, and they were carried home to family hearths for protection. Doorways were decorated with swags and wreaths of birch, fennel, white lilies and St. John's Wort which is in bloom now.

My Litha fire jumping days are over, but I am usually outside with a mug of Jerusalem Artichoke (Earth Apple) tea to watch the sun rise. There's a candle on the old oak table and a lighted wand of Shiseido incense in a pottery bowl nearby. An hour or two of afternoon pottering in the village, quiet feasting as the sun goes down, a little stargazing and moon watching later. We cherish the simplicity of our small festive doings, the quiet pleasure of being surrounded by kindred spirits at such times. As always, we will think of my departed soulmate. This is our seventh midsummer observance without Irv, and his passing still cuts like a knife.

Happy Litha (or Midsummer), however you celebrate it (or don't celebrate it). May the sun light up your day from sunrise to sunset, and your night be filled with stars from here to there.  May all good things come to you

Thursday Poem - To The Rain

Mother rain, manifold, measureless,
falling on fallow, on field and forest,
on house-roof, low hovel, high tower,
downwelling waters all-washing, wider
than cities, softer than sisterhood, vaster
than countrysides, calming, recalling:
return to us, teaching our troubled
souls in your ceaseless descent
to fall, to be fellow, to feel to the root,
to sink in, to heal, to sweeten the seas.

Ursula K. Le Guin, from So Far So Good

Wordless Wednesday - Just Dandy

The Old Guy in the Garden

Hotei sits in a sunny alcove in the garden under a canopy of old rose and buckthorn leaves. Birds serenade him in early morning, and rabbits visit him at nightfall. Bumbles and dragonflies buzz around him, and spiders knit him into their webs. Sometimes butterflies land on him. Maple keys, leaf dust and pine needles rain down from the trees over his head, and he is strewn with grass from our mowing exercises.

Although he appears to be carved from stone, the old guy is polyresin of some kind and weighs only a pound or two. I discovered him in the window of a thrift shop years ago, purchased him for a few dollars and carried him home where he now presides over a leafy enclave in the garden from early April until late October. He is still the first one to be carried out of the garden shed when spring arrives, and he makes me smile. That is something beyond price, thrift shop origins or no.

Sequestered, 358 (CCCLVIII)

Sunday, Saying Yes to the World

Once there were brook trout in the streams in the mountains. You could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of their fins wimpled softly in the flow. They smelled of moss in your hand. Polished and muscular and torsional. On their backs were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again. In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery.

Cormac McCarthy, from The Road

In the Heart of Perfection

Friday Ramble - Kingfisher Days

It goes without saying that I spend many of my summer hours wandering around and taking photos of things. The eastern Ontario highlands are a treasure trove in all seasons, and I feel fortunate to be there and taking it all in, especially in summer when the world is green and gold and full of wild music. It would be rude not to pay attention and say thanks to the Old Wild Mother once in a while.

There are wonders everywhere: dragonflies, butterflies and moths, bumbles and wasps, birds, puddles, trees, orchids and wildflowers, fields of waving grain, meandering rivers, poppies, lilies and lupins gone wild and doing their own untrammeled thing in roadside ditches.

I spend hours crawling about in the woods on all fours with a macro lens on the camera, “doing” ferns, mosses, lichens, bugs, salamanders and little green frogs. Every tump, stump, leafy alcove and stone has wonders to share. Is it difficult to get back to a standing position afterward? Oh yes, but I do it anyway. 

Other hours are spent at the lake capturing loons floating on the water at sunset, herons motionless in the shallows, kingfishers hunting the last small meal of the day. Once in a while, an otter turns up and watches me from the water for a while,  occasionally displaying the bright red inside of its mouth and a set of wicked teeth. Curious critters, otters. The ones at the lake are all called Portly.

Birds, otters and fabulous sunsets, there is always something to see. These are kingfisher days, times out of time, full of magic and an elusive something I am always reaching toward and can't quite find a word or image for. When I arrive home, dusty, sweaty and speckled with leaf dust, I look at everything, but the images make me groan, so I archive them on a DVD and think no more of it.

Years later, when I am searching for an image for something or other, I pull out a DVD of long ago captures and discover to my astonishment that it holds treasures. Wonder of wonders, some of the images are not too bad at all. I remember when they were taken, my soulmate and Beau (or Cassie or Spencer) and I together out in the woods or on the shore at the lake, royally chewed by bugs and happy as clams.

My apologies to Susan Coyne for borrowing the title of her memoir (Kingfisher Days) for this morning's post. Her creation is a gem, and I am reading it again.

Thursday Poem - Directions (Excerpt)

The best time is late afternoon
when the sun strobes through
the columns of trees as you are hiking up,
and when you find an agreeable rock
to sit on, you will be able to see
the light pouring down into the woods
and breaking into the shapes and tones
of things and you will hear nothing
but a sprig of birdsong or the leafy
falling of a cone or nut through the trees,
and if this is your day you might even
spot a hare or feel the wing-beats of geese
driving overhead toward some destination.

But it is hard to speak of these things
how the voices of light enter the body
and begin to recite their stories
how the earth holds us painfully against
its breast made of humus and brambles
how we who will soon be gone regard
the entities that continue to return
greener than ever, spring water flowing
through a meadow and the shadows of clouds
passing over the hills and the ground
where we stand in the tremble of thought
taking the vast outside into ourselves.

Billy Collins, 

(from The Art of Drowning)

Wordless Wednesday - On the Fence

Lupins and Early Light

I never walk past a stand of lupins without thinking of a sketch in the thirty-seventh episode of Monty Python's Flying Circus. A bumbling highwayman named Dennis Moore (played by John Cleese) steals lupins from the rich ("Your lupins or your life!") and tries to give them to the local peasantry. The peasants tire of lupins and start demanding other things like money, Titian paintings, Venetian silver and art glass.

This morning's lupins live in the hedgerow along a hydro corridor in the village. They are descendants of those that once lived in the garden of a a small brick bungalow owned by my friend Sadie. Her house was surrounded by fences and high hedges, and its enclosures were filled with fruit trees, old roses and heirloom perennials. Although she and her garden are long gone, Beau and I remember them every time we pass the lupin children on our morning walk. 

Sequestered, 357 (CCCLVII)

Sunday, Saying Yes to the World

The love of wilderness is more than a hunger for what is always beyond reach; it is also an expression of loyalty to the earth, the earth which bore us and sustains us, the only paradise we shall ever know, the only paradise we ever need, if only we had the eyes to see.

We know so very little about this strange planet we live on, this haunted world where all answers lead only to more mystery.

Edward Abbey (Desert Solitaire)

Seeing Red

Friday Ramble - Golden

Greater Yellow Lady Slipper

(Cypripedium parviflorum var pubescens)

I sometimes sign on here in the morning, survey my efforts, utter a silent "meh" and decide to say (or write) as little as possible. That seems to be happening more often than it used to. When I plunk myself down in front of the computer and skim the early news, I cringe. How can we be doing this to each other? I can't find words for what is going on, or at least not the right words. Lately, I can go several days at a clip without surfing digital newspapers.

This week, I thought of my wild orchids. In the eastern Ontario highlands, lady slippers are blooming as they have for time out of mind. In their flickering, sunlit alcoves, they sway and sing a capella, a testament to wildness and belonging and community. Whole hillsides of wild golden grace express the indwelling incandescent spirit of the living earth without any help at all from This Old Thing. Wild orchids are a balm to this world weary spirit.

My departed soulmate and I watched over our wild orchid colony for many years, protecting them from being eaten by deer and trampled by bears. Every year, I stretched out in the grass nearby and marveled at their perfection, had long conversations with them and captured them with my lens every chance I got. In the midst of global disease and rampant human brutality, here they are again in all their golden perfection.

Events on the world stage are breaking us wide open, and they compel us to confront aspects of our humanity that we would rather not acknowledge, let alone address. The orchids are a powerful reminder of what it means to be a sentient being on this dear little planet, and I am grateful for their counsel. Time for us to get to work.

Thursday Poem - The Other Kingdoms

Consider the other kingdoms. The
trees, for example, with their mellow-sounding
titles: oak, aspen, willow.
Or the snow, for which the peoples of the north
have dozens of words to describe its
different arrivals. Or the creatures, with their
thick fur, their shy and wordless gaze. Their
infallible sense of what their lives
are meant to be. Thus the world
grows rich, grows wild, and you too,
grow rich, grow sweetly wild, as you too
were born to be.

Mary Oliver

Wordless Wednesday - On the Edge

Seeing Red in June

June would not be June without clay pots, boxes and planters of red geraniums (cranesbills) blooming at the entrances of houses in the village. Here we are again, pottering along in June and heading toward another summer solstice, and there are geraniums everywhere.

On early morning walks, Beau and I have noticed that many of this year's geranium offerings are attended by purple petunias and marigolds. There are also some splendid coleuses in rainbow shades, and sometimes all four dwell comfortably in the same pot, geraniums, petunias, marigolds and coleus. What a riot of aestival color!

My gypsy soul craves spectacular coleus strains like "Dragon Heart, "Rainbow Dragon", "Kingswood Torch" and "Chocolate Covered Cherry", and I am looking for other places in the garden to plant them this year. Ditto some of the more arty amaranth varieties in local nurseries like "Joseph's Coat", "Molten Fire" and "Early Splendor".

A pot of geraniums on the threshold is a long standing tradition, and every year, I think of their ancestors who graced our entry in years past and greeted everyone who came to the door. I remember their shape, their color, their texture, their green and rather peppery fragrance, their joyous flowering. They were perfect expressions of summer, and I thank them. Happy June everyone, happy blooming!

Sequestered, 356 (CCCLVI)

Sunday, Saying Yes to the World

Touch is a reciprocal action, a gesture of exchange with the world. To make an impression is also to receive one, and the soles of our feet, shaped by the surfaces they press upon, are landscapes themselves with their own worn channels and roving lines. They perhaps most closely resemble the patterns of ridge and swirl revealed when a tide has ebbed over flat sand.

Robert Macfarlane, The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot

Saying Yes to the World

Once upon a time, when women were birds, there was the simple understanding that to sing at dawn and to sing at dusk was to heal the world through joy. The birds still remember what we have forgotten, that the world is meant to be celebrated.

Terry Tempest Williams, When Women Were Birds

What Falls Away

Friday Ramble - Sweet

And so it goes . . . One day, the old crabapple is bare and forlorn, the next day it wears a multitude of tiny leaves. Almost overnight, the tree is covered with blooms and buzzing with throngs of ecstatic, blissed-out bumbles, bees and wasps.

Along comes a restless breeze, and the crabapple symphony is over, petals drifting through the air like confetti, coming to rest on lawns and hedges and gardens, on fences and birdbaths and pergolas and fountains. The fallen bits of pink float merrily on puddles in the street and flutter across cobblestones in the village like tiny, airborne scraps of vibrantly hued carnival paper. Their presence conveys a festive aspect to the day, and seeing them on our morning walks makes us smile.

Our word traces its roots all the way back to the Proto-Indo-European (PIE) root form *swād- meaning sweet or pleasant, also the likely source of Old English, Germanic, Sanskrit, Greek and Latin words meaning more or less the same thing.

Lilacs in the village are blooming this week, and when I stepped outside with Beau last evening around ten, the night air was full of their heady fragrance. For a few minutes, we leaned against the railing on the veranda and breathed in the glorious perfume. Then we were driven indoors by clouds of ravenous mosquitoes. The little blighters were out for blood and no mistake.

Standing out in the darkness, I remembered a garden I planted years ago with purple heliotrope. The color of the blooms was gorgeous, and their sweet, cherry-like scent pulled in hummingbirds, butterflies, bumbles and bees from miles around. The stuff was almost indecently sumptuous, and I shall have to plant it again.

How sweet this season is, how fleeting and poignant, just a little sad too. I sometimes wish that summer lasted a little longer this far north, but if it did, spring and autumn would be truncated slightly. No to that!

Thursday Poem - When I Am Wise

When I am wise in the speech of grass,
I forget the sound of words
and walk into the bottomland
and lie with my head on the ground
and listen to what grass tells me
about small places for wind to sing,
about the labor of insects,
about shadows dank with spice,
and the friendliness of weeds.

When I am wise in the dance of grass,
I forget the name and run
into the rippling bottomland
and lean against the silence which flows
out of the crumpled mountains
and rises through slick blades, pods,
wheat stems, and curly shoots,
and is carried by wind for miles
from my outstretched hands.

Mary Gray from Wild Song: Poems of the Natural World

Wordless Wednesday - The Music of Summer Mornings

The Jester's Cap and Bells

Wild Columbine (Aquilegia canadensis) 

The delightfully complex shape of columbines always reminds me of a harlequin's chapeau or a medieval court jester's cap. The architecture is splendid stuff, and there is a blithely capering choreography to the columbine's dancing "to and fro" movement on gracefully arching and swaying stems. With sunlight shining through them, the petals and sepals of the flower seem to be made of stained glass.

The stained glass analogy is apt, for the flowers dwell in woodland cathedrals of flickering sunlight and deep green shadows. The ceilings of the structures are way up in the sky, and the soaring green arches disappear into the clouds. The leafy chapels seem to go on and on forever, and the clerestories, ribbed vaults and flying buttresses would make any architect proud. Such places hum with enchantment.

As I often do at this time of the year, I am reading (again) John Crowley's fabulous Little, Big, and a sentence about the forest at the heart of the book comes to mind: “The further in you go, the bigger it gets.”

Columbines often seem to be wearing at least one spider web, along with bits of fluff from nearby cottonwood trees and slender filaments of milkweed silk. I am always astonished by what my macro lens "sees" and records in its ramblings. At times, its loving eye seems to linger and caress everything it encounters, and that is particularly so when columbines are in bloom.