Friday Ramble - Kingfisher Days

I spend many summer hours wandering around and photographing things. The eastern Ontario highlands are a treasure trove of earthy abundance, and I feel fortunate to be there and taking it all in. The wonders never cease: dragonflies, butterflies and moths, bumbles and wasps, birds, puddles, trees, orchids and wildflowers, poppies and lupins gone wild and doing their own carefree thing in roadside ditches.

Some time is spent crawling about in the woods on all fours with a macro lens on the camera “doing” ferns, mosses, lichens and little green frogs. Every tump, stump, leafy alcove and stone has wonders to share. Is it difficult to lurch back to a standing position afterward? Oh yes, but I do it anyway. The results are worth it.  

Other hours are spent hanging out at the lake capturing images of loons floating on the water at sunset, great 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 several minutes, occasionally displaying the bright red inside of its mouth and a set of wicked teeth. Curious critters, otters.

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. Wonders of wonders, some of the images are not too bad at all. I can remember when they were taken, my soulmate and Beau (or Cassie or Spencer) and I together in the woods or 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.

Sequestered, 355(CCCLV)

Sunday, Saying Yes to the World

I’m not trying to hide from the truth but to balance it, to remind myself that there are other truths, too. I need to remember that the earth, fragile as it is, remains heartbreakingly beautiful. I need to give my attention to a realm that is indifferent to fretful human mutterings and naked human anger, a world unaware of the hatred and distrust taking over the news.

Margaret Renkl, The Comfort of Crows

In the Pink

Friday Ramble - Earth/Earthy

Earth is a good word for pondering in this shaggy season as we work in our gardens and tend the sweet beginnings of the harvest to come. All things, or at least most things, arise from the earth and return to it in time, us included.

Our word dates from before 950 CE, and it comes to us through the good offices of the Middle English erthe, the Old English eorthe; German erde, Old Norse jǫrth, and Gothic airtha, thence the Ancient Saxon eard meaning soil or dwelling place. Then there is the Latin aro, meaning to plough or turn over. In the beginning is the Proto-Indo-European (PIE) form *h₁er- meaning ground, soil, land or place.

When we say "earth", we are usually thinking of the ground under our feet or in our garden pots and planters. We may be thinking of the many millions of roots doing their thing way down deep, but we almost never think of ourselves as elements in the same story. We are indeed, and it is amazing stuff. Blood and bones, root and branch, rivers and rocks, we are tiny, thoughtless players in a vast elemental process. Endlessly befuddled strands in the web, we are always getting distracted and forgetting we are part of anything at all.

Once in a while, the simple fact that we are NOT separate shows up and insists we pay attention. It can happen while dangling on a rock face or seated in a pool of sunlight under a tree in the woods, on a hill somewhere under the summer stars, or on the shore of a favorite lake at dusk. Dazzling sunsets and starry nights do it for me every time, and occasionally it even happens while I am parked in the waiting room of my local cancer clinic. Such moments cannot be predicted, and nor should they, but I have noticed that they often show up right when I need them.

There I was this week, feet planted in the garden and head in the clouds, but not a lofty thought in sight. My soulmate and I gardened together for many years, and I was missing him more than words can say that morning. Out of the blue, there came a fey scrap of memory, and I remembered (probably for the millionth time in this long and tatterdemalion life) that I was right where I was supposed to be and doing just what I was meant to be doing. I needed the reminder.

We belong here, roots, branches, star stuff and every dancing particle - we belong here as much as rivers, mountains, acorns, wild salmon and sandpipers do. Dirt, rocks, clouds, sky and stardust, it's all good. Roots down, branches up, away we go!

Thursday Poem - To Be Held

To be held
by the light
was what I wanted,
to be a tree drinking the rain,
no longer parched in this hot land.
To be roots in a tunnel growing
but also to be sheltering the inborn leaves
and the green slide of mineral
down the immense distances
into infinite comfort
and the land here, only clay,
still contains and consumes
the thirsty need
the way a tree always shelters the unborn life
waiting for the healing
after the storm
which has been our life.

Linda Hogan

Wordless Wednesday - This Perfect Light

Froth and Fragrance

One day there are no leaves on trees in the village at all, and the next day the same trees are fully leafed out, their voluptuous canopies alive with birds who dish out madrigals at sunrise and trip the light fantastic from branch to branch until the sun goes down. Their pleasure in the day and the season is obvious.

Crabapple trees, flowering almonds and plums seem to leaf out and flower overnight, and wonder of wonder, they are alive with madly buzzing bumbles, honey bees and wasps. Dusted with pollen from stem to stern, the little dears are in constant motion, ecstatic to be feeling sunlight on their wings and foraging for nectar on a balmy morning in May's middling pages.

Here comes another fine summer of prowling about in gardens wild and domestic with camera and macro lens, drinking in light and gathering nectars of my own. Now and then, I will put down my photography gear and dance with the joyous bumble girls. Ungainly creature that I am, I hope no one is watching, at least no humans. The bee sisters are tolerant and don't mind my lurching about at all.

Sequestered, 354 (CCCLIV)

Sunday, Saying Yes to the World

Our songs travel the earth. We sing to one another. Not a single note is ever lost and no song is original. They all come from the same place and go back to a time when only the stones howled.

Louise Erdrich, from The Master Butcher's Singing Club

Heart of Gold

Friday Ramble - Aestival

This week's word is one of my favorites, hailing from Middle English, Middle and Old French, thence the Late Latin aestīvālis and earlier Latin aestās meaning summer or summery. Both forms are cognate with the Sanskrit इन्द्धे (inddhé) meaning to light or set on fire. At the beginning of our wordy explorations is the Proto-Indo-European (PIE) form h₂eydʰ- meaning heat, fire or to burn.

In the science of zoology, aestival refers to the tendency of all living creatures to be rather sleepy and slow moving in the heat of summer. Botanists use the word to describe the arrangement of organs or components in a flower bud. I used to think that the word siesta (a leisurely nap after lunch) was related, but I discovered some time ago that its roots are in the Latin sexta meaning the sixth hour of the day (midday). The two words sound similar, but as far as I know, they are not related.

June is only two weeks away, and this week's word is one of my favorites for the brief greening season at the heart of the northern calendar year. Summer is a fine word too, but it doesn't hold a candle to the frothy perfumed magnificence of the golden season that reigns so briefly here in the sub-Arctic climes of Canada. Aestival says it all, and I love the shape of the word on my tongue.

After an unusually long, cold winter, things are beginning to warm up. There are not many nectar gathering insects about yet, but ornamental trees in the village (almond, cherry, crabapple, magnolia and mock orange) are starting to bloom, and soon the air will be full of fluttering petals and sweet fragrance. Beau and I stop to look at every tree. One of these fine mornings, the objects of our rapt attention will be chock full of ecstatic bees and blissed out bumbles.

I say "aestival" and its sibilance summons up images of outdoor festivals and al fresco celebrations, shaggy gardens of scarlet poppies and towering purple lupins, trees filled with singing birds, bees in the orchard, roses sweeter than any vineyard potion, perfect sunsets across the lake shared with herons. It's all golden, and it's all good. Here comes June in all her glory, and we are ready.