Friday Ramble - Creeping Autumn

Virginia creeper (Parthenocissus quinquefolia)

Suddenly, there in the hedgerows on our morning walks are clear signals that seasonal changes are in the air. The persistent strands of Virginia creeper wrapping old wooden fences and stone walls and draping themselves around trees and shrubs were green a few days ago, and this morning many look more like Yuletide (or Christmas) paper, red and green and silvery in the early light. Where the stones and bricks to which they cling get direct sunlight during the day and retain their heat at night, the creepers cling to their greens a little longer, but they too are thinking about changing their colors.

Oak leaves are lightly touched with the splendid rosy bronze tint they wear in late September and early October before falling to earth, and beech leaves are already edged in coppery red and cognac. Leaf by leaf and branch by branch, maple trees in the eastern Ontario highlands are turning red.

One of my forestry references identifies native beeches as being of the species called simply "common beech". To my mind however, there is nothing common about the beeches on our hill with their majestic height, silvery bark, dense foliage and rounded crowns. They are simply magnificent.

Part of me wants to dance about and applaud the cooler temperatures and the burnished, glorious colors coming into their own. Another part of me, as much as I love Samhain (or Halloween) and the harvest season, is dismayed at the prospect of cold weather, long days and short nights, of an early autumn this time around. Fall should not arrive until the end of September at the very earliest, and then it ought to hang about until the end of November.

Please Mama, not yet........ Gift us with several more weeks of sun and warmth and gentle breezes, no ingathering and cold nights for a while longer.

Thursday Poem - Song for Autumn

In the deep fall
    don't you imagine the leaves think how 

comfortable it will be to touch
    the earth instead of the
nothingness of air and the endless
    freshets of wind? And don't you think
the trees themselves, especially those with mossy,

    warm caves, begin to think

of the birds that will come—six, a dozen—to sleep

    inside their bodies? And don't you hear

the goldenrod whispering goodbye,
    the everlasting being crowned with the first
tuffets of snow? The pond
    vanishes, and the white field over which
the fox runs so quickly brings out
    its blue shadows. And the wind pumps its
bellows. And at evening especially,
    the piled firewood shifts a little,
longing to be on its way.

Mary Oliver, from Devotions

Wordless Wednesday - Holding the Sky

Village, Scarlet and Bokeh

In the village, scarlets, plums and deep inky blues are creeping into view slowly, their emergence out of late summer's dusty greens motivated by cooler evenings and gently ruffling winds at nightfall. Autumn brings heavys dews, and when Beau and I potter off on early morning walks, there are glossy coins of dew everywhere. 

A small gasp of koi or nishikigoi (錦鯉, "brocaded carp") makes its home in the shaded pond underneath this Japanese maple. I didn't know until recently that a colony of koi is called a gasp, and that frill of interesting but trivial information has been tucked away in the old sconce for future reference. My neighbor's pond is fed by a waterfall, and the sound of the falling water is a pleasing music as we pass by on early walks. Beau and I visit the alcove until all the maple's leaves have fallen, and the waters below her gracefully arching branches are dusted with snow. There is a lovely, meditative stillness by the pond under the tree, in all seasons.

As often as I witness the turning of the seasons and the vivid entities coming into being, the autumn morphing of the village into deeper and more intense hues is always enchanting. It takes us (and the camera) by surprise each and every year. Such transformations are magics of a wilder kind, and it is difficult to imagine living this old life without being among them, without watching as they flare and swirl and dance, blithely remaking the world in stunning elemental colors.

Northern light dazzles the eyes and lingers lovingly on everything it encounters in its journey across the eastern Ontario highlands at this time of the year, and I wish I could paint everything it touches. Come to think of it, that is just what my lens is doing. All I do is hold the camera. Happy October!

Sequestered, Week 232 (CCXXXII)

Sunday, Saying Yes to the World

. . . I don't know what gladness is or where it comes from, this splitting open of the self. It takes me by surprise. Not an awareness of beauty and mystery, but beauty and mystery themselves, flooding into a mind suddenly without boundaries. Can this be gladness, to be lifted by that flood?

This is something that needs explaining, how light emerges from darkness, how comfort wells up from sorrow. The Earth holds every possibility inside it, and the mystery of transformation, one thing into another. This is the wildest comfort.

Kathleen Dean Moore, Wild Comfort: The Solace of Nature

Bumble Girls in the Gold

Friday Ramble - Going for the Gold

It's the reds that grab our attention in late September and early October. When maple trees in the Lanark highlands turn, its gorges, hills and quiet coves are ablaze with color. Other trees are dazzling in their own right, but their earthier hues are always upstaged by the riotous, cavorting red maples.

There is an elemental chemistry at work in the woods. In summer, the green pigment in leaves (chlorophyll) helps converts sunlight into energy in the elegant chemical process called photosynthesis. (That word comes from the Greek phōs meaning "light", and suntíthēmi meaning "putting together".) Trees retain the carbon dioxide extracted during photosynthesis and use it to manufacture nourishment, together with water taken in through their roots. Oxygen extracted at the same time is released back into the earth's atmosphere for us to breathe. It's a wild and earthy magic of the very finest kind, trees and sentient beings all breathing in and out together and sharing the bounty of light. That there is magic is without question, and trees are sentient beings too, not just woody things with leaves and branches and roots.

When autumn arrives, deciduous trees withdraw into themselves. Chlorophyll production slows down, allowing the anthocyanin and carotenoid pigments also in leaves to come into their own. Leaves high in anthocyanins and low in carotenoids turn scarlet, and those with high levels of both flavinoids flash bright orange. Leaves high in carotenoids and low in anthocyanins do a sky dance in honeyed golds and yellows. Absent both anthocyanins and carotenoids, tannins rule, giving us the burnished russets, ochres, umbers and bronzes of the great oaks, hickories and beeches.

Like most northerners, I have a passion for scarlet, claret and ruby in autumn, but it always seems to me that the golds, bronzes and russets of our other native tree species don't get the attention they so richly deserve. The oro (gold) on display here in late September and early October is anything but pallido (pale or light). It dazzles the eye; it sings and struts and dances; it kicks up its heels. It rocks.

Poplars, ashes, elms and birches wear radiant saffron, and so do ginkgo trees in the village. Beech leaves are coppery coinage, and oak leaves turn an alluring rosy bronze. In Lanark, the aspens and tamaracks down by our beaver pond wear a delightful buttery gold. Nearby, late blooming goldenrod sways back and forth until it goes to seed and offers its fuzzy children to the wind. A few tenacious bumbles ride its plumes. Yellow daisies and hawkweed bloom in protected nooks among the rocks, and everywhere, there is fine contrast from spruces, pines and cedars in the background. An ambrosial, blue-green, evergreen fragrance fills the air.

And then there are all the smaller bright entities down on the forest floor among the fallen leaves. Eastern yellow fly agaric (Amanita muscaria) glows like a hundred watt bulb in the woods, and one can spot it in autumn as at no other time of the year. From the shadows, the lovely but poisonous fungus dishes out its frothy, studded golden incandescence like a halogen lamp set on high beam.

Here's to the glorious golds of the fall panoply. When the long white season arrives and snow covers the countryside, it is the golds that will turn up in my dreams. Long may they delight these old eyes in dazzling array.

Thursday Poem - Evening

The sky puts on the darkening blue coat

held for it by a row of ancient trees;

you watch: and the lands grow distant in your sight,

one journeying to heaven and one that falls;

and leave you not at home in either one,

not quite so still and dark as the darkened houses,

not calling to eternity with the passion

of what becomes a star each night, and rises;

and leave you (inexpressibly to unravel)

your life, with its immensity and fear,

so that, now bounded, now immeasurable,

it is alternately stone in you and star.

Rainer Maria Rilke

(translation by Stephen Mitchell)

Wordless Wednesday - Fallen Treasure

Taking the Sky Road Home

Only in September and October do sunsets like this come along, ground mist creeping through fields and around trees, light and sky and clouds like something out of a Maxfield Parrish painting. The clouds look like a trail one could walk along, and they remind me of the title I appended to another photo a few years ago, "Taking the Sky Road Home". My word, this almost looks like a painting.

Fog and ground mist are fine, spooky things and common at twilight in autumn, clouds of condensed moisture generated by the earth's slow breathing and drifting along, just above the surface. Humans are cloud-breathing dragons - we generate our own mists and fogs as we take air into our lungs and expel it again; trees breathe in and out too. As above so below, humans, sky, trees and the earth all breathing in and out together. We are one with the clouds drifting along above our heads and the nebulous stuff floating along below us. I find the notion pleasing, and I also like the idea of being a dragon, cloud-breathing or otherwise. 

We call visible murky stuff "fog" when it reduces visibility to less than 1,000 metres, "mist" when we can see further than 1,000 meters through it. There is a farm building in the distance, so this is mist rather than fog, and a right fine mist it is.

I might be anywhere in the world, but I am leaning against a fence in the eastern Ontario highlands on a cool night in September with the collar of my old corduroy jacket turned up against the wind. Beau and I watch as another day fades, and I take photo after photo, hoping one or two will turn out. The clouds, the setting sun, and the gauzy veils of condensation floating just above the field are too exquisite for words, so why on earth am I trying to describe them? 

The sun slides below the horizon, another autumn day folds up like an umbrella, and the stars come out. There is a moon up there somewhere, but she is waning and won't be visible until midnight. If we are awake, we will go outside and greet her.

Sequestered, Week 231 (CCXXXI)

Happy Autumn Equinox (Mabon)

Fence and Morning Light

Friday Ramble - For the Fall Equinox

It seems as though summer has just arrived, but here we are again, nearing the eve of the autumn equinox. Slightly cooler mornings, heavy dews and falling leaves after months of blistering heat and humidity, can it be?

The autumn equinox is often observed on September 21st, but the astronomical coordinate this year is the day after tomorrow, Sunday, September 22. Like all the old seasonal festivals, the observance begins at sundown on the night before, Saturday, September 21st. South of the equator, the natural cycles are reversed, and tomorrow is the eve of the vernal equinox (Ostara).

Whenever we choose to observe it, the fall equinox is a pivotal cosmic hinge, and it wears many names: Mabon, Harvest Home, Second Harvest, the Feast of Ingathering and Alban Elfed, to name just a few. Mabon is the most common of the bunch, a modern invention taken from the name of the god Mabon/Maponus, a male fertilizing principle in Welsh mythology. The American pagan Aidan Kelly devised the name in the seventies when he was crafting a calendar for modern pagans and noticed the fall equinox did not have a pagan name of its own. It seems to have stuck.

And so it goes...  Sunday's observance blends modern pagan practices with the rich traditions of ancient harvest festivals. Ceres, Demeter, John Barleycorn, Lugh or Persephone are other contenders for a tutelary deity presiding over autumn harvest rites, but I am rather fond of the "Great Son" of the Mabinogion, sometimes thought to be a companion of Arthur's Round Table.

In the old Teutonic calendar, the autumn equinox marked the beginning of the Winter Finding, a ceremonial interval lasting until Winter Night on October 15, also the date of the old Norse New Year. For moderns, the date marks the end of summer and the beginning of autumn. In Christian tradition, the day is associated with St. Michael the Archangel—his feast takes place a few days from now on September 25 and is known (for obvious reasons) as Michaelmas. The autumn blooming Michaelmas daisy or New England aster with its purple petals and golden heart is one of my favorite wildflowers, and I always looks forward to its blooming. 

The autumn equinox is about abundance and harvest, but most of all, it is about balance and equilibrium—it is one of two astronomical coordinates in the whole year when day and night are (or rather seem to be) perfectly balanced in length. Like all the old festivals dedicated to Mother Earth, it is a liminal or threshold time, for we are poised between two seasons, summer and autumn.

One holds out hopeful thoughts for the autumn equinox, that skies overhead will be brilliantly blue and full of singing geese by day, that trees and vines and creepers will be arrayed in crimson and gold, that a splendid golden moon will be visible against a blanket of stars by night. This year, the moon is slightly past full but no less beguiling for all that.

An autumn wreath graces our door, and pots of chrysanthemums grace the threshold. Sometimes the pots are adorned by leaves fallen from the old oak nearby and its companion maple. The oak is our guardian, the wreath and mums a nod to the season and a tribute of sorts. Oak, fallen leaves, wreath and blooms are cheerful things, conveying a benediction on anyone who knocks at the door, treads our cobblestones or just passes by in the street. Autumn images tug at the heart, and I always sort through reams of archived images looking for just the right one for today, am never sure I have found it. Leaves, asters, puddles, clouds, light, geese, herons??? It's always about the light, and autumn light is fabulous.

However, and whenever you choose to celebrate the occasion, a very happy Autumn Equinox, Harvest Home, or Mabon. May good things come to you.

Thursday Poem - Mabon, The Autumn Equinox

Ephemeral truce.

The dark begins

its long winning streak.

But for now

in this disheveled garden

a riot of blowsy flowers

hangs on like a chorus

of aging show girls

still with a few good kicks.

The air is ripe

with seedy perfume

and pleasant lies,

the pomegranate shared

between two mouths.

This is our second harvest,

the corn, the squash,

the reconstructed

memories of summer.

Ceres, comfort us with apples,

with grapes and the wine of grapes.

Wheaten breads are baked

in the shape of the sun.

We savor them

with honey.

It will be a long time

before this golden

moment comes again.

Dolores Stewart Riccio

Oh, That Harvest Moon

This moon is my favorite in the whole turning year.  It is also the one I can't describe properly or take a good photo of, no matter how extensive my preparations or ardent my intentions. Every year, I wander off to a good vantage point, set up camera, telescope and tripod, check my settings and wait patiently for night to fall. The moon rises, and I stand breathless in the dark, trying to capture her radiance with my lens and grasping a clumsy handful of words to describe the most beautiful moon of the year. Honoring this month's full moon is a personal seasonal rite, and if I had to think up a name of my own for it, that name would be "Hallelujah Moon".

It is something of a cosmic joke, my standing outside in the dark and taking photo after photo but never a good one. Another glorious Harvest Moon has just gone by, and another tottering heap of mediocre images has been captured. The whole  exercise brings to mind the Zen teaching tale in which a monk on his deathbed was asked to describe his life, and he replied blithely, "just one mistake after another..."

In the greater scheme of things, it doesn't matter how my efforts turned out - it was just being there that mattered. I was happy to be around for another harvest moon, and I hope to be around for many more such wonders. Lady Moon climbed into the sky at the appointed hour, and we (Beau and I) were there to witness her ascent. As we packed up our stuff and headed indoors, we couldn't help thinking that such splendor deserved a gesture of some kind, a chorus, a chant or a benediction - something grander, wider and more expressive than our rickety bows and contented sighs.

We also know this moon as the: Acorns Gathered Moon, All Ripe Moon, Aster Moon, Autumn Moon, Barley Moon, Berry Moon, Chrysanthemum Moon, Corn Moon, Corn Maker Moon, Dancing Moon, Deer Paw the Earth Moon, Dog Salmon Return to Earth Moon, Elderberry Moon, Drying Grass Moon, Fruit Moon, Hay Cutting Moon, Her Acorns Moon, Holy Moon, Hulling Corn Moon, Index-finger Moon, Leaf Fall Moon, Leaves Changing Color Moon, Little Chestnut Moon, Mabon Moon, Maize Moon, Mallow Blossom Moon, Moon of Falling Leaves, Moon of First Frost, Moon of Full Harvest, Moon of Much Freshness, Moon When the Leaves Fall, Moon of Plenty, Moon When the Corn Is Taken in, Moon When the Plums Are Scarlet, Moon When Deer Paw the Earth, Moon When Calves Grow Hair, Moon When Everything Ripens and Corn Is Harvested, Moose Moon, Morning Glory Moon, Mulberry Moon, Nut Moon, Papaw Moon, Rice Moon, Rudbeckia Moon, Seed Moon, Shining Leaf Moon, Silky Oak Moon, Singing Moon, Sturgeon Moon, Snow Goose Moon, Wine Moon, Wood Moon, Yellow Leaf Moon. 

Wordless Wednesday - Turning

Painted Ladies and Purple Sage

Painted Lady (Vanessa cardui)

There must have been at least thirty "ladies" dancing about in the clump of Balkan sage around a corner in the village this week. Beau and I stopped for a few minutes on the way home from our morning walk to watch them flutter exuberantly about, a perfect marriage of purple and orange.

Alas, it was a windy morning, and most of the images we captured were fuzzy - there was only a single acceptable capture in the several exposures taken. For all that, it was good fun to watch the Vanessas dancing about in the early breeze.

Village goldenrod thickets are in full bloom, and they are abuzz with rapturous bumbles, bees and wasps. So are the Michaelmas asters which are just coming into their own and filling the garden with dry sweetness. Could there be anything sweeter and more poignant than late summer nectar?

Late September conferences of orange, red, gold and purple are perhaps my favourite color combinations ever. Deciduous trees in the village are a riot of colour now, and morning walks take forever because we stop to admire every single one.

Just a reminder that tonight's Harvest Moon is the last supermoon of the year, and that there will also be a partial lunar eclipse. If skies are clear this evening, Beau and I will be out around ten watching Luna do her thing. Autumn moons are always something to crow about, and I often think of an old friend (now departed) who used to call them "big ass yaller moons". Standing out in the garden and looking up at Herself in the darkness, I find myself saying admiringly, "Hey there, Mama, looking good."

Sequestered, Week 230 (CCXXX)

Sunday, Saying Yes to the World

What hope is there for individual reality or authenticity when the forces of violence and orthodoxy, the earthly powers of guns and bombs and manipulated public opinion make it impossible for us to be authentic and fulfilled human beings?

The only hope is in the creation of alternative values, alternative realities. The only hope is in daring to redream one's place in the world - a beautiful act of imagination, and a sustained act of self becoming. Which is to say that in some way or another we breach and confound the accepted frontiers of things.

Ben Okri, from A Way of Being Free

Nectar and Light

Friday Ramble - Autumn

This week's word comes to us through the Middle English autumpne and Old French autompne, thence the Latin autumnus. The Latin likely hails from even older Etruscan forms. The first part of autumnus (autu) may originate in the Etruscan autu, related to avil, or year, the second part (mnus) from menos meaning loss, minus, or passing. There we have it. At the end of our etymological adventures is the burnished but wistful thought that another year is ebbing, another circling in what I like to call simply, "the Great Round," the natural cycle of our existence.

September is about harvest and abundance, but it is about balance too. The Autumn Equinox on September 21 is one of the two times in the year when day and night are balanced in length. On that day, (also called Mabon or "Harvest Home"), the sun seems to pass over the equator on a journey southward, moving steadily away from us. Things are actually the other way around of course, and it is the earth and her unruly children who are in motion. Between the Midsummer Solstice and the Winter Solstice, our planet's northern hemisphere tilts away from the radiant star at its center, and we northerners go along for the ride.

The magnificent constellations of winter are starting to appear, and the dome of night is a treasure trove of deep sky wonders, a gift for stargazey types like this Old Thing. Last night, a tapestry of stars covered the sky from here to there, and Saturn dazzled in the southern sky, borrowing light from the sun and acting for all the world as if it was a star and not a planet. 

This morning, Beau and I were out in the garden again before sunrise. The moon will not rise until late afternoon, but Orion, our favorite autumn constellation was clearly visible, Jupiter shining brightly above his head, and Sirius, the brightest star in the night sky, twinkling below his right foot near the horizon. When the sun rose, the stars vanished and every roof in the village was sewn with sequins of dew. With mornings like this, can one feel anything except rich as Croesus and jubilant in spirit?

On early walks, fallen leaves drift around our ankles and make a fine rustling music. Earthbound foliage on the trail is going transparent and turning into stained glass in splendid buttery colors. We pause to look at all the wonders around our feet, and it's a wonder we ever get anywhere at all. When I stopped to look at yet another leaf in the path on our early walk, Beau sighed and looked up at me curiously. I started to say that I was looking for a perfect leaf, then stopped and started the sentence over again. Every single autumn leaf is perfect, just as it is.

Thursday Poem - Fall Song

Another year gone, leaving everywhere

its rich spiced residues: vines, leaves,

the uneaten fruits crumbling damply

in the shadows, unmattering back

from the particular island

of this summer, this NOW, that now is nowhere

except underfoot, moldering

in that black subterranean castle

of unobservable mysteries - roots and sealed seeds

and the wanderings of water. This

I try to remember when time's measure

painfully chafes, for instance when autumn

flares out at the last, boisterous and like us longing

to stay - how everything lives, shifting

from one bright vision to another, forever

in these momentary pastures.

Mary Oliver

from American Primitive)

Wordless Wednesday - On the Edge

For the Oaks

In September, every garment in my wardrobe seems to have acorns in its pockets, offerings from trees in the garden, in the park near my home and out in the Lanark highlands. After years of rambling, I have come to think of the towering woodland people as sisters. On sunny autumn days, I find a seat among my kin, and we have conversations, some of the most thoughtful and enlightening discussions ever. I have no leaves, and I don't bear acorns, but the great oaks welcome me nevertheless.

Pockets without acorns rattling around in their depths enfold other offerings, pine and spruce cones, conkers, walnuts, butternuts, beech nuts and shagbark hickory nuts. I adore their shapes, their colors, their textures, their fragrance, the whole season of their fruiting, and I can never resist gathering such things out in the woods. Autumn is a season of entelechy, a time of becoming, of once and future trees.

Turning my pockets out this week before chucking everything into the washing machine, I realized that there has been a whole forest riding around with me for several days, and it made me smile. No need to pine for my tree sisters when I am away from the woods - they are right here with me.

Sequestered, Week 229 (CCXXIX)

Sunday, Saying Yes to the World

I could hand you a braid of sweetgrass, as thick and shining as the plait that hung down my grandmother’s back. But it is not mine to give, nor yours to take. Wiingaashk belongs to herself. So, I offer, in its place, a braid of stories meant to heal our world... It is an intertwining of science, spirit, and story—old stories and new ones that can be medicine for our broken relationship with earth, a pharmacopoeia of healing stories to allow us to imagine a different relationship, in which people and land are good medicine for each other.

Robin Wall Kimmerer

Turning, Slow and Easy

Friday Ramble - Drifting

On September mornings, the village can be a mysterious place. The earth is often warmer than the air above, the meeting of the two elements turning otherwise mundane landscape features into entities fey and luminous. Autumn is here, and she is comfortable in her tenure of mist, rain, wind and madcap tumbling leaves.

There is nothing like a good fog, and September dishes up some splendid atmospheric murks. In early morning, mist swirls around everything like a veil. It drapes whiskery trees in the park, smooths the contours of the houses and streets and parked vehicles along our way. The wind tugs playfully at the leaves of old trees, and they fall, rustling underfoot as Beau and I wander along. If we listen carefully, we can sometimes hear Cassie and Spencer (his big sister and brother) pottering along beside us, their happy feet doing a kind of scuffling dance through the fallen treasure. 

Out of the pearly gray and sepia come sounds now and again. Birds converse in hedgerows and geese move unseen among the clouds, singing as they pass over our heads. Doors open and close as sleepy residents collect their morning papers. There is the growling of automobiles and the rumble of buses, the muffled cadence of joggers gliding through the park, children chattering on their way to school, commuters heading downtown to work. Some mornings, rain beats a staccato rhythm on roofs, and little rivers sing through the gutters. Once in a while, there is the whistle of a faraway train, only a faint echoing in the air.  All together, it is symphonic.

On such mornings, the world seems boundless and brimming with luminous floating Zen possibility, soil and trees and sky and mist giving tongue in a language that is wild and compelling. Part of me is curled up and engaged in a slow breathing meditation, counting my breaths, in and out, in and out. Other parts are out there drifting along with the fog and happy to be doing it. Emaho!