Hallelujah, They're Back!

Friday Ramble - Melt

This week's word has been around since before 900, coming to us through the Middle English melten, Old English meltan, mealt and gemæltan all meaning to liquify and (or) digest. It's cognate with the Old Norse melta and Greek méldein meaning much the same thing, then the Proto Germanic meltanan and West Saxon gemyltan meaning "to make liquid". All or most of the forms in existence spring from the Proto Indo-European (PIE) root form meld meaning "softness" or "to render soft". The study of word origins is a fine thing.

Strange as it may seem, the word malt is also kin to this week’s ramble offering. In the malting process, barley is soaked, softened and drained to release enzymes used in brewing beer, and the result is called malt (or wort). The curious relation between melt and malt can be explained simply by the fact that both involve softening. On the other hand, the similar sounding verb meld "to dissolve, blend or mingle" originates in the Old High German melden, "to announce" and the Old English meldian, "to make known", and it is not kin. The term is used mainly in card games, particularly canasta.

In recent days, we watched hopefully as icicles depending from the eaves of the little blue house in the village melted away, little by little. We grow some fabulous icicles up here, and a favorite springtime exercise is wandering about with the camera and photographing them as they dwindle at their lofty moorings, turn skinny and then disappear into the earth, drop by shining drop.

There are tiny worlds too numerous to imagine in the icicles dangling over our heads and in the streams below our feet. The greater world around us and its multitudes of miniscule universes are complete within themselves and teeming with life and enchantment, all wrapped up together and happy with the arrangement.

Sometimes melting ice holds the doddering photographer and her camera. Other times, it is filled with sky, clouds, bare trees and tiny sprigs of emerging greenery—all are expressions of this madcap season when vibrant new life is coming into being. The Old Wild Mother (Earth) creates finer "stuff" than I shall ever be able to dream up, but that is quite all right. I just wander around and chronicle her doings with lens and notebook and a perpetually stunned expression.

Happy Vernal Equinox (Ostara)

For the Vernal Equinox (Ostara)

Tomorrow marks the Vernal Equinox or Ostara, one of two times in the calendar year (the other being the Autumn Equinox or Mabon) when the Earth and her unruly children hover in perfect balance for a brief interval.

Humans have nothing to do with the origins of this day, a pivotal astronomic point ordained by the natural order of things in the cosmos. On both equinoxes, the Sun is right above the equator, and its annual pathway (the ecliptic) intersects with the celestial equator. Day and night are equal length. We like to say that the Sun is passing over the equator, but it is we and our planet who are in motion, not the magnificent star at the center of our universe.

If I lived further south, tomorrow might be a day of greening and enchantment, a day when Eostre, the old Teutonic goddess of greening and fertility, wanders wild places with her arms full of spring blooms, bestowing blessings on everything she sees. Flowers would spring up in her footsteps as she passed, and she would be attended by hares, her special animal,. The air would be filled with birdsong, with the heady fragrance of rich dark earth and wild springtime herbs.

Alas, the only snowdrops blooming here at the moment are those in a glass jar in my study. It will be a week or two until Lady Spring turns up and decides to stay for a while, but rumors of her imminent arrival persist. It has been a long winter this time around, and Eostre can't show up too soon for me. Our winter birds feel the same. Every feathered visitor to our sleeping garden seems to be declaring its lofty status as a messenger from the sacred, a harbinger of abundance and new life.

In the wee hours of this morning, Beau and I went outside into the garden for a few minutes, and a cold going it was. As we shivered in the star spangled darkness and looked up, it seemed to us that the waning moon bore more than a passing resemblance to a great cosmic egg, a perfect expression of this turning of the wheel with its verdant motifs of warmth, light and new life coming into being.

There is blooming in our thoughts, but it is too cold here for outdoor celebrations, and our festivities are indoors for the most part, a festive lunch with a dear friend, the exchange of gifts, tea and an afternoon of happy natter. Pancakes, berries, whipped cream and local maple syrup are on the menu this year. Yum.

Happy Equinox! Blessings of the season to one and all.

Rain and Robins Returning

Skies are cloudy, and a gentle rain is falling outside the windows. Beau and I are doing tea and listening to raindrops hitting the roof of the garden shed in a fine staccato rhythm, to clumps of snow falling off the peaked rooflines of nearby houses. The watery motifs of two seasons are rolled into one this soggy morning.

Mr. B. does not care much for wet weather, and he is curled up in a corner of the sofa, grumbling. He does, however, appreciate a fine puddle, and there are lagoons in the village deep enough and wide enough for him to swim around in circles. That will cheer him up immensely when we go out for a walk later.

A murmuration of starlings is hanging out in the cedar hedge, and the wily birds are pretending they are something else entirely, cardinals, robins, house finches, song sparrows. What is wrong with just being a starling? A few robins are back, and they have been visiting the garden this week. At sunrise, one was perched high in the ash in the corner, singing his (or her) pleasure in the day and calling for more rain.

Perhaps it is time for a new wreath on the front door, something with sprigs of pussy willow and eggs (fake of course) in pastel colours. Rain or no, a graceful nod to Eostre and a small ritual gesture of some sort is called for.

Tobar Phadric (for St. Patrick's Day)

Turn sideways into the light as they say
the old ones did and disappear
into the originality of it all.

Be impatient with easy explanations
and teach that part of the mind
that wants to know everything
not to begin questions it cannot answer.

Walk the green road above the bay

and the low glinting fields

toward the evening sun, let that Atlantic

gleam be ahead of you and the gray light

of the bay below you, until you catch,

down on your left, the break in the wall,

for just above in the shadows

you’ll find it hidden, a curved arm

of rock holding the water close to the mountain,

a just-lit surface smoothing a scattering of coins,

and in the niche above, notes to the dead

and supplications for those who still live.

But for now, you are alone with the transfiguration

and ask no healing for your own

but look down as if looking through time,

as if through a rent veil from the other

side of the question you’ve refused to ask.

And you remember now, that clear stream

of generosity from which you drank,

how as a child your arms could rise and your palms

turn out to take the blessing of the world.

David Whyte, from River Flow
(with permission) 

Sunday, Saying Yes to the World

Belonging so fully to yourself that you're willing to stand alone is a wilderness—an untamed, unpredictable place of solitude and searching. It is a place as dangerous as it is breathtaking, a place as sought after as it is feared. The wilderness can often feel unholy because we can't control it, or what people think about our choice of whether to venture into that vastness or not. But it turns out to be the place of true belonging, and it's the bravest and most sacred place you will ever stand.

Brené Brown

In the Woods, Sweetness

Friday Ramble - Journey

Journey comes from the Middle English journei, meaning day (or day's travel), through the Old French jornee and Vulgar Latin diurnta, then the Late Latin diurnum (meaning day), or perhaps the neuter form of the Latin diurnus, meaning daily or "of a day". The word claims kinship with journal, diurnal, and diary which comes to us from the Latin diārium meaning daily allowance or record. Somewhere in there too and predating 950 CE by a fair interval are the Middle English dæg; and the Germanic tag. At the beginning of it all is the Proto-Indo-European (PIE) root *dhegh- "to burn".

The word harks back to the long ago time when we moved from place to place on our own two feet and measured our barefoot progress by the amount of daylight involved in doing so. There are some lovely synonyms for this week's word in our language: adventure, campaign, caravan, expedition, exploration, migration, odyssey, passage, peregrination, pilgrimage, quest, ramble, roaming, roving, safari, sally, seeking, sojourn, transmigration, vagabondage, voyage, wandering and wayfaring.

Journeying is not simply getting from one place to another place. When I say the word (and I am fond of it), I don't think of trips to school or marketplace, but of childhood rambles and a clear sense even then that life was an adventure unfolding - that something grand, magical and illuminating awaited behind the next tree or around a bend on the trail ahead. My younger self spent hours watching leaves float down rivers of windfall light, how light turned the whole world dazzling gold as the sun went down at the end of the day.  A mere sapling has no words for such things, but feelings of wonder and possibility tugged at my sensibilities,. "Ready or not, here I come, seeking something magical, mysterious and incandescent, I know not what."

From her early adventures, that odd little girl moved on into college, adulthood, work, marriage, parenting, all the inevitable bumps and potholes in the shambolic road of life. Oh, there were snippets of fey knowing here and there, but the midlife journey often seemed to be "arrow straight" and running toward a flat horizon, nary a tree, a hill, a cantrip or a mystery in sight.

I am older now, and I am (hopefully) a little wiser for all my meanderings. In these creaky, eldering days, I think about the wind blowing through the trees of my native place, of sunrises seen from the cliffs above Dalhousie Lake. I think of migrating geese and drifting fogs in early morning, the way clouds seen from heights often seem to form a sparkling road - one spiralling right out into the great beyond. There are glorious sunsets to be seen if one climbs a mountain at twilight, but they can be viewed from the shoreline too, often in the company of herons.

Here I am again, watching leaves float down the river in season, haunting shorelines with a camera and trying to capture that twilight moment when the world seems to be spun out of gold. The childhood sense of journeying and mystery that seemed to vanish during my frantic middling years has returned and so have my dreams. There are islands in the sky at sunrise, tall wooden ships bound for faraway places and unknown adventures in the offing, eldritch musics offered in the voices of the sirens.

Childhood rambles, my university years, and the straightforward thoroughfares of middle life are behind me, and these eldering days are about community, wildness, and grace unfolding. May there be joy and enchantment on your journey. May there be wonder and adventures in your life, and may there be light.

Thursday Poem - Another Spring

The seasons revolve and the years change

With no assistance or supervision.

The moon, without taking thought,

Moves in its cycle, full, crescent, and full.

The white moon enters the heart of the river;

The air is drugged with azalea blossoms;

Deep in the night a pine cone falls;

Our campfire dies out in the empty mountains.

The sharp stars flicker in the tremulous branches;

The lake is black, bottomless in the crystalline night;

High in the sky the Northern Crown

Is cut in half by the dim summit of a snow peak.

O heart, heart, so singularly

Intransigent and corruptible,

Here we lie entranced by the starlit water,

And moments that should each last forever

Slide unconsciously by us like water.

Kenneth Rexroth

(Translation of a poem by Tu Fu)

Wordless Wednesday - World Within

Crocus Thoughts

Snow fell in the village in the wee hours of yesterday morning, no surprise at this time of the year. One may reasonably expect the long white season to lurk in the shadows and make unforeseen appearances until late April, sometimes well into May. I remember a not so long ago year when snow and a killing frost wiped out our newborn veggie patch on the first day of June, and we had to start over. 

When winter finally retreats, the woods green up rapidly, and within a short time the whole forest is carpeted in bloodroot, trilliums, trout lilies, tiny hepatica and violets. No quiet and subtle entrance here for Lady Spring, but a loud, triumphant fanfare and running footsteps, an explosion of shaggy green leafage in local hedgerows, a riotous, profusion of spring blooms bursting forth, almost within minutes.

In my sleep last night, Beau and I wandered along in a cloud of wildflowers and lacy green ferns, listened to a throng of  grosbeaks singing in the overstory, watched an osprey hunting over the Clyde river. Sigh, early days yet. Dreams will have to sustain us for another several weeks—at present the woods are a realm of deep snow and inky blue shadows, and so they will remain for quite a while.

I think wistfully of putting my hands in the warm dark earth of the garden with a trowel, but the place is still three feet deep in snow and so it will be for a while. For now, potted tulips and crocus thoughts will have to do.

Sequestered, Week 255 (CCLV)

Sunday, Saying Yes to the World

I breathe in the soft, saturated exhalations of cedar trees and salmonberry bushes, fireweed and wood fern, marsh hawks and meadow voles, marten and harbor seal and blacktail deer. I breathe in the same particles of air that made songs in the throats of hermit thrushes and gave voices to humpback whales, the same particles of air that lifted the wings of bald eagles and buzzed in the flight of hummingbirds, the same particles of air that rushed over the sea in storms, whirled in high mountain snows, whistled across the poles, and whispered through lush equatorial gardens…air that has passed continually through life on earth. I breathe it in, pass it on, share it in equal measure with billions of other living things, endlessly, infinitely.

Richard Nelson, The Island Within

Thursday Poem - Summons

(for International Women's Day)

Last night I dreamed

ten thousand grandmothers
from the twelve hundred corners of the earth
walked out into the gap
one breath deep
between the bullet and the flesh
between the bomb and the family.

They told me we cannot wait for governments.

There are no peacekeepers boarding planes.

There are no leaders who dare to say

every life is precious, so it will have to be us.

They said we will cup our hands around each heart.

We will sing the earth’s song, the song of water,

a song so beautiful that vengeance will turn to weeping.

The mourners will embrace, and grief replace

every impulse toward harm.

Ten thousand is not enough, they said,

so, we have sent this dream, like a flock of doves

into the sleep of the world. Wake up. Put on your shoes.

You who are reading this, I am bringing bandages

and a bag of scented guavas from my trees. I think

I remember the tune. Meet me at the corner.

Let’s go.

Aurora Levin Morales 

 

When Winter Returns

Order a beaker of something ambrosial at your local coffee shop. Sip it slowly. 

Pretend the weather is balmy and the trees have leafed out, that the overstory is lavishly tenanted by songbirds. 

Think about gardening. Imagine roses and herbs in bloom, veggies coming up, the bee garden filled with little sisters going about their work.

Remember sunlight and warmth. Breathe deeply. Cradle the light within.

Friday Ramble - Getting Through March, Sheepishly

March came in like a lioness, and then the lioness stepped away for a few days. In her absence, plucky birds paired off amorously, and village starlings sang merrily, pretending they were robins and enjoying the pretense. It rained, and for a day or two, there was the possibility of a maple syrup run. Thoughts of springtime danced in my sconce, and there were gardening magazines, agricultural annuals, nursery catalogs and seed packets on every surface in the house.

Alas, the halcyon days were brief. Winter made a gleeful return late yesterday, the north wind howling in the rafters and tossing heaps of snow against the doors of the garden shed. There were clouds of blowing snow, and clumps, tumps and desiccated grasses vanished after their fleeting emergence out of the white stuff. Snowdrifts took a deep sigh of relief and stopped melting. Overnight, the village became a sea of ice, and walking this morning is worrisome, downright treacherous.

In other years, migratory birds had returned by now, but Canada geese, ducks, herons and loons will be late coming home this year because there is no open water anywhere and nothing for them to eat. On walks, we listen for them anyway.

What is one to do at such times? I drink copious amounts of espresso and tea. I spend a lot of time reading and scribbling. In the wee hours, I plot new bee gardens and beds of roses, research heirloom vegetables, lay out the design for another quilt. I cultivate forbearance and don't look out the window when snow falls again, hoping ardently that Lady March will get her act together and morph into a lamb, darn it.

At the end of winter, one becomes a tad maudlin. When a friend in the Lanark Highlands told me a few days ago that lambs are now being born in her magnificent old log barn, I was sad. I felt sorry for the poor wee beasties who were coming into the world in such bleak circumstances. What a harrowing start to life.

Enough is enough. Rain would be just fine, and it is certainly easier to shovel than snow. There is one thing about the weather though - night skies are fabulous when they are clear. There are flaming sunsets and moons one can almost reach up and touch, planets dancing in the sky at dusk, dippers of starlight strewn by handfuls from vast, streaming cosmic cauldrons. Simply magnificent.

While I was outside this morning shoveling the veranda, a friend walked by with her Labrador (Sunny) and stopped to talk for a few minutes. We had not seen much of each other in recent weeks, and it was pleasant to stand there (shuffling from foot to foot in the cold) and catch up. I think I can hang in for a while longer.

Thursday Poem - You Can't Be Too Careful

Spring storm and hail of ice cubes
pummels my town and no other.
There was a time when townspeople
would call this fall the wrath of God
or work of witches. A lower profile
may have saved some crones
renowned for bitter herbs, odd dames
you went to in the woods for troubles.
But some would go on being busybodies
and scolds dragged out, dunked, drowned
or hung like limp, forgotten fruit
from gallows trees. Scarecrows and
cautionary tales. And truly the crows
flee from our town screaming
blue murder, scarier than a siren.
Even in these enlightened times,
some of us still go warily,
keeping secret our wild simples,
asking nothing for our quirky blessings.

Dolores Stewart Riccio
(from The Nature of Things)

Wordless Wednesday - Reflection

Birch Mother in the Wind

Paper birch (Betula papyrifera)

also called White birch or Canoe birch

Here we are on the cusp between winter and springtime, weary of ice and snowdrifts, craving light and warmth. There is still a lot of snow about, and the weather is cold, icy winds scouring the bare trees and making the branches ring like old iron bells. Perhaps that is to be expected, for springtime is a puckish wight this far north. After making a brief appearance, she often disappears for several weeks and doesn't show up again until the end of March or the beginning of April.

For all that, March days have a wonderful way of quieting one's thoughts and breathing rhythms, bringing her back to a still and reflective space in the heart of the living world. The Old Wild Mother (Earth) is haggard and tattered, but she takes us in and holds us close. She shelters us and soothes us. She comforts us. 

I sat on a log in the woods a few days ago, watching as scraps of birch bark fluttered back and forth in the north wind. When my breath slowed and my mind became still, the lines etched in the tree's paper were words written in a language I could almost understand. When the morning sun slipped out from behind the clouds, rays of sunlight passed through the blowing endments and turned them golden and translucent, for all the world like elemental stained glass.

When I touched the old tree in greeting, my fingers came away with a dry springtime sweetness on them that lingered for hours. I tucked a thin folio of bark in the pocket of my parka and inhaled its wild fragrance all the way home.

Sequestered, Week 254 (CCLIV)

Sunday, Saying Yes to the World

One swallow does not make a summer, but one skein of geese, cleaving the murk of a March thaw, is the spring. A cardinal, whistling spring to a thaw but later finding himself mistaken, can retrieve his error by resuming his winter silence. A chipmunk, emerging for a sunbath but finding a blizzard, has only to go back to bed. But a migrating goose, staking two hundred miles of black night on the chance of finding a hole in the lake, has no easy chance for retreat. His arrival carries the conviction of a prophet who has burned his bridges. A March morning is only as drab as he who walks in it without a glance skyward, ear cocked for geese.

Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac

It is very cold here this morning, so there will be no open water for a few weeks and no returning Canada geese, but I have been hearing them in my dreams.

Rumors of Spring

Happy March!

For a few days this week, weather in the village was mild, and the towering snowdrifts everywhere subsided a bit. Birds sang lightheartedly in the park, and maples in the garden sprouted tiny red buds. For a while we dared to entertain the fragile hope that springtime was on its way and warmer times were not far off.

Alas, March roared in like a lion. Several inches of snow fell overnight, and we are back to heaving white stuff out of our way. I have already shoveled the deck, the stairs and a track around the garden for Beau, and I will tackle the front walk and driveway after my fingers have warmed up. First, a fine cup of hot, black coffee.

Weather Canada says the snow will stop in an hour or so, but I am not holding my breath. There are snow clouds up there from one side of the sky to the other, and a nasty north wind is rampaging through the village. When the sun rises tomorrow morning, the temperature will be in the minus thirties (Celsius) with windchill factored into the equation. Old Man Winter is not done with us yet. Harumph.

Friday Ramble - How Sweet It Is

It remains one of my favorite intervals in the whole turning year - the cold sunny days in late winter or early springtime when the north gears up for the maple syrup season. At this time of the year, the Lanark woods are filled with sugar bird (saw-whet owl) songs - it is nesting season and the tiny fierce owl (the male) sings to attract a mate. Legend has it that the saw-whet sings when the maple sap is running, and that the sap stops running when thunder is heard for the first time.

Clouds of smoke and steam rise from wooden sugar shacks tucked in among the old trees, and the ambrosial fragrance of boiling maple sap is everywhere. The sylvan alchemy in progress is wild and sweet, and the homely metaphor of the syrup cauldron or pot has profound resonance for me. I still have the battered Dutch oven I carried as I rambled the continent many years ago, stirring soups, potions and stews by starlight and watching as sparks went spiraling into the inky sky over the rim of my old pot. The motes of light rising from its depths were stars too, perfect counterpoint to the constellations dancing over my head.

These days, there's the stockpot bubbling away on my stove, a rice cooker, a bean crock and an unglazed earthenware tagine, cast iron cooking pots by Staub and Le Creuset in bright red, a small three-legged iron incense bowl on the table in my study. In late February, early March and April, there are the sugar camps of friends in the Lanark Highlands. Miles of collecting hose in confetti colors are strung from maple to maple, and evaporators send fragrant plumes into the air. Tin sap pails and spouts are fixed to trees, and antique syrup cauldrons boil over open fires to demonstrate how maple syrup was made in times past.

The word cauldron comes from the Middle English cauderon, thence from the Anglo-Norman caudiere and the Latin caldāria, the latter meaning “cooking pot” and rooted in the adjective calidus meaning warm or “suitable for warming”. At the end of the trail is the Proto-Indo-European (PIE) root kelə meaning simply “warm”. Calendar, calorie, chafe, chiaroscuro, claim, clamor, class, clear, council, hale, haul and lee are kin. So is caldera, the term geologists use to describe the massive crater formed when a volcano's magma chamber is emptied by a massive eruption or the chamber's roof collapses. The largest volcanic caldera on earth is the vast Yellowstone Caldera in northern Wyoming which is actually composed of four overlapping basins.

The night that gifts us with stars and enfolds us gently when the sun goes down is a vast cauldron or bowl. Somewhere up there in the darkness, Cerridwen is stirring a heady cosmic brew of knowledge, creativity and rebirth, her magical kettle simmering over a mystic cookfire. From her vessel, the bard Taliesin once partook of a single drop and awakened into wisdom and song. We're all vessels, and one of the best motifs for this old life is surely a pot or cauldron, one battered, dented and well traveled, but useful and happy to be of service, bubbling and crackling away in the background, making happy musics and occasionally sending bright motes up into the air.

And so it is with this old hen when her favorite wild places begin to awaken in early spring. Notions of alchemy bubble away gently in her sconce. Sparks fly upward, images of pots and cauldrons cosmic and domestic whirl about in her thoughts. She simply could not (and would not) be anywhere else, and she would not mind coming back as an owl in the Lanark woods in her next life.

Northern saw-whet owl (Aegolius acadicus)

Thursday Poem - For the Children

The rising hills,
the slopes,
of statistics
lie before us.
The steep climb
of everything, going up,
up, as we all
go down.

In the next century

or the one beyond that

they say,

are valleys, pastures,

we can meet there in peace

if we make it.

To climb these coming crests

one word to you, to

you and your children:

stay together,

learn the flowers,

go light.

Gary Snyder, from Turtle Island

Wordless Wednesday - Evergreen

Cakes for the Journey

I awakened before dawn this morning and stood outside in the darkness, waiting for a fragile scrap of waning moon to show her face above the horizon in the southern sky. She was visible for only a minute or two before fading away in a graceful gesture of kinship with the rising sun, but the slender crescent of light remained on the inside of my eyelids long after retreating into the high still light of morning.

A single male cardinal perched in a maple tree in the garden singing blithely, and he didn't seem to care that it is only late February and there is a lot of snow about. On our early walk, two owls were perched in an old beech tree in the park, a splendid pair of mated "great hornies" greeting the day with gentle nudgings and hootings.There was no mistaking their pleasure in being together and sharing a tree for a few minutes, but that is probably the only quiet time they will enjoy today. There is a brood of little owlets in another tree down the hill, and the parents are run off their feet (or rather their wings) finding food for their hungry offspring.

 

Returning home, I made a robust beaker of French roast with freshly ground beans before ransacking the freezer for blueberries, then the refrigerator for organic flour and maple syrup from the highlands, a fine rosy beginning for a late winter day. The moon is new tomorrow, and the approaching lunar cycle (and hopefully the arrival of spring) calls for a celebratory gesture of some kind, a little culinary magic. Fresh "made from scratch" journey cakes (or pancakes or bannock) seemed like the right way to go, and the fragrance in the kitchen as they cooked was downright ambrosial.

Sequestered, Week 253 (CCLIII)

Sunday, Saying Yes to the World

I build a platform, and live upon it, and think my thoughts, and aim high. To rise, I must have a field to rise from. To deepen, I must have bedrock from which to descend. The constancy of the physical world, under its green and blue dyes, draws me toward a better, richer self, call it elevation (there is hardly an adequate word), where I might ascend a little -- where a gloss of spirit would mirror itself in worldly action. I don't mean just mild goodness. I mean feistiness too, the fires of human energy stoked; I mean a gladness vivacious enough to disarrange the sorrows of the world into something better.

It is one of the great perils of our so-called civilized age that we do not acknowledge enough, or cherish enough, this connection between soul and landscape—between our own best possibilities, and the view from our own windows. We need the world as much as it needs us, and we need it in privacy, intimacy, and surety.

Mary Oliver, Long Life: Essays and Other Writings

On the Edge of the Snowy Woods