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!

Thursday Poem - Assurance

You will never be alone, you hear so deep

a sound when autumn comes. Yellow

pulls across the hills and thrums,

or the silence after lightening before it says

its names—and then the clouds' wide-mouthed

apologies. You were aimed from

birth: you will never be alone. Rain

will come, a gutter filled, an Amazon,

long aisles—you never heard so deep a sound,

moss on rock, and years. You turn your head—

that’s what the silence meant: you’re not alone.

The whole wide world pours down.

William Stafford, from The Way It Is

Wordless Wednesday - Evergreen

September, Taking Wing

It is the first Tuesday in September, and village children are off to school, walked all the way there (or just to the bus stop) by proud parents, big brothers and sisters, and (occasionally) family pets. I have known many of the kids since they traveled about in prams, and here they are going off to school. Dear me, how time flies...

On our walk this morning, we counted several bright yellow school buses trundling along village streets, something we have not seen in our travels for a few months. The cheerful crossing guard who presided over a nearby corner last year was back on duty, and we compared notes on how our summers had gone.

The youngsters wear jackets in confetti colors, carry backpacks and lunch boxes in pink, turquoise and lime green, tote miniature umbrellas patterned in flowers or bunnies or polka dots. They bloom like  pint-sized peonies out in the street, and watching them from the window, I feel like doing a little blooming too.

Only a short distance away, other brightly arrayed offspring have hatched out in village hedgerows and thickets, and they are strengthening their glorious wings for the long journey south to begin in a week or two. I shall be sad when they depart.

When Monarchs alight on fall asters in the garden, the combination of orange, purple and gold is dazzling. Every butterfly is a stained glass jewel, a wild, vivid and breathtaking wonder. Lacking a clearly visible black pheromone spot on the rear wing, the butterfly at the top of this post may be female, but I am not sure. Sometimes the spot is not visible in profile.

There are vibrant colors everywhere I look in early September, and they are a sumptuous treat for these old eyes. It doesn't matter whether the riotous tints are on Virginia creepers, monarch butterflies, coneflowers or tiny raincoats - they invite me to kick up my heels and dance, or more likely just lurch about.

Sequestered, Week 228 (CCXXVIII)

Happy September!

Sunday, Saying Yes to the World

That, I think, is the power of ceremony: it marries the mundane to the sacred. The water turns to wine, the coffee to a prayer. The material and the spiritual mingle like grounds mixed with humus, transformed like steam rising from a mug into the morning mist.

What else can you offer the earth, which has everything? What else can you give but something of yourself? A homemade ceremony, ceremony that makes a home.

Robin Wall Kimmerer

Foggy Morning By the Fence

Friday Ramble - Little Ordinaries of the Season

It's small things that engage one's attention at this time of year: fallen leaves like confetti on the old wooden dock at the lake, woodland maples clothing themselves in scarlet, sunflowers inclining their heads and sending thousands of seed children out into the world, damp furrows where garden veggies bloomed and fruited.

Oak leaves on the trail have been touched by cool fingers overnight, and they rustle wonderfully underfoot in their earthy sepias and rosy creams. The beech trees in our woods are turning, and their coppery leaves fall in burnished, windblown showers. Autumn sunlight streams through the flickering overstory as though through clerestory windows, and the forest feels like a cathedral that goes on and on forever. Little seasonal ordinaries conjure a litany that is spicy on the tongue, touched with a leaf-dusty fragrance that follows us wherever we ramble.

Lines of swallows are congregating on rural telephone lines before flying south, and skeins of geese move to and fro between rivers and farm fields. Soon, the loons on our favorite lake will be calling goodbye as they head for warmer moorings. The great herons still haunt the shallows of local waterways, but they will not be far behind the loons in departing. Is it just me, or is there a restless melancholy spirit loose in the village and haunting the countryside?

It is a little cooler here this morning, and far from recent thoughts of salads and cold drinks, I find myself pondering soups and stews, corn fritters and gingerbread, the first McIntosh apples lovingly folded into a baked crumble with oatmeal, maple syrup and cinnamon. Thoughts about comfort food and culinary undertakings are a sure indication of autumn, all by themselves.

Life becomes quieter as daylight hours wane. Temperatures tumble, migratory kin leave, and the light changes - we drink every blessed thing in like wine. Gloves on our paws, and collars turned up against the wind, we ramble and ponder and feast our senses on the colors, sounds and spicy fragrances of autumn. Then we come home to tea and toast and molasses cookies at nightfall. It's all good.

Thursday Poem - Unchurched

It’s Earth that breathes around us,
so perilous in its comforts,
so perfect in impermanence.

Autumnal sun streams through
these yellow maple leaves
translucent as stained glass.

The ground beneath my feet
is strewn with pine cones, acorns.
The random pattern of continuance.

Etched columns of pine and oak.
Incense of resin and fungi.
Great glacial stones for altars.

High winds and choirs of
minor breezes, the whispering hush.
It is the Sabbath. It is enough.

Dolores Stewart (Riccio), from The Nature of Things

Dolores was my friend, and I miss her.

Wordless Wednesday - Harbinger

And there in the woods...

Spotted Jewelweed or Touch-Me-Not

(Impatiens capensis)

There is a whole thicket of these colorful critters flowering along the creek in the woods, and we (Beau and I) were happy to find them last weekend.

Jewelweed is a wild North American herbal with known medicinal benefits, one used by indigenous cultures for centuries. Infusions made with the leaves are used to treat measles and fevers, poultices with the bruised stems for the pain and itching of skin ailments like poison ivy, poison oak and poison sumac. The plant contains compounds which neutralize uroshiol, the chemical which causes contact dermatitis, and it is a splendid addition to one's wild medicine chest.

Jewelweed is also an important nectar source for hummingbirds, and they are usually about when it is in bloom. When hummers reach into the bell-shaped blooms with their long beaks and brush up against nearby seed pods, the pods explode, propelling the contents several feet into the air, hence another name, Touch-Me-Not. 

Although an annual, jewelweed is persistent and prolific. For years, I cultivated it in my garden, and thanks to the exploding seed pods, it showed up everywhere - keeping it in check was quite an undertaking. For all that, I have just harvested seeds from the thicket in the woods and am thinking about having another go. It is cheerful stuff, and I like the freckled faces on the blooms. In addition to being a "tried and true" wild medicinal, jewelweed also provides nourishment for hummers, bees and other insects, and that makes it a clear winner in my book.

Sequestered, Week 227 (CCXXVII)

Sunday, Saying Yes to the World

Those places where our spirit is in harmony with the landscape call to us. Some of us feel at home where we are born; others look for it in places they’ve never been but long to find. Discovering the source of our sense of place, belonging finally to and in a fixed and particular landscape engenders a kind of relationship. It makes us care for soil and air and water in a deep way we will not feel if the countryside around us is a franchised, faceless and anonymous blur.

Fred First, from What We Hold in Our Hands

Creeping Into Autumn

Friday Ramble - Demeter at the Gate

A single burnished leaf from the oak in my neighbor's front yard floats down and comes to rest in a pot of chrysanthemums on her threshold. The deep scarlet in the center of the "mums" matches the vibrant color of her front door, a cheerful thing and very welcoming. Days are still warm here for the most part, but nights are starting to cool down, and it won't be long until villagers have to carry flower pots indoors every evening as darkness falls and the wind comes out of the river.

As the oak leaf makes itself comfortable among the blooms, a long v-shaped skein of geese passes overhead, joyously honking on its way out to farm fields to feed. The great Canadas will return at sunset and spend the night on the river.

Closer to the earth, the swallows of summer are packing their flight bags and making ready to depart, their places on the village telephone wires to be taken by flocks of chirping sparrows and constellations of noisy starlings, who are donning winter plumage and swapping their yellow beaks for pecking equipment in darker shades.

Village squirrels are frantically filling their larders, and I have surrendered to the little blighters in the matter of geraniums - there does not seem to be much I can do to prevent the flowers from being unceremoniously tossed out of their pots and replaced with buried acorns, berries, crabapples and walnuts. For some reason, the squirrels leave chrysanthemums alone. The scent perhaps?

When I awakened this morning before sunrise, Mars and Jupiters were bright presences in the southeast quadrant, and the constellation Orion was rising below them, his club held high and his sword belt twinkling. The appearance of the mythical hunter is one of my seasonal markers. Fall is on its way for sure. 

Above us, autumn stars twinkle in the darkness. Here on earth, apples, corn, pumpkins and hay are ripening. There is no doubt about it—Demeter is at the gate, and she is rattling its rusty latch with enthusiasm. The lady knows the ancient cantrip that grants her entrance to these smoky northern hills, and she knows the key in which it is to be sung. This is my favorite time of the year.

Thursday Poem - Become Becoming

Wait for evening.

Then you'll be alone.

Wait for the playground to empty.

Then call out those companions from childhood:

The one who closed his eyes

and pretended to be invisible.

The one to whom you told every secret.

The one who made a world

of any hiding place.

And don't forget the one who listened in

silence while you wondered out loud:

Is the universe an empty mirror?

A flowering tree? Is the universe

the sleep of a woman?

Wait for the sky's last blue

(the color of your homesickness).

Then you'll know the answer.

Wait for the air's first gold (that

(color of Amen). Then you'll spy

the wind's barefoot steps.

Then you'll recall that story beginning

with a child who strays in the woods.

The search for him goes on in the growing

shadow of the clock.

And the face behind the clock's face

is not his father's face.

And the hands behind the clock's hands

are not his mother's hands.

All of Time began when you first answered

to the names your mother and father

gave you.

Soon, those names will travel with the leaves.

Then, you can trade places with the wind.

Then you'll remember your life as a book

of candles, each page read by the light

of its own burning.

Li-Young Lee from Behind My Eyes