The Peace of the Forest

"It is the peace of the forest that I carry inside."

Jane Goodall

Another view of my secluded grove in the Lanark woods where the water bubbles up from deep underground, sustaining my wildwood friends even in the depths of winter. The place sustains me as well - it enfolds me and holds me up, wherever I am and whatever I am doing.

The peace of the forest and its quiet water is something I carry within myself, and the sound always leads me back to where I should be.

Small Pleasures Revisited

Curious the things which bring one pleasure and comfort at restless and agitated times......

I was poking about in my photo archive late last evening and discovered this image which had been taken and uploaded over a year ago, then forgotten and left to languish in a file folder on this computer system. I remember thinking at the time what a glorious fall morning it was, how lovely the length of silvery old barnboard, how the bright leaf complimented the wood perfectly.

There are times when one needs to be in the presence of great mountains, tall trees and rushing water. There are other times when only an old length of barnboard and an autumn leaf will do.

This Old Door

Why has this particular mercury retrograde been such an ordeal? One expects things to become snarled up during retrogrades, missed deadlines, dropped messages, bungled communications, arguments and misunderstandings of various sorts.

At present I feel like this old granary door, all weathered planks and rusty hinges, fastened together crudely and by hand a long time ago. On winter days the wind whistles through the cracks and the hinges creak. The door seems to be in constant motion and looks as though it will come crashing down at any moment to spend the remainder of its lifespan as just a heap of splintered lumber in the paddock. Entropy is inevitable and only moments away.

I should forget about the cracks, the creaks and the moans. I should remember what fine stuff this old door is made of, oak harvested by hand, milled and planed and crafted into a portal which has been doing its job for well over a century now. I should remember the fine woodgrain, the silvery patina, the dry fragrance, how very beautiful it is.

Shame on me for being such a gloomy, saturnine and cantankerous old hen.

Water Under the Bridge

It was a chilly day at Dalhousie Lake, and the water under the old Geddes bridge was only a few degrees above freezing. As I stood under the bridge (and out of the wind), I found myself thinking about early morning visits there in the summer - I remembered the loons who nested on the lake and flew south in early October, the great blue heron who fished in the reeds at sunrise, the young otter who climbed onto one of these rocks and grinned up at me, displaying an amiable nature, avid curiosity and very sharp teeth. I remembered the vulture who perched on a fence one morning and spread his wings to dry in the sun, a flock of mergansers practicing takeoffs and landings in the bay.

If I listen carefully, I can hear the loons calling across the lake to each other on a summer morning not so long ago. In winter, such memories are nurturing and sustaining things.

Winter Trees

Morning in the Lanark woods, pale November sunlight coming through the evergreens, deep pools of shadow here and there.

Does it look cold? Among the old evergreens, I was sheltered from the wind and felt warm, contented and at peace, soft light coming through the branches above me, fresh snow crunching underfoot, the perfumes of cedar, spruce, pine and balsam filling the air.

Drifting Leaves

There were leaves everywhere a few weeks ago, and I made slow but happy progress on my weekend rambles through the woods. Every step was accompanied by the music of rustling leaves, and my meandering was punctuated by frequent pauses to look at the brilliant hues and patterns arrayed on the forest floor around me. No two leaves were alike - each possessed its own unique shape, fragrance, sound and coloration, and there were astonishing patterns everywhere I looked.

At this rate, I shall never make it as far as the back fence line, for I am always stopping to look at something along the way.

A Quiet Place in the Woods

It seems as though it was only a few days ago that I paused by this stream in the woods on a fall day and watched the cold clear water bubble up to the surface, rising through several hundred feet of subterranean granite to create a quiet shaded pool visited regularly by bears, wolves, deer and other forest residents. It was a burnished day in late autumn, and both the stream and the grove around it were dappled with fallen leaves, twigs, seeds and acorns.

Winter has arrived in the highlands, but water is still springing to the surface from somewhere far underground, and so my stream continues in its appointed task, that of providing a secluded and sheltered oasis for the creatures who share my few hundred acres of woodland.

Grandmother Birch

The old birch tree on the edge of my hill has lost her leaves to the wind, but she lifts her gnarled and whiskery branches to the morning sun and revels in the coming of another day. Do trees feel joy, and do they cultivate mindfulness? This one seems to do exactly that.

As years are reckoned by the calendar of the forest, my birch is old and a veritable grandmother among trees. Branches have been expiring and falling away from her for years, but she holds to earth and welcomes the sun.

Of Wood and Stone

Wood, stone and earth are the all-embracing features of my native landscape, both the landscape which exists within, and the one which is visible in the great wide world. Perhaps they are the same landscape after all? I spend my spare time (and my happiest time) pottering among the great trees and old stones of the Lanark Highlands, and on winter nights I often think of the wood and stone resting patiently beneath the snow.

There is Zen simplicity and winter clarity in this tableau of fallen maple in the embrace of old granite, fallen maple which is slowly turning back into earth.

The Morning Guest

Yesterday I awakened at sunrise as usual and went out to the kitchen to brew a pot of good dark Columbian coffee, opening the sliding doors onto the deck first to let Cassie go out into the garden and play in the snow which had fallen overnight. Like most German Shorthair Pointers, her enthusiasm for winter, snow and ice is a fleeting thing, and she does not remain outside long - she ran around the garden at top speed a few times, then raced back into the house when she started to feel the cold.

Still half asleep, I waited in the kitchen for the coffee to complete its burbling, then poured a large mug of lovely black stuff, added cream and took my morning potion into the dining room to drink quietly - I cherish this small early morning ritual, and it is how I always begin my day.

To my amazement, there in the dining room was a delicate house sparrow, perched contentedly on the back of a chair, warming himself in the pale morning sunlight coming in through the glass doors. What to do? I did not wish to alarm my small friend, so I slid the doors quietly open and waited nearby without moving. For a few moments the little cock sparrow looked around cautiously, then flew out through the open doorway, perching in a buckthorn bush several feet away and chirping merrily at me as he flew.

In summer my garden is full of birds at sunrise, and they are bright notes in a already colorful season. Cardinals, jays, flickers and house finches are among the frequent dabblers in the old stone birdbath, and I always enjoy watching their shenanigans, but the birds who visit my feeders in winter are a special gift. My winter visitors are less showy and less brilliantly feathered than their summer kin, but they are the wandering bards who faithfully visit my hearth in winter, and they remain true to the covenant formed many years ago, one in which nourishment and shelter are given in return for song and fellowship in the long nights time.

November Sunlight

November sunlight finds its way through an opening in an old barn wall, falling across hand hewn supports and heaps of straw in the corner left over from harvests long past.

Daylight is is paler, cooler and more slanted at this time of year when the Old Wild Mother is leaning away from the Sun. Shadows are longer, deeper and more attenuated, but winter sunlight has warming and endearing qualities all its own, and I am thankful for it. Each and every ray of sunlight, every dancing dust mote, carries an echo of summers past and a hint of the summers still to come.

How does one spend those brief and precious summer hours? If the summers already gone by are any indication, I will while away many twilight hours next year, just leaning on the old rail fence in Lanark and listening for the sound of owls hooting in the woods, for wolves howling somewhere over the hill and far away. At sunrise I will go into the woods and watch the Sun's flickering dance across the beech leaves, the angular play of light and shadow.

Countryside Dreaming the Moon

A few light snowfalls and the Lanark Highlands drift gently into winter sleep, the fields slumbering beneath their cloaks of withered corn, barley and grasses, a shallow drift of snow. The old cedar barn is creaking and groaning in the winter wind, the brittle trees on the ridge are coated in ice and sighing. How swiftly this all seems to come about.

For weeks in late autumn the whole landscape has seemed to be waiting for the arrival of something stark and undefined but dimly remembered and longed for after the long hot summer and arduous work of the harvest.

This season of snow and sleep wears no shape save that of the land itself and the structures placed on it long ago. Winter's moon has a dreaming companion in the earth below.

First Snow

A full moon and the first snowfall of the season - could one ask for more? Yesterday morning it snowed for the first time since last winter, and I was delighted. I love the first snow of the season. Wherever I am and whatever I am doing, when the first snow begins falling, I run outside to revel in the sudden appearance of sparkling white "stuff" which will be several feet deep here by the end of winter and too loathsome for mere words.

Some of my favourite works of art are ukiyoe and shinhanga woodblock prints, and many of those lovely creations are scenes depicting snow and temples in Japan, particularly in the city of Kyoto. I long to visit Kyoto, and to visit it in the depths of winter.

For those of us who are travellers (even wobbly or occasional travellers) on the Buddhist path, falling snow is a metaphor for enlightenment, a wise teacher and a Zen koan to be contemplated and worked out. Snow has its own majestic power, and it possesses incomparable beauty, an eloquence which speaks (or rather sings) volumes by virtue of the simple fact of its existence. There is a whiteness and cleanliness to new fallen snow which is fleeting and therefore poignant and suggestive, a deep and companionable silence in which everything and everyone is united. Snow does not discriminate in its whirling tumble to earth, it falls on everything it encounters without exception, and for a while we are all made new again.

Distant Shores

In honour of Saturn's second appearance, my slow and meandering (but nevertheless traumatic) journey into elder status and the fine adventures awaiting me somewhere up ahead on the trail, here is a photo of one of my favourite places on the planet, Old Woman Bay on the far northern shore of Lake Superior.

I have spent many happy weeks on this bay at one time or another in my life, splashing about for polished stones in the shallows, watching moose drinking on the shoreline, watching loons and mergansers navigate the deeper waters beyond the point and eagles glide into the big trees on the islands beyond.

On my library table is a set of runes painstakingly etched by me a few years ago, but polished first for several thousand years by the Old Wild Mother and her tempestuous lake in northern Ontario. Lake Superior is a geologist's dream, and there are treasures to be found all along her shores, but her waters are icy, even at the height of summer, and one does not enter them for more than a few minutes at a time.

After several years without dreaming at all, my dreams have just returned to me, and I am delighted. In my newfound crone dreams are fond memories of gliding eagles, the plangent music of northern loons and white capped waves striking a rocky shore. Am I a wild thing? Yes, I suppose I am...............

Stormy Weather

A wise friend noted recently that I have entered the period of my second Saturn return, and that mine is a Saturn return "with a vengeance". I am surprised that I didn't think of it myself. Saturn's second return is seldom a comfortable time, and one may expect tumultuous experiences and surprises by the dumpster when Saturn is making its second appearance in one's life, job losses, wrinkles, lost sleep and much worry about what lies ahead.

This is a time of reflection when one examines her life and comes to terms with things done and undone. She reflects upon the choices made on her journey so far and sorts through almost sixty years of life experiences, mining long ago events, forgotten dreams and painful decisions for clarity, wisdom and authenticity to take into her eldering years.

Human nature being what it is, our reflections are bound to be both bitter and sweet, and perhaps that is just as it should be. One cannot build a future entirely on sunny afternoons and gentle breezes - one also needs to carry along strong memories of driving rain, the kind of lightening that "paints the sky" and some good rolling thunder.

I am not sure where this trail is leading me or where it will end, but that doesn't matter at all. There are fine adventures waiting for me somewhere up ahead, and it is the journey which matters, not the destination. Job or no job, it feels good to be on this road, and besides, I've always loved driving rain and thunderstorms.

November Poem on the Hill in Lanark

A crunching frost last evening in the highlands,
the lambent moon high above the trees,
an embracing darkness and the
aurora borealis dancing over the hill.
November stillness moving like a shadow
down the trail below the oak trees at twilight.

Winter stirs among the short days,
the whisper of cold moons to come,
the rattling dry breath of the long nights,
like these old bones that move creaking
through the brown grass, dead leaves and fallen twigs

Patterns everywhere, and not of my making,
but the Old Wild Mother's weaving,
marbled stones, hoary branches, mottled leaves,
prints of wolf and deer along the trail,
puddles deep in the wooded hollows rimed with ice,
shreds of tattered birch bark blowing free.

There are ghost scents on the wind this evening,
of fresh turned earth and summer fields,
There are echoes of the wild geese going south,
the old rail fence creaking when I leaned on it at dusk in June.
If I listen, I can hear the stream moving away in the gorge.
"Rest now sister," it tells me in its hollow voice.
"Rest you now, for all things turn in time, and we,
like the seasons, must await the time of our tuning."

We Are Light

"I come from nowhere. I come from everywhere. I am one. I am many. I am as we are – eternal, out of time."
Le Cirque de Soleil, Saltimbanco

“We are the Light, open, released over and over again.”
Martha Glessing, Wind Cloud

During the last day or two, I have been reading (again) the late Martha Glessing’s exquisite novel “Wind Cloud”, and Light is much on my mind at the moment: the sunlight coming through my kitchen window now in early morning, moonlight and starlight in the evening, flickering firelight in the old brick fireplace downstairs, the golden halo of the beeswax candle I light before beginning my morning and evening meditations, the glowing tip of a wand of smouldering sweetgrass incense.

Our lives, the lives of those who share this planet with us, the life of the planet itself and the calendar of the seasons are in an eternal dance, all of us spiraling endlessly round the Sun. We ourselves are made of light - we are creatures forged from the dust of stars which once shone brilliantly in the heavens and which may have ceased to exist millennia ago. Within the cells of my present metabolism are encoded the wisdom of the earth, the stories of ancient cultures, the star knowledge of unknown (as yet) constellations and "The Big Bang" which is thought to have engendered not only our own precious world, but our whole universe too.

The stardust of which we are made is in essence recycled matter, having assembled into diverse life forms over and over again, lived and died as those life forms, then dissolved back into the cosmic sea countless times. In our time, “we” have been many things, have worn many shapes and answered to many names. In this lifetime I exist as a tatterdemalion, specific and perhaps unique collection of molecules called Catherine or Cate, but in previous appearances I was someone or something altogether different:

I have been a tree with its roots reaching deep into the good dark earth,
I have been a lake sparkling in the sunlight,
I have been a hawk in rapturous flight,
I have been a dolphin dancing in the ocean,
I have been a mountain dreaming under the moon.

Buddhism and the teachings of other ancient cultures offer us a seamless paradigm, one in which we are all connected and exist in fundamental harmony, if only we had the vision and wit to recognize it. Within the glowing paradigm of such teachings, I am an ecstatically dancing creature who is made of light and stardust, and once upon a time I was a mountain - what a lovely thing to have been a mountain.

Zen Moon and Canada Geese

Last evening around ten o’clock I wrapped up in my favorite old jacket and shawl and went outside for a hour or so with my dog, Cassie. It was a glorious night, cold and clear, and when I looked up, the stars were so close that one could almost reach out and touch them. Southeasterly, Orion was just rising above the horizon, and in the southwest, a radiant moon was riding high and almost full. Now and then a skein of Canada geese flew across that radiant moon on their way south, and I wished that I had taken my camera outside with me to record such rare and shining moments. The brief appearance of the migrating geese against the moon now and again was a clear signal that deep winter is on its way, something which I have known in my blood and bones for some time now.

Last evening the moon above me was a perfect Zen moon. It seemed silly in the presence of such spare and regal luminescence to think about the past or linger on the myriad possibilities of my uncertain employment future. To paraphrase a few words from Cad Goddeu, an ancient Welsh poem in the Book of Taliessin, I "knew the light whose name is Splendour". In the deep cold of my quiet city garden, I breathed in and out and was perfectly content to rest in the moment.

November Thoughts

It is a classic November day here in eastern Ontario, bleak and grey, windy and somber. I am on vacation this week, and on long walks with my dog through the village of Westboro, I turn the collar of my coat up against the wind and am careful to wear heavy gloves and a warm scarf. It will not be long until snow falls, and the monotone palette of the streets is replaced by a different palette, one in which the principal colours are pristine shades of white, cream and the palest ice blue.

I have much to think about on my walks this week. After several years of frenetic and enjoyable activity, my employment in a large law firm in Ottawa is coming to an end. The firm is undergoing corporate reorganization, and my graphic design/publishing position will be eliminated at the end of December. This has been a shock and a rude awakening. I had assumed (silly me) that I would remain with the organization until I chose to retire a few years hence. One would think that by this late time in life I would have renounced the practice of making foolish and mundane assumptions, but (alas) it was not so.

While the firm has been generous in its severance package, the future is suddenly filled with uncertainty. At the age of fifty-six, I must make plans for a new future, one which does not include the many good friends and interesting assignments which have comprised my working life for so many years. What is to come, and what shape will my future wear?

Canto for the Moon and Stars

My apologies to Clarissa Pinkola Estes, whose splendid book, "Women Who Run With the Wolves", inspired every word of the poem below.

I am searching for the ancestral burial ground.
I am looking for my scattered bones.
By lantern light and candlelight, by moonlight and starlight,
I wander the bosky hills and chambered fields,
Searching always for the bones, the bones.
I wander here, there and everywhere,
Unearthing the bones from forgotten and far flung places,
Listening always for their haunting voices in the depths of night.
The bones lift their voices to the hills,
They sing of treed and rocky places,
They sing of the ever turning seasons.
They sing of a wisdom both wild and rooted,
Of community and a fierce compassion which knows no bounds.
They sing of ancient sisters, of sisters in the now
And of sisters still to come,
All sisters joined and traveling on together.
They sing of a circular journey taken hand in hand,
Of a journey which has no beginning and knows no end.
Oh, listen to the bones!