After the Rain

Bloodroot
(Sanguinaria canadensis)

Within a few minutes of the sunlight which followed Sunday's early morning rain, the Bloodroot in the Lanark Highlands unfurled themselves - they opened up and started to bloom like a thousand little suns in the woodland, all glowing white petals and golden centres.

The Old Wild Mother (it seems) has a particular love of white and gold in springtime.

Wet and Greening

Dutchman's Breeches (Dicentra cucullaria)

Yesterday it rained steadily in Lanark and the terrain of the Two Hundred Acre Woods was full of the sounds of courting birds in the overstory, hidden waterfalls and rain dripping off the trees.

We set out in early morning to traverse the place and wander the heights and valleys, booted, wearing our oilskins and entertaining wistful hopes of seeing bloodroot (Sanguinaria canadensis)) and trout lilies (Erythronium americanum) unfurled and blooming in the woodland, one of our markers for spring.

There were leaves of both species in abundance everywhere, but each and every bloom was closed tightly against the gloom, holding its heart safe and shuttered in readiness for a sunnier time. There were, however, Dutchman's Breeches (Dicentra cucullaria) everywhere we looked, lovely great clouds of feathery grey-green foliage annointed with sparkling raindrops, the ornate and eccentric white and yellow flowers nodding above.

This early bloomer is a creature of deciduous woodland, of gentle slopes, gorges and the fertile shelves along wandering forest streams, and its preferred native place is one which has never been harrowed or tilled. Yesterday, the most magnificent clump of the day was about twenty feet up an almost vertical rock face, and it seemed to revel in the rain and the wet.

Purple Vision

Is there a colour more vibrant and uplifting in springtime than this glowing, almost incandescent purple?

This is the only purple crocus blooming in the garden behind the little blue house in the village this year, although there are a number of striped specimens in flower. I planted at least a hundred of these glorious creatures last autumn, but my fellow gardeners (the squirrels) have replanted them all over the village, and only this single vivid solid purple specimen remains in the garden under the big ash tree.

The neighbours who were gifted with crocus bulbs by my furry little friends are surprised and delighted too.

Mama Says Om - Sex

We are finally on our way into the green heart of springtime, and all nature seems to be preoccupied with sex and proliferation now, with the continuation of multitudinous species and the proliferation of their genes.

For several days I have been watching sparrows, starlings, blackbirds and various finches flying to and fro with bits of string, birch bark and plant fibres in their beaks, all focused with clear and present intention on sex, fertility, the making of nests and the raising up of tribe and family.

The fuzzy brood raised by a pair of Great Horned Owls in the old oak tree on the Two Hundred Acre Wood in Lanark are adolescents now, but the birds with whom they share the forest (and which form the main part of their diet) are building their own nests and creating stable and secure nurseries in which to raise their own broods.

In springtime, the Green Man is abroad in the landscape, and nature is a lusty being indeed. When I think of greening, fertility and sex (as one inevitably does in springtime), it is the Greater Canadas who come to mind, because I see the great geese everywhere I look - their stately elegant presences and their nests adorn almost every field and hollow. My favorite birds (along with the herons) are lifelong mates, and they are splendid parents. Goose and gander care for one another, tend the nest and nurture the goslings when they hatch. In late summer, there are flotillas of geese on all the local waterways looking like toy trains and pull toys: the proud mother goose in the lead, her goslings swimming along behind her one after the other with their heads bobbing, the father goose at the rear, keeping a watchful eye out for avian predators and snapping turtles.

The deer (of course) do things a little differently - they perform their antler dances and courting rites in late autumn, and their delicately freckled fawns will be making their first appearances in the fields of the Lanark Highlands any day now.

Such springtime scenes are vivid reminders of my younger days, and they make for much musing about our own human courting rites and nesting endeavours, as generally defined by the cultures into which we were born (in this lifetime anyway).

Written for the beauteous and ever blooming mamas who tend their flocks, the spirit of mindfulness, compassion and the creative flame at Mama Says Om.

Thursday Poem - When Loneliness Comes Stalking

When loneliness comes stalking, go into the fields, consider

the orderliness of the world. Notice
something you have never noticed before,

like the tambourine sound of the snow-cricket
whose pale green body is no longer than your thumb.

Stare hard at the hummingbird, in the summer rain,
shaking the water-sparks from its wings.

Let grief be your sister, she will whether or not.
Rise up from the stump of sorrow, and be green also,
like the diligent leaves.

A lifetime isn't long enough for the beauty of this world
and the responsibilities of your life.

Scatter your flowers over the graves, and walk away.
Be good-natured and untidy in your exuberance.

In the glare of your mind, be modest.
And beholden to what is tactile, and thrilling.

Live with the beetle, and the wind.

Mary Oliver
(excerpt from Flare, The Leaf and the Cloud)

Willowing Along

These are the greening male (staminate) catkins of the Pussy Willow (salix discolor) somewhat further along on their springtime journey and looking furry and exuberant against the clear blue sky this morning, a little after sunrise.

In early spring, the buds were grey, silky and as lush as an otter's pelt, and we loved the willows for their abundant furry buds, but first and foremost, their flowering was a sure sign that Spring was on its way, hence their popularity as decorative elements in the little blue house in the village.

The male and female flowers of this rowdy spring blooming little tree or shrub are borne on separate specimens, and the early male flowers are a treasure trove for the first bees of spring and other pollen seeking insects. This morning I was delighted to see that my little willow was chock full of rapturously foraging bees — the air was full of their happy buzzing.

Could there be a better motif for Earth Day than these exuberant willow catkins dancing in the breeze? There is a haiku sequence for Earth Day here.

Jewels in the Morning Grass

Heirloom Striped Crocus

Crocus vernus, "King of the Striped"

Blooming

Round-lobed Hepatica (Hepatica americana)

Oh joy, my favorite springtime wildflowers were indeed blooming in their woodland grove yesterday, almost a mile from the front gate of the Two Hundred Acre Wood. As tiny as they were, one could see them from quite a distance because of their almost neon lavender (sometimes snowy white or vivid pink ) sepals and their lavishly fringed hearts.

These are Round-lobed Hepatica (Hepatica americana) although Sharp-lobed Hepatica (Hepatica acutiloba) also grows on our place in the Lanark Highlands. It is always difficult to figure out which hepatica are round lobed and which are sharp lobed — the blooms lift their heads out of deep drifts of last autumn's leaves accumulating in the nooks and crannies of old limestone rock faces, and the leaves are seldom visible at this time of year when riotous flowering is the order of the day. Over the last few years, I have spent a fair amount of time on hands and knees peering into piles of dead leaves in April and trying to figure which of the hepaticas I was looking at. Perhaps small things amuse small minds?

Our first woodland bloomers also go by the names of squirrel cup, snow trillium, mayflower, blue anemone, kidneywort, liver-leaf and liverwort — their triple lobed (round or pointed) dark green leathery leaves resemble human livers or kidneys. What appear to be the petals of this delicately glowing wildflower are actually conjoined sepals and not petals at all.

There is some dissension in the world of botany about where the hepaticas actually belong. They are usually considered to be spritely members of their own genus hepatica, but there are still a few botanists out there who class them as genus anemone instead — Lawrence Newcomb and John Eastman classify the hepaticas as being members in good standing of genus hepatica, while Audubon prefers to treat them as anemone. The springtime blooms do resemble those of the northern Wood Anemone (Anemone quinquefolia) and the much bigger Canada Anemone (Anemone canadensis) which flowers here several weeks later. For practical purposes, hepaticas and anemones share a common phylum, class, order and family, but there seems to be a general parting of the ways when it comes down to genus, with one group opting for genus hepatica and the other plumping for genus anemone.

Yesterday, I really didn't care about phylum, class, order, family or genus — I was just happy to see hepaticas in bloom and know that greening has begun in my native place.

First Spring Ramble

Dutchman's Breeches

Wild Leeks

The first real spring ramble is always a treat, and something I look forward to in the dark days of winter. On an April morning, one goes out to the woods in her warm anorak, gloves and boots and laden down with camera, camera bag and lenses, compass and water bottle. When she arrives, she discovers that there is no need for an anorak and gloves at all - it is a day for happy twittening, sunlight, birdsong, greenery and short sleeves.

Everything in the landscape exists in a stronger light in April, each sprout and tendril alight in a realm where the trees have yet to burst into a leafy (and sheltering) splendour, and the sunlight paints every stone and branch and lichen with intense gold. Yesterday, the woods were also full of waterfall music and the cries of courting birds.

On the moist ground near the creek, the first fronds of Dutchman's Breeches were already poking their heads out, and the vigorous clumps of Wild Leeks which I discovered last year at this time were well up, a dazzling earthbound bouquet of green among the drifts of dead leaves remaining from last autumn.

I know a sunny secluded slope a mile from the main gate where the Hepatica are probably in bloom now, and this morning, they are calling.

Green and Gold

Mama Says Om - Silence

Silence...

It's that perfect interstice between one gust of springtime wind and the next, an incandescent interval at twilight when the setting sun illuminates a melt pool in the park, turning the water and reflected trees a brilliant gold as one stands nearby open-mouthed.

It's the space between one bead on a rosary or mala and the next — it's the mute and eloquent distance between two words in a tale or narrative, the quiet mindful expanse between the opening chime of the zendo bell and the one which closes our meditations. Is anything ever really finished or over?

One always seem to be reaching for silence and stillness, and occasionally one finds it as I did last evening while walking in the park at sunset. In small everyday silences, one dwells (however briefly) in mindfulness and infinite possibility: rooted, connected, one with the whole world and everything going on in it, the suffering, breathing, flowing, becoming and occasional blooming.

Silence is a song, a prayer, a benediction, and there is too little of it in modern life. Sometimes, we need to be able to hear ourselves think — or better still, not think anything at all, just show up and BE there.

Written for the shining mamas at Mama Says Om.

Thursday Poem - The Task

It is a simple garment, this slipped-on world.
We wake into it daily — open eyes, braid hair —
a robe unfurled
in rose-silk flowering, then laid bare.

And yes, it is a simple enough task
we've taken on,
though also vast:
from dusk to dawn,

from dawn to dusk, to praise, and not
be blinded by the praising.
To lie like a cat in hot
sun, fur fully blazing,

and dream the mouse;
and to keep too the mouse's patient, waking watch
within the deep rooms of the house,
where the leaf-flocked

sunlight never reaches, but the earth still blooms.

Jane Hirshfield, The Task

A haiku sequence for this week is here.

Wordless By the River

Sadness

What does one say on a morning like this after so many precious young lives have been violently snuffed out by a deranged killer, all their beauty and brightness, their youthful spirit and their promise brought to a bloody end?

Even the Tibetan bells on the terrace are silent this morning. There are no words for such tragedy, only this deep aching sadness.

Revisiting Winter

Yesterday was dim and dark and rainy, but it was mild and the entire neighbourhood was out and about in the wet. Enfolded in springtime thoughts, we turned over our collections of clay pots, our bins of compost and our sacks of rich dark earth for the green gardening days ahead.

We were all thinking happily of sowing packets of seeds in sunlight and laying out flats of bright spring flowers and there was much joyous natter as we pottered about in our oilskins and rubber boots.



This morning I awakened to the sound of wind in the gutters and the little blue house creaking like an old wooden schooner sailing upriver, the muffled thump of snow falling off the roof. When I pulled the draperies open and looked out into the garden with coffee in hand, there were several inches of fluffy sparkling whiteness draped over the trees, the still dreaming garden beds and the shrubberies - the day looked rather like one in early January, but somewhat milder.

Does one draw the draperies closed again (and quickly), shutting out such a day amid morose thoughts, muted squawks of protest and expressions of gloom? No, it is a beautiful day for all that, and the pristine sparkle of the abundant flakes and gentle snowfall are lovely to see from my kitchen window. The village is out and about again this morning, but we are wearing woollies rather than oilskins, and we are carrying snow shovels rather than our garden spades.

First snow, then compost, then snow again. . . one who lives this far north becomes acquainted with oscillating weather at the cusp of the seasons. All is change and flow.

For June Callwood

June Callwood paddled her own canoe all the way, and she did it with heart, courage, compassion and great determination, often upstream, against the current, the prevailing winds and the odds.

When I was growing up, June was one of the first (and only) strong female voices I encountered in public life, and therefore she was something of a role model in my younger days. Canadian journalism will be a different place and in many ways a poorer place without her wise, independent and iconclastic presence.

If you are a user of cosmetics, this is interesting and illuminating reading.

First Sunflower

Mama Says Om - Peace

Most of us think wistfully about peace now and then, and we think about what will befall those who come after us, our children, our grandchildren and their children, but it is not enough merely to think about peace from time to time and entertain fond hopes. We have to place love, interconnection, peace and the moving breathing cultivation of peace at the core of our lives — at the very centre and heart of our existence.

We have to become peace ourselves. We must become Shambala warriors, and as such, we will have to wage peace with as much (or even more) commitment, diligence, tenacity and focused heart as those who wage war and take pleasure in its inexorable carnage, suffering and destruction. There must be peace in every breath we draw and peace in every footstep we take — there must be peace in everything.

Wage Peace with your breath.
Breathe in firemen and rubble.
Breathe out whole buildings and flocks of red-wing blackbirds.
Breathe in terrorists.
Breathe out sleeping children and fresh mown fields.
Breathe in confusion and breathe out maple trees.
Breathe in the fallen and breathe out life long relationships intact.
Wage peace with our listening: hearing sirens, pray loud.
Remember your tools: flower seeds, clothing pins, clean rivers.
Make soup.
Play music; learn the word "thank you" in 3 languages.
Learn to knit: make a hat.
Think of chaos as dancing raspberries.
Imagine grief
as the outbreak of beauty or gesture of fish.
Swim for the other side.
Wage peace.
Never has the word seemed so fresh and precious.
Have a cup of tea and rejoice.
Act as if armistice has already arrived.
Celebrate today.

Judyth Hill, Wage Peace

Written for the remarkable mamas at Mama Says Om with thanks. They are truly an inspiration to all of us.

Thursday Poem - The Real Work

It may be that when we no longer know what to do

we have come to our real work,

and that when we no longer know which way to go
we have come to our real journey.

The mind that is not baffled is not employed.

The impeded stream is the one that sings.

Wendell Berry, The Real Work
(from Collected Peoms)

Sign of Spring in Lanark

The Latin words at the bottom of the image (above) read, "Let us rejoice, for spring is here." The roadside exclamation in the Lanark Highlands tickled my fancy greatly when I encountered it a few days ago, and I made a note to find out who the puckish (and ecstatic) Latin scholar is.

There are infinite possibilities to be explored here. Perhaps the scholar and I can meet for tea now and again and trade murky Latin puns. Perhaps she or he possesses a Latin edition of Winnie the Pooh (Winnie Ille Pu) or The House at Pooh Corner (Winnie Ille Pu Semper Ludet) and we can read aloud to one another.

Companion

Red Squirrel (Tamiasciurus hudsonicus)

also known as the Pine Squirrel or Chickaree

The Sound of Snow

A classic northern Easter day, the perfect waning moon seen at dawn for a only moment, the birds singing chill in the garden at first light, drifts of ethereal cloud in the early blue, then mist and a slow greyness creeping in from somewhere over the Gatineaux hills and far away.

There were torrents of snow falling soft on the Clyde river yesterday, over the fields and through the bare trees. It was so quiet by the river that one could hear the snow falling and coming to rest on old wood and water and stone. Listen, can you hear it?

Easter Morn

This morning, there is a brilliant waning moon rising into the cold grey sky. There is fresh whiteness resting on the earth in the garden and a frozen pool of glassy water in the heart of the ice rimed birdbath - there is a light snap and a crackling as the birds dance from twig to brittle twig among the shrubberies and do a little chilled Easter singing of their own to greet the day.

Yesterday there was a storm in the woods in Lanark, but I wandered in the dank cold for an hour or two, filled with relief and humble gratitude for Barb's deliverance from la segadora (the reaper), with a grizzled head full of wintry Easter thoughts and the camera carefully shielded from the falling snow. After only a few clicks, my fingers were turning as blue as the creek at my feet, and back into the heavy gloves they went.

Strange imagery for Easter weekend perhaps, but this is the way my part of this perfect little blue planet usually looks on Easter weekend. Somewhere below the ice in my hidden woodland clearing, there was water running free and singing a doxology - I could hear it yesterday, and the flow is still percolating in my thoughts this Easter morning.

Yes indeed, there is rising, and there is light here among the icicles and the snow.

Happy Easter

Around the time of Easter, one is grateful for springtime, for warmth, gradually lengthening days and more sunlight, but this morning there is more than the usual helping of gratitude in the air, and there is relief too.

I've written a few scraps early in the morning for the last several days but my thoughts have been elsewhere and trained almost entirely on other matters. A much loved family member has just returned home from hospital after undergoing radical surgery for ovarian cancer, and I am feeling very thankful indeed, thankful that the surgery appears to have been successful, that Barb is home again, that she is in good spirits, that she is mending fast and that she is not in much pain (or so she says anyway).

This was not my sister-in-law's first brush with cancer, and several months ago, we were sure we were going to lose her. The world would be an infinitely poorer place without her goodness and common sense, her wisdom and droll sense of humour, her sweet and giving nature. I love her fiercely, and it is hard to picture life without her.

Happy Easter, and over the next few days, I shall try to catch up on visiting all of you, writing messages and pottering about here in the wonderful world of blog.

Thursday Poem - Testimony

I want to tell you that the world
is still beautiful.
I tell you that despite
children raped on city streets,
shot down in school rooms,
despite the slow poisons seeping
from old and hidden sins
into our air, soil, water,
despite the thinning film
that encloses our aching world.
Despite my own terror and despair.

I want you to know that spring
is no small thing, that
the tender grasses curling
like a baby's fine hairs around
your fingers are a recurring
miracle. I want to tell you
that the river rocks shine
like God, that the crisp
voices of the orange and gold
October leaves are laughing at death,

I want to remind you to look
beneath the grass, to note
the fragile hieroglyphs
of ant, snail, beetle. I want
you to understand that you
are no more and no less necessary
than the brown recluse, the ruby-
throated hummingbird, the humpback
whale, the profligate mimosa.
I want to say, like Neruda,
that I am waiting for
"a great and common tenderness",
that I still believe
we are capable of attention,
that anyone who notices the world
must want to save it.

Rebecca Baggett, Testimony (for my daughters)
(from Women's Uncommon Prayers)

Nested

I always enjoy finding last year's nests in the woods, and the vireo's nest found near the creek on Sunday was the most astonishing one yet: a complex and elegant creation into which were interwoven most (if not all) of the essential elements of the north woods where it came into being.

Its delicate cupped shape was suspended between the forked branches of a young cherry tree on the hill above the fast flowing creek, and the maker had done an astonishing job of incorporating all sorts of natural materials into it: birch bark, the paper from abandoned wasps' nests, grasses, roots, bits of grapevine, mosses and lichens. it was fastened to the branch with what looked like tiny grapevine fibres, spider silk and strands from caterpillar cocoons.

I was so fascinated by the nest that it was several minutes before I realized that the young cherry in which it (the nest) resides is budding out exuberantly. My word, I shall have to do better than that.

April's Full Seed Moon

April's moon is one of bare trees and spectacular inky darkness as dense and shiny as a raven's wing. There's a richness to the night sky in April, a sense of mystery, of waiting, burgeoning and great events in motion.

Now and then flights of geese are silhouetted across the moon, and their happy homeward honking fills the air. The rising moon is so bright that it dazzles the eyes, and in its corners, the darkness is almost the same intensity as the deep purple hyacinth blooming on the old oak table in the dining room. Night's fragrance is something very different though - something wild, impatient, anxious to be off and running and very earthy.

We also know this moon as: Ashes Moon, Awakening Moon, Big Spring Moon, Black Oaks Tassel Moon, Broken Snowshoe Moon, Budding Time Moon, Budding Trees Moon, Bullhead Moon, Cherry Blossom Moon, Daisy Moon, Egg Moon, Eoster Moon, Fish Moon, Flower Moon, Fourth moon, Frog Moon, Glittering Snow on Lake Moon, Grass Moon, Gray Goose Moon, Great Sand Storm Moon, Green Grass Moon,, Growing Moon, Half Spring Moon, Hare Moon, Ice Breaking in the River Moon, Kutios Moon, Leaf Split Moon, Loon Moon, Maple Sap Boiling Moon, Moon of Greening, Moon of the Big Leaves, Moon of the Red Grass Appearing, Moon of Windbreak, Moon When Geese Return in Scattered Formation, Moon When Nothing Happens, Moon When the Geese Lay Eggs, Moon When They Set Indian Corn, Ostara Moon,, Peony Moon, Pink Moon, Planter's Moon, Planting Corn Moon, Planting Moon, Poinciana Moon, Red Grass Appearing Moon, Ring Finger Moon, Snowshoe Breaking Moon, Spring Moon, Sprouting Grass Moon, Strawberry Moon, Strong Moon, Sugar Maker Moon, Sweet Pea Moon, Sxánel Moon, Tulip Moon, White Lady Moon, Wildcat Moon, Willow Moon, Wind Moon, Wisteria Moon, Yellow Moon

Of all the names for this month's springtime moon, "White Lady Moon" is probably my favourite. There is a Monday haiku sequence here.

Liquid Choreography

Water. . . .

The sound of ten thousand springs released from their wintery prisons and flowing freely in Lanark Highlands. The bubbling, sparkling and mad euphoric gurgling is the background music of spring coming to the north woods, a choreography born of riotous tumbling waters, little geysers and whirlpools here and there, twigs, small stones, floating leaves and tiny glassy icicles.

The harmonies being sung in counterpoint are vast waves of geese passing overhead, the raucous chant of jays in the overstory, the soft hooting of our resident Great Horned Owls as they tend their young in the old oak tree on the other side of the creek, the sharp cries of a pair of Red-tailed Hawks circling high in the blue.

For the most part, the returning Turkey Vultures are silent, but their very flight is an eloquent song. As unappealing as it appears on the ground, cathartes aura is poetry in motion up there riding the early morning thermals, and its effortless soaring is a thing of incomparable beauty.

Who needs anything else?

One Golden Morning

Saturday morning's offering was a Great Blue Heron, the first visitor of the season observed standing thoughtfully on a fallen log at the edge of the beaver pond around nightfall. There was no tripod employed and no tricks used that evening, but the Old Wild Mother and the Norns were kind, and the telephoto lens was already mounted on the camera when I encountered the heron. I think it was a female, although it is almost impossible to differentiate between female and male herons, either standing majestically in one's beaver pond or flapping elegantly overhead in flight with their long legs trailing behind them. I didn't want to disturb my pensive visitor and didn't use the flash on the camera, reluctant to intrude on what was a perfect (and seemingly timeless) moment by the beaver pond at dusk in spring.

There's a small morale or lesson to this encounter with the heron - last year I prowled my beaver ponds and nearby lakes endlessly in the quest for a reasonably good heron picture, achieving only a single gracefully silhouetted image in the golden shallows of Dalhousie Lake one fine summer night.

This year, I resolved to let go of the almost obsessive desire to photograph a Geat Blue, to cultivate patience and watchfulness and "just let things be". I resolved to make my visits to the beaver pond and the woods without any expectations whatsoever and to accept gratefully whoever and whatever presented itself to me there. Lo and behold, there was a heron there on the shore Friday, and she was magnificent in every way. Any words about her tucked into yesterday's post would have been inadequate - they would also have been superfluous, redundant and completely "over the top".

Yesterday there were no herons to be seen, but there were geese in profusion, and the air around the Clyde river was full of their blissful honking and splashing. "We're back", they sang, "we're back, we're back, we're back!"