Bird on a Wire

Red-shouldered Hawk
(Buteo lineatus)

Mantis Prayers

Praying Mantis
(Mantid religiosa)

Mantids are not native of course, but they do turn up occasionally on the Two Hundred Acre Wood. When they do, I never to fail marvel at their color and elegant physique. Yesterday, I suddenly remembered having one as a pet when I was seven years old.

This male (I think it was a male from its robust movement in the air) zoomed over my shoulder in splendid swooping silvery green flight, then perched in a small hazelnut tree nearby. Although the late summer wind was vigorous and buffeting everything it could reach, the mantis stayed on its leaf for some time, and not even Spencer's exuberant dancing through the shrubbery below seemed to bother him.

Pardon the photos, but there was a LOT of wind, and I could get no closer - there was a wicked thicket of blackberry canes between myself and the bug. It was hot and humid, but we just had to be out of the village for a while and out in the wildnesses.

Friday Ramble - Collision

"If you surrender to the wind, you can ride it."
Toni Morrison

The word collision comes from the Latin collisio, collidere meaning "to dash or strike together, a compound of com meaning together and lædere meaning to "to strike". For some reason, my mind also connects with the unrelated but similar sounding Latin laetare, the singular imperative form of laetari meaning "to be joyful".

One tends to think of collision as connoting violent interaction, but it does not have to be that way. The striking of a clapper against the interior of the bell, the creak of an old water wheel as water, wood and stone meet and contend within its slow, ceaseless and seemingly effortless rounding, the interplay of rocks and falling water, the sound of a sea of liberated pebbles and small stones rolling downhill (myself rattling and bumping along among them like a graceless chunk of weathered granite), the willows on the ridge in flowing Tai Chi movement as they contend with the wind on an autumn day - all are collisions of a sort, but they are interactions (or contentions) without violence for the most part.

This morning I can hear my tattered lung-ta (wind horses or prayer flags) fluttering among the trees in the garden as I tap away here - each flag with its central steed, its snow lion, garuda, dragon and tiger. It is most likely the lingering legacy of many years spent toiling away in the entrails of large urban corporations, but I often have to remind myself in these quieter times to treat life's encounters as opportunities for listening, flowing and peaceful connection rather than endless tourneys of collision, contention and (at times) blazing fireworks. The tattered wind horses and their guardian creatures are excellent reminders.

The task is one of surrendering to life and the wind and figuring out how to ride them, how to bend and flow like wind horses or thickets of flexible bamboo rather than treating everything as an occasion for shouting, head banging and collision. Bamboo doesn't grow this far north, but my short mantra for the ongoing exercise is "bamboo". Between health issues and computer gremlins, there have been many times in recent months when I trotted out the mantra out and used it - ardently.

Thursday Poem - Words

The world does not need words. It articulates itself
in sunlight, leaves, and shadows. The stones on the path
are no less real for lying uncatalogued and uncounted.
The fluent leaves speak only the dialect of pure being.
The kiss is still fully itself though no words were spoken.

And one word transforms it into something less or other--
illicit, chaste, perfunctory, conjugal, covert.
Even calling it a kiss betrays the fluster of hands
glancing the skin or gripping a shoulder, the slow
arching of neck or knee, the silent touching of tongues.

Yet the stones remain less real to those who cannot
name them, or read the mute syllables graven in silica.
To see a red stone is less than seeing it as jasper--
metamorphic quartz, cousin to the flint the Kiowa
carved as arrowheads. To name is to know and remember.

The sunlight needs no praise piercing the rainclouds,
painting the rocks and leaves with light, then dissolving
each lucent droplet back into the clouds that engendered it.
The daylight needs no praise, and so we praise it always--
greater than ourselves and all the airy words we summon.

Dana Gioia
(from Interrogations at Noon)

On the Library Table: The Divine Circle of Ladies Rocking the Boat

The Divine Circle of Ladies Rocking the Boat: The 6th Cass Shipton Adventure
by Dolores Stewart Riccio

This is the sixth enchanting volume in "The Divine Circle of Ladies" series by Dolores Stewart Riccio. As the novel begins, Deidre's husband has passed away, and the other four members of the Plymouth circle (or coven) have resolved to take Deidre on a Caribbean cruise to cheer her up. Arrangements have been made for a leisurely voyage on the good Liberian ship "The Norse Goddess of the Sea" right through the Bermuda Triangle and on to Bermuda, just in time to celebrate Samhain (Halloween) on a tropical island beach.

Herbalist Cassandra Shipton's husband, Joe Ulysses, a marine engineer with Greenpeace, has volunteered to stay home and tend both altar fires and canines. Cass, Phillipa, Heather, Fiona and Deidre are looking forward to a relaxing holiday on the high seas, far from murderers, thieves, vandals, poisoners and arsonists. Little do they know that their cruise is to be anything but peaceful...

Before leaving home, the clairvoyant Cass has a vision of a young woman in a shroud falling away into darkness, and her coven mate turns up the Ten of Swords in a tarot reading, a card portending dire misfortune and possibly death. Within a short time of arriving on the ship, it becomes clear that a restful holiday is not in the cards for the five pagan sleuths. The cabin which Deidre is sharing with her two older children is haunted by a phantom female presence wearing a lace veil and a seaweed draped wedding gown, and Cass's visions return again and again. The circle decides to investigate and learns that on the previous voyage, a young woman on her honeymoon vanished without a trace. When a spell of rough weather sets in, and a second young woman vanishes, the five women realize that a murderer is on board and plying his deadly trade. The murderer manages to convince the authorities on the ship that he is innocent, but the circle knows better. When the evildoer follows the women back to Plymouth, intending to silence them forever, he comes to a salty end, and his drowning may have been arranged by his victims, acting from the bottom of the sea.

I've been a devoted fan of "The Divine Circle of Ladies" mystery series since I received the first volume as a birthday gift shortly after it was published. These are fine ripping mysteries, and they are a great pleasure to read. The characters are drawn wonderfully, and the novels engage and amuse the reader - they delight on the very first reading, and they continue to do so on every reading thereafter. Every once in a while I go back and read the whole series over again, and I come away from every reading liking these fey and spirited women very much and wishing they lived in my part of the world. If they were real, I would consider moving to Plymouth.

Seven novels in the series have been published so far, and they are available on Amazon; they may also be ordered from Dolores at her website. She is also a gifted poet and a fine inventive chef, and I highly recommend a visit. There is (of course) a wealth of information on her books there, but beautiful poetry and delicious recipes await you too. In chronological order, the "Divine Circle" mysteries are:

Circle of Five

Charmed Circle
The Divine Circle Of Ladies Making Mischief

The Divine Circle of Ladies Courting Trouble

The Divine Circle of Ladies Playing With Fire

The Divine Circle of Ladies Rocking the Boat

The Divine Circle of Ladies Tipping the Scales (new)

Rain, rain...

On the Beach

Thursday Poem - There is a Brokenness

There is a brokenness
out of which comes the unbroken,
a shatteredness out
of which blooms the unshatterable.
There is a sorrow
beyond all grief that leads to joy
and a fragility
out of whose depths emerges strength.

There is a hollow space
too vast for words
through which we pass with each loss,
out of whose darkness
we are sanctioned into being.

There is a cry deeper than all sound
whose serrated edges cut the heart
as we break open
to the place inside which is unbreakable
and whole,
while learning to sing.

Rashani

Wordless Wednesday - Floating

Olivia-Rose

My great granddaughter was born prematurely on May 23, and her first several weeks were "touch and go". We were all very worried about her, but wee Olivia was a warrior from the moment she arrived on this planet. She fought her way through the many serious medical issues which beset her with courage and the forthright tenacity that runs all the way through the tribe.

Our baby girl is blooming now like the little rose she is, and she lights up like a Yule tree whenever she sees her "Aggy" (me). She has a delicately curved chin, perfect tiny fingers and the most beautiful sparkling smile in the whole wide world.

Mothering

The old farm pond in Lanark is fringed with reeds, clover and daisy fleabane. Later in the day there will a heron or two here, perhaps a bittern, but the pond is quiet for now, the reeds uninhabited, the air above filled with darting barn swallows and jeweled dragonflies.

The real jewels on this late summer morning (of course) are the proud Muscovy duck, and her twelve beautiful children on the shore.

August Bearing

The roses of August are some of the most glorious bloomings of the entire year. This delightfully pink, velvety and cupped little being arrived on our threshold earlier this year as a gift, no name bearing tag or marker in her pot to tell us who she is. Now she nestles in a fertile hollow in the garden behind the little blue house in the village, and she shows her pleasure in the great wide world by sending up leaves and thorns in abundance, these splendid tiny late summer blooms, scarcely more than an inch across. It would be lovely to address her by her true name, but does it really matter what she is called? She is perfect, and a rose by any (other) name is still a rose...

On other fronts, the heat and humidity continue, the late summer business of nurturing our veggie patch through the swelter and into a vigorous harvest. Domestic alchemy is at work, the fine time honored activity of transforming the mundane into the magical, the tasty and the sumptuous. There are vegetables to be blanched and tucked into the freezer, jams and chutneys and pickles to be made for the larder, fruit to be sliced and artfully arranged in the dehydrator, loaves of bread to be pummeled and set to rise, mincemeat to batch up for fruitcakes... a busy time and a happy one too.

Friday Ramble - Harvest

Harvest comes to us from the Old English haerfest which once meant simply autumn or fall, and the word is related to the German herbst, also meaning autumn or fall. Both words are kin to harrow or harrowing: to plough or turn the soil over in the waning months of the calendar year.

In the Lanark Highlands, harvest means round bales of hay in farm fields like great yellow coins, sheaves of grain drying in the sunlight and cribs overflowing with cobs of corn. It is grapes on the vine, potatoes, squash and red tomatoes gathered fresh from the garden, the happy buzzing of bees and wasps intoxicated by the nectars of goldenrod and Michaelmas daisies. It's fields of pumpkin plants in flower and apples in the orchard, cool and and redolent of autumn spice, but not quite ripe. Is there anything on earth as fine and tasty as a rosy Macintosh apple kissed by the first frost of the season?

On my hill in Lanark, it's milkweed pods giving away their shiny silk, meadowsweet going to seed and filling the air with its exotic fragrance, the scent of good dark earth and humus, the dry and slightly astringent perfume of fallen acorns, hickory nuts and oak leaves. It's a light wind dancing over the brow of the hill and greeting the happy wanderer when she arrives - that same blithe zephyr moves the blades of the old windmill on the hill at sunrise and makes it turn with merry abandon and the occasional rusty creak.

In harvest season, there is color everywhere. The whole world seems to be ablaze, and there are not enough adjectives to describe it: alight, blazing, burning, burnished, coruscating, effulgent, flashing, gleaming, glistening, glittering, glossy, golden, illuminated, incandescent, intense, irradiated, lambent, limpid, lucent, luminous, lustrous, phosphorescent, polished, radiant, ravishing, shimmering, shining, sparkling, vivid. The language needs a whole cauldron of other adjectives to describe such magnificence.

In the highlands of eastern Ontario, we're all thinking harvest; deer in the stubble fields, turkeys in the corn, squirrels among the nut trees, humans up on ladders in their orchards. We're harvesting, reaping, and gathering in, piling up firewood for our hearths in winter, putting things by for the long nights to come. Early windfall leaves in their red and russet and gold splendor are a rich and random harvest all on their own. So are our slowed honeyed thoughts of reciprocity, wild affluence, community and "the great round"

This is our favorite time of the whole turning year. We wander in untrammeled places, and beautiful Cassie is right there dancing along with us in spirit. As soon as the lingering traces of the last disastrous tumble vanish, we are out of here and off to the woods. I am (however) taking my blackthorn walking stick along.

Wordless Wednesday - How Be Alone

Indie filmmaker Andrea Dorfman's creation features the spoken word poetry and original music of Halifax poet/singer/songwriter Tanya Davis. The video debuted late last month, but it has already attracted a fair bit of attention, and it has appeared on several websites in recent days. I enjoyed it, and I thought I would like to tuck it in here this morning.

As a spoken word poetry performance, there are words of course (duh), but they are not my words after all, and in their own way, they fit in beautifully with the notions of solitude and wordlessness which are Wednesday's special province.

Thank you to Wenda at Daring to Write for bringing the video to my attention!

Turning Thoughts

August is wet and sunny by turns this year, often rainy and with a high fog drifting over the village trees after sunrise. How soon the rain vanishes into the earth, and the world is dry again!

For all the summer monsoons, local hedgerows, fields and woodlands are acquiring dry and dusty aspects as the month grows elderly and autumn peers cautiously over the hill. Am I dreaming?  No, the leaves of the old maple tree across the street are already starting to turn.

The colors of the Two Hundred Acre Wood in August are a dry grayish green and bright gold; the song of this late summer month and its lambent moon is a ubiquitary pollen-dusted buzzing. I've been rambling and looking out for Monarch butterflies, caterpillars and cicadas, but endeavors in that area have been disappointing this summer. There's a profusion of jewel-eyed dragonflies, cabbage butterflies and satyrs in the western field, but scant handfuls of Monarchs and various fritillaries, a paucity of lovely bugs which are usually common around this time of year.  We continue to peer hopefully into fields, flowers and foliage with camera in hand.

By contrast, the waving goldenrod forests host throngs of intoxicated bees shambolically threading their way through the gold, and there are ants and Pennsylvania Leatherwings on every leaf and flower and pod.

Every year is different, and every season a wonder.

Spinning

Orb Weaver
(Argiope spp.)

I am not sure which member of the Argiope family this splendid Arachnid is, but here she is anyway, suspended like a jewel in her almost invisible silk, and she is probably an Argiope aurantia. Yesterday was dank, overcast and windy, and she was perched upside down on her intricate web in a forest clearing, working carefully and steadily, trying to correct the damage being done to her gossamer creation by the puckish wind. There was Zen focus in her every movement, in every trembling of her delicate web.

Today is the second anniversary of Cassie's trip across the bridge to the Elysian fields, and I am going to be very quiet today - her passing still hurts, and there is never a day when I don't think of her, send her my love and bless her for coming into our lives. The three of us (Himself, Spencer and I) are going for a long meditative ramble through the woods and along the river.

Our little guy Spencer is a jewel too, and like his big sister, Cassie, he is a wise and loving companion.

On the Shores of the Inland Sea (Seta Naikai)

Early Days

Heritage (Ausblush)

English Rose by David Austin

Early days, the bittersweet stirrings of August and the harvest season...

Dawn skies in August are a fetching shade of violet, crinkled rose and gold along the edges, and a radiant scrap of waning crescent moon rose in the east before sunrise this morning - Spencer and I went out to greet the new day and the moon together. I sipped my tea thoughtfully, and my companion looked up at the moon and crooned to it softly, just as his big sister Cassie used to do on such mornings.

Thousands of geese were winging up from their rest on the river and out into the cornfields - there were vast waves of joyous honking song as they flew overhead and off for the first meal of the day.

My Heritage rose always puts on a rare display in August, and this morning, a single rose was blooming like a little pink moon in the sleeping garden.

Thursday Poem - At the Door of Night

at the door of night, my mirrored

pond holds the setting sun like a jewel

and all the herons homeward go,

backlighted against the trees

upon the shore we three stand

watching rapt, as the thousand

things that formed this day

are folding inward slowly

(Me)

Wordless Wednesday - Textures

Jewels in Late Summer Stillness

Swift River Cruiser

(Macromia illinoiensis)

After weeks of exuberant blooming and riotous color, the lilies in our garden have begun to wither and droop, and they remind me of antique linen in their deliciously crumpled textures, stripes and faded hues. There are many bright days still to come, but August has arrived, and we are sliding slowly down the long sunny hill into burnished autumn.

Blooms languish on the the tall green spires in the garden in a way that brings to mind the timeless Japanese aesthetic (or world view) called wabi sabi. The gracefully evanescing lily petals are the essence of impermanence, imperfection, simplicity and poignant late summer grace. Beautiful in their own unique way, they are silent teachers and powerful reminders of the natural way of things, of the the simple inescapable truth that all things come into being, bloom exquisitely in their own good time and then dissolve like fragrant rain back into the cosmic sea from which they arose.

Mornings are becoming a little cooler here in the north, and on our early walks, Spencer and I make our way through a heavy dew: tiny worlds, atomies and whole constellations laid out at our feet like lustrous pearls. As we go along, we often see dragonflies suspended like brightly enameled jewelry in the hedgerows and thickets along our path. The dragons of the summer air rest easy among the greenery, and their wings vibrate slowly in the activity called "wing whirring" as they warm their muscles and make themselves ready for vibrant flight.

Resting in the light and feeling the warmth of the sun on her wings, my female Swift River Cruiser was a flawless jewel in late summer stillness, and her emerald eyes were perfect in every way.

Armed and Dangerous

Bull Thistle

(Cirsium vulgare)