Happy Halloween

October Morning: Birch Grove and Tamarack

Friday Ramble - Threshold

The word threshold has been in use for many centuries, probably since early humankind worked out the algorithms of crop cultivation and storing food for leaner times. It comes to us through the Middle English threschold and the Old English threscold or threscwald from the Old Norse threskǫldr, all meaning the place where grain crops are threshed or trampled underfoot to separate the noble seed from husk and stem.

Mircea Eliade wrote of thresholds as potent mythic symbols and passages, corridors where passage from the profane to the sacred becomes possible. The philosopher Martin Heidegger described thresholds as joinings or spaces between two worlds: potent common or middle grounds which hold, join and separate two different realms, all at the same time. Thresholds are sacred places which form a boundary between what is "here" and what is "there", but they are, in themselves, neither here nor there. They are compelling places, and they can exert a powerful tug on the sensibilities. Every hero's journey or heroine's journey begins with a threshold, with a call to adventure: a breathtaking, serendipitous, watershed moment in which she or he discovers a threshold, responds to its eldritch music and steps across into another realm.

Thresholds have the power to open a cranny between this world and other realms, letting tumultuous otherworldly forces blow through. The ancients knew it, and they undertook special measures to secure their thresholds, carving protective sigils on door lintels, placing sprigs of rowan and Brigid's crosses in their doors, burying pins and needles under their hearth stones, sweeping and blessing their thresholds and mounting horseshoes overhead to keep the fey without. Sunrise, noon, twilight and midnight were thought to be thresholds when divination and magic could be worked by those skilled in such arts — such times would have been fearful for those without magical gifts or the protections of the Craft.

Sleeping, dreaming and awakening are threshold states, and so is the very act of breathing. Doors, windows, hearths, labyrinths, bridges and stone circles are thresholds opening into other modes of being and thinking — so are quiet woodland trails, secluded oak groves and springs. The old fire festivals of the Celts are perhaps the most powerful threshold times of all; the four feasts of Samhain (Halloween), Imbolc (Candlemas), Beltane (May Day) and Lugnasadh (Loaf Mass or First Harvest) fall at the times of the year when the veils between the worlds are thin and magic is indeed afoot in the great beyond.

Ours is a winding trail of wonders and surprises, and whether or not we realize it, we all encounter thresholds from time to time. We hear siren voices from beyond the threshold in our own unique key and tongue, and the lens through which we filter the experience is a very personal thing. Thresholds allow us to step out of the ordinary world for a while and into the rich realm of the archetypal, the strange and the creative. We need such places in our daily lives to grow and evolve, to become wild authentic beings and exercise the creativity which is our birthright.

In my own life, I encounter thresholds in art, books, photography and stillness, in lighted candles and incense, in deep twilight and the perfect shapes of trees, in strong coffee and the keyboard sonatas of Scarlatti, in winter days in the shire when the air is so still that one can hear snow falling among the trees, in herons and loons (anywhere, anytime) and walks through the oak woods in late autumn, in the creaking timbers of old log barns, wood smoke, dark chocolate, good cognac and the fragrances of bergamot, lavender and rosewood.

On cold October mornings, Spencer and I pause by our favorite hedgerow and stand for a while looking around. This is my beautiful boy's third autumn with us, and he loves every raven, dancing leaf and gust of wind. For him, each is a threshold, an adventure, a doorway into wonder and enchantment. Walking through this burnished autumn together, we sense wild forces in motion on the trail ahead of us — there is a cranny between here and there, and trickster forces are blowing though it like a brash inviting wind. It's good to be here and alive, and we simply would not be anywhere else.

Is this a Samhain or Halloween ramble? Definitely...

Thursday Poem - Storytelling

Come in out of the darkness.
Come in where the fire casts shadows of longing.
Sit near each other. Hold hands

while I tell you a story that has never been told,
a story with music, a flute and singing, a drum and dancing,
a story of life’s circle and the hungry wolves

waiting for caribou, and the caribou lingering
over a feast of lichen, and ravens poised in the trees
at the edges of the wolves’ eyes,

a story with a grandmother spider
stealing a piece of the sun,
a story with medicine plants and sacred weeds,

a story of how men and women found each other,
of how coyote got his cunning, of arrow boy,
of the owl’s beak tapping, always the owl, the death bird,

and the mouse, timorous, scuttling into its den,
a story of you, and you, and you.
What does it mean this dream fruit?

Nothing more than to peel and eat
the sweet juicy flesh, to let its seeds
become part of your spirit.

Long after I am gone
you will remember a story that never happened
how things that never were came into being.

Dolores Stewart,
from Doors to the Universe

This is one of my very favorite poems, written by one of my very favorite authors, Dolores Stewart Riccio, who writes gorgeous poetry as Dolores Stewart and delightfully magical novels as Dolores Stewart Riccio. It always seems to me to be the perfect poem for Samhain (or Halloween), that magical and liminal time when we stand on the threshold between one year and the next, when the veils between the worlds are gossamer thin and we dwell in infinite possibility.

Wordless Wednesday - Trail

Restless Days

Perhaps restless feelings are inevitable at such a liminal time of year as this. We stand on the cusp between autumn and winter, a poignant interval harbinging the end of the old Celtic year on October 31 and the arrival of the new year which awaits us somewhere just over the windy withered hills.

All the migrating wild creatures who are still here in the highlands seem agitated and anxious to be off on their adventures: mallard ducks, gulls and geese to name a scant handful of restless local residents who turn south on the edge of winter.

I'm restless too, and words alone don't "do it" for me at this time of the year; nor do images. Morning after morning, I scribble a few words here and regard them with impatience and disdain. I prowl through old photo archives, looking for an image which adequately describes the dark foggy day beyond the windows, the dried grasses in the garden, the wilting shrubbery, the bare and eloquent trees.

Archive prowlings at the break of day are perilous undertakings at the best of times - volume after volume of photo archives, disk after disk of images, and they all leave something to be desired. At this time of the year, I sometimes ponder flogging the cameras to a pawn shop and taking up soap operas or macrame.

What I really need right now is sunlight and clear skies, several inches of snow and a few hours of happy wandering through the woods on snowshoes: cameras slung around my neck, pockets crammed full of filters, lenses and other photographic trappings, food for the birds and Spencer's homemade doggy biscuits too.

Out of the wind on such winter potterings lies a fine blue stillness, pools of articulate silence, long resonant conversations with the dreaming trees. Camus wrote that in the depths of winter, he discovered within himself an invincible summer. I suspect that for this old and creaky hen, what lies invincible within is a Lanark Highlands winter in all its sparkling snow bound grandeur.

As above, so below..... On winter mornings before sunrise the sky goes on forever, and one can almost touch the dancing stars overhead. Below the region of the winter stars, snow dunes roll away toward the limitless horizon in billows and swirls and waves, and the world is made new by wind and whiteness.

My parka and snowshoes are out of storage, and they long to set off on adventures. Let Lady Winter come, we are ready.

On the Edge of Winter

Thursday Poem - Frost in the Highlands

A crunching frost last evening in the highlands,
the lambent moon high above the trees,
a sweet embracing darkness and on high,
the aurora borealis dancing over the hill,
late October stillness lying like a shadow
on the trail below the oak trees at twilight.

Winter stirs among the short days, whispering
of darkness and cold moons still to come,
the rattling dry breath of the long nights,
much like these old bones that move creaking
through the grasses, leaves and fallen twigs.

Patterns everywhere, and not of my making,
but the Old Wild Mother's weaving, marbled
stones, hoary branches and mottled leaves,
the footprints 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
as I leaned on it at dusk one night in June.

Listening, I 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.

Cate Kerr (me)

Wordless Wednesday - Fields of Gold

For the Geese

When I awoke before dawn this morning and meandered off to the kitchen to make coffee, I could hear Canada geese through the kitchen window, great flowing waves of local birds filling the early skies with their happy honking. How can one not be uplifted in hearing their wild music? Their passage overhead and their songs are a splendid way to begin the day and one of my personal markers for the presence of autumn here in the north, for the inexorable shortening of our days and the coming of the long white season.

There are communities of the great birds in every field, on every lake, river and shoreline, and however many I encounter in my pottering, I never tire of watching them. Wherever I am and whatever I am doing, I stop when the geese pass overhead on their way to the cornfields at dawn and back to the river at dusk. They sing their contentment as they travel to and fro, and one would never know from their voices what an arduous journey lies ahead for them.

This past weekend, I watched geese alighting on the beaver pond and thought about how they have always sustained me. The great Canadas have been with me all the way: through thick and thin, up and down, hard and soft, in moments of perfect contentment and times when my distress was too deep for expression. Geese are the finest of companions, and when winter arrives and they are in a far and southern place, I have only to close my eyes and they are with me again. There is comfort in thinking that long after I have shuffled off the planet (in this form anyway), they will be here and engaged in the perfect endless round of their days.

Late last evening, the geese were briefly silhouetted against the almost full October moon, and they made a perfect autumn tableau, but my tripod was on loan, and the perfection of the frosty evening went by without being captured on my memory card. Perhaps the moment was not meant to be frozen, but to be held within and revisited on long winter nights when the icy north wind prowls around the little blue house in the village.

Much of the music of my life has been composed and orchestrated by the geese, and I would not have it any other way - I sometimes think about composing something akin to the late David Fanshawe's exquisite African Sanctus. My own composition would enfold, not the desert bells of the eastern Sudan, the Masai milking songs of Kenya or the rain chants of Uganda, but the sound of the north wind and the migration songs of the great geese in autumn. Perhaps we could call it "An Algonquin Mass". This one is for the birds, or rather the geese.

And so it begins...

Red Oak in the Wind

Thinking of Migration

Great Blue Heron
(Ardea herodias)

When my heron lifted her head and tilted it, looking up at the skein of migrating geese flying overhead, she was almost human.

Rather, she was more than human and greater than human by far, greater by rolling oceans and star dappled heavens, by windswept valleys and unexplored ranges higher than the Himalayas. She was elemental grace and dignity; she was majesty and wildness; she was wonder and grandeur and pure enchantment.

I could have watched her forever, and I felt like getting down on my arthritic old knees in the bog and thanking her for her august presence. Let us hope that she has left her cold pond behind and flown south on her great blue wings.

Thursday Poem - Piute Creek

One granite ridge
A tree, would be enough
Or even a rock, a small creek,
A bark shred in a pool.
Hill beyond hill, folded and twisted
Tough trees crammed
In thin stone fractures
A huge moon on it all, is too much.
The mind wanders. A million
Summers, night air still and the rocks
Warm. Sky over endless mountains.
All the junk that goes with being human
Drops away, hard rock wavers
Even the heavy present seems to fail
This bubble of a heart.
Words and books
Like a small creek off a high ledge
Gone in the dry air.
A clear, attentive mind
Has no meaning but that
Which sees is truly seen.
No one loves rock, yet we are here.
Night chills. A flick
In the moonlight
Slips into Juniper shadow:
Back there unseen
Cold proud eyes
Of Cougar or Coyote
Watch me rise and go.

Gary Snyder

Wordless Wednesday - Red

Great Blues

This Great Blue Heron (Ardea herodias) was standing at the edge of a farm pond on the Rosetta road in the Lanark Highlands yesterday morning. He or she was still perched there when we drove home later in the day, fierce, golden eyed, statuesque and beautiful beyond words.

The great herons are perhaps my favorite birds ever, and I stood at a distance for some time with a monster lens mounted on the camera, collar up in the cold wind and shooting image after image of one of the Old Wild Mother's finest creations. I would not mind being a heron in my next life.

It is becoming cold here, and there is little for these magnificent birds to eat at this time of year, no frogs, minnows, water snakes and aquatic insects. "Fly", I told him (or her). "Leave this place and make your way south now. I shall stand as guardian in your place and watch over the valley until you return in springtime. Go now and journey safely, my friend."

Much as I love this place, this time, this season, it is always a wrench to say goodbye to the neighbors and wild kin who spend their winters away, and I am a little melancholy. A part of me is already awaiting their return.

Oh Splendid Bird

This is Thanksgiving Day in Canada, and a very happy celebration (and feasting of course) to all of you who also live on the north side of the Canada/U.S. border. Would it not be a fine thing if we all observed this holiday on the same day of the calendar year rather than doing so almost a month apart?

No, we are not eating this gorgeous wild "tom". He was alive and well yesterday afternoon and putting on a fine splendid strutting performance on our favorite hill in the Lanark Highlands.

Dancing Silks

A cold morning in October's middling pages, slanting intense sunlight, bare whiskery trees, deep shadows falling across the trail here and there, a whole world evolving...

The north wind careens through the fields and sets the milkweed in motion. The stalks and pods sway back and forth in unison, disclosing their silken contents, filling the air with diaphanous dancing fluff that looks like small birds in flight, white butterflies or snowflakes.

Below the cavorting milkweed and hugging the ground, the papery lanterns of Clammy Ground Cherry (Physalis heterophylla) are growing fragile and transparent. Looking much like tomatillos, the tiny round fruits are miniature golden suns. Seen through the lacy framework of the enclosing lanterns, the berries are the same blithe color as autumn sunlight and the few bright remaining birch leaves overhead.

Is any of this significant in the greater scheme of things? We walk these trails through the woods and the fields and capture a few images, remark on the changes from a day or two ago and scribble a few notes in a tiny notebook. It matters to us, and it matters greatly.

Floating

Thursday Poem - In Blackwater Woods

Look, the trees
are turning
their own bodies
into pillars

of light,
are giving off the rich
fragrance of cinnamon
and fulfillment,

the long tapers
of cattails
are bursting and floating away over
the blue shoulders

of the ponds,
and every pond,
no matter what its
name is, is

nameless now.
Every year
everything
I have ever learned

in my lifetime
leads back to this: the fires
and the black river of loss
whose other side

is salvation,
whose meaning
none of us will ever know.
To live in this world

you must be able
to do three things:
to love what is mortal;
to hold it

against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it go,
to let it go.

Mary Oliver, from American Primitive

Wordless Wednesday - On the Shore

Self Portrait With Moon and Clouds

Spirit in Place

Daylight arrives later and later. It is cold when I take my mug out to the garden before dawn and look up at the fragile scrap of waning moon dancing right above my head. One must wrap up warmly to go outside on chilly October mornings, and coffee does not stay hot for long.

There is frost on the grass in the garden and on the trees. There is a splendid inky darkness overhead at five o'clock, a few hours before the sun climbs over the horizon on a day in late autumn. Jupiter is clearly visible this month - it can be seen in the east just after nightfall, but it is still a radiant presence in the darkness before sunrise. Through my astronomical binoculars, four of the planet's many moons are strung like beads across its face.

This is the wondrous region of the winter stars. The color of the sky before first light this morning was reminiscent of a favorite fountain pen ink by Private Reserve. Called Tanzanite, the fluid is a shade of violet so deep and rich as to be almost indigo in its intensity. The same manufacturer makes a gorgeous color called Purple Mojo, and I am thinking of giving it a go. All I have to do is find my favorite old Waterman pen.

Local geese are still flying merrily back and forth between the river and stubble cornfields, but many of the flights of Canada geese passing overhead now are from the far north. They are traveling at altitudes so high that one can barely see them, and their farewell songs are little more than a plangent echo on the icy wind. I bless them each and wish them well, a safe journey south and then back here in springtime.

There is something about migrating geese that always makes me restless and a little melancholy. That is at least part of the reason why I am standing out here in the darkness while the rest of the village sleeps - that and the simple fact that I love these predawn hours and the faint glow on the horizon, harbinger of a brand new day. Some part of my crone self wishes she too could take wing in autumn and fly away on an adventure. Chances are I would be winging my way north if I could fly and not headed south like the geese. I am drawn like a magnet toward the shores of distant Lake Superior, to sweeping winds and untamed waters, weathered rocks, canyons and jack pine trees. Still a wild thing after all these years...

Flight is not in the cards this year for a number of reasons, so I am considering tinting my hair burgundy, acquiring a new pair of of purple Doc Martens, finding the Waterman and sketching something in a fetching shade of ultraviolet in my tattered art journal of the moment.

As the sun dances above the horizon and I turn to go back into the house, I remember that all our northern snows are touched with violet, and I smile - there is color everywhere in autumn and winter if one only has the wits and the eyes to see it. The finest migrations of all are those undertaken within, no airplane tickets are required.

Fallen

On the Library Table: The Divine Circle of Ladies Tipping the Scales

The Divine Circle of Ladies Tipping the Scales
Dolores Stewart Riccio

This is the seventh adventure in Dolores Stewart Riccio's "Divine Circle of Ladies" Wiccan mystery series, and it is a delight.

The Circle are safe and sound on dry land after the ocean adventures of volume six (The Divine Circle of Ladies Rocking the Boat). They are longing simply for a little peace and quiet when they suddenly find themselves involved in murder, mystery and mayhem right in their own town.

There is usually a goddess in the equation, and this time around it seems to be Themis (or Justitia), She who is "of good counsel". A Titan and one of the Oracles of Delphi, Themis embodies divine order, law and custom. She is the bringer of justice and sacred overseer of all things legal, and her ability to see into the future makes her a perfect fit with our dauntless sleuths. With Lady Justice on the scene and the five fabulous members of the circle at work, Justice will indeed roll down like the waters and righteousness like an everlasting stream.

Herbalist Cass Shipton is happily nested with her Greenpeace marine engineer husband Joe Ulysses and her two canines when she is summoned to jury duty. A local mother and daughter have been killed in what appears to be a house burglary which went horribly wrong, and the two burglars are on trial for murder. A true Libra, Cass takes her legal responsibilities seriously, and she resolves to examine all the evidence closely, weighing everything on her personal scales of truth and fairness. It is not long until her powers as a clairvoyant manifest themselves, and she realizes that not all in the courtroom is as it seems.

While Cass is attending the trial, her friends and coven mates are knee deep in their own judicial pursuits. Heiress and animal lover Heather Devlin resorts to illegal tactics and covert operations in her passionate efforts to bring down a local dog fighting ring, rescuing three fugitive (and abused) Staffordshire terriers in the process. Librarian Fiona must assist a young woman named Ashling Holmes in laying to rest the angry ghost of her husband, an alcoholic poet who is haunting her days and making her life a misery. Chef Phillipa pursues her own investigation into the dastardly doings in a local restaurant which is linked to the murder trial Cass is attending as a juror. Deidre, recently widowed, meets an old boyfriend and finds herself enchanted all over again. Meandering merrily through the novel is Cass Shipton's Goth loving and psychokinetic daughter-in-law, Freddie.

When a new "Divine Circle " novel is published, I always find myself exclaiming that it is the best one yet, and this seventh volume is no exception - it is a treasure and I absolutely loved reading it. It really IS the best one yet.

Dolores Stewart Riccio is a superb writer, and she moves from strength to strength (and magic to magic) in writing this delightfully fey series. Her settings are wonderfully drawn; the characters are eccentric, forthright and possessed of immense humor and charm - then there is the matter of their spiritual path and their unusual abilities, all put to good crime solving use.

The five ladies of the divine circle are women I have come to treasure, and I almost expect them to turn up in my living room when I am reading one of the novels. How I wish they would, and I am already looking forward to volume eight. Bravo! Kudos to the author, and many "thank you's" too.

Above the Wild River

A fallen tree, the gentle tumbling of water and trees on the shore turning red... Not so gentle, for this is but a single shallow step in the roaring waterfalls at Almonte as seen from the boardwalk above the dam. The image was captured with a monster telephoto lens and from quite a distance.

Never underestimate the raw surging energy of torrential waters hurling themselves headlong down a rocky gorge. When one stands on the boardwalk above the Mississippi at Almonte, the structure vibrates with the power and tumult of the waters on their wild passionate voyage to the Ottawa River. Voices cannot be heard on the boardwalk, and one must rely on sign language to converse.

Our own Mississippi River is a little over one hundred miles long. Rising out of Mazinaw Lake east of the Kawarthas, it flows through the Crotch, Dalhousie, and Mississippi Lakes, thence northward to join the Ottawa River near Arnprior.

The name of the river originates, not in the native American form meaning "great water", but probably the Algonquian Mazinaa[bikinigan]-ziibi, meaning "painted image river" - most likely a reference to the ancient pictographs on the cliffs above Mazinaw Lake. My favorite image there depicts Nanabozho, a trickster spirit prominent in Ojibwe storytelling and creation mythologies - he is kin (and much like) the Abenaki trickster spirit Ganoozhigaabe (or Glooscap).

I am fond of the Mississippi in all her moods for she is the mother of my favorite little rivers in the Lanark Highlands, the Clyde, Indian and Fall rivers.