Wordless Wednesday - Out of the Swing of the Sea

By Winter Crowned

Morning Offerings

Friday Ramble - Anointed

The world beyond the windows is wonderfully nebulous and hushed behind its veil. Curiously soothing and comforting are vistas which seldom invite a thoughtful glance later in winter, the garden anointed with white like icing sugar, openings in our old rail fence with a few rimed strands of rusty wire looped around the uprights, the grainy texture and dry fragrance of the cedar posts themselves, dead mulleins and grasses blowing in the wind, floating leaves like snowflakes falling and coming to rest in the white, bare trees lightly dusted with crystals and arching overhead like cathedral windows.

The trail across the field and up into the woods to fill the bird feeders is a magical artery, a sinuous flowing ribbon of white looping its way around thickets, brambles and dancing milkweed.  The snow falling among the trees is a symphony and precious beyond words, one of my favorite musics in this hoary old span of earthly days.

 

The word anoint comes to us from the Middle English anoynten (derivative of the past participle anoynt or enoynt) and the Old French enoint, both hailing from the Latin inunctus or inungere meaning to daub or sprinkle with oil, other liquid or salve.  In modern parlance, to anoint something is to consecrate it or make it sacred through a token application of some kind, and there is often an element of ritual or ceremony involved in such undertakings, a dedication to service.

 

It always seems to me that there is something wonderful waiting to be known after the first snows anoint the north, a wild and canny insight that is unhurried in revealing itself to an elderly scribe and photographer.  Chances are that there is an elusive knowing right in front of me, and I have neither the eyes or wits to recognize what is being held out in offering.  This place is already sacred.  Perhaps it is enough to understand that there are wonders grand and fey and elemental here in these winter woods and gardens.

Thursday Poem - Thanksgiving

I have been trying to read
the script cut in these hills—
a language carved in the shimmer of stubble
and the solid lines of soil, spoken
in the thud of apples falling
and the rasp of corn stalks finally bare.

The pheasants shout it with a rusty creak
as they gather in the fallen grain,
the blackbirds sing it
over their shoulders in parting,
and gold leaf illuminates the manuscript
where it is written in the trees.

Transcribed onto my human tongue
I believe it might sound like a lullaby,
or the simplest grace at table.
Across the gathering stillness
simply this: "For all that we have received,
dear God, make us truly grateful."

Lynn Ungar

(from Blessing the Bread)

Happy Thanksgiving to each and every one of you!

Wordless Wednesday - From the Window

Frosted Garden Splendor

Thursday Poem - Praise Song

Praise the light of late November,

the thin sunlight that goes deep in the bones.

Praise the crows chattering in the oak trees;

though they are clothed in night, they do not

despair. Praise what little there's left:

the small boats of milkweed pods, husks, hulls,

shells, the architecture of trees. Praise the meadow

of dried weeds: yarrow, goldenrod, chicory,

the remains of summer. Praise the blue sky

that hasn't cracked. Praise the sun slipping down

behind the beechnuts, praise the quilt of leaves

that covers the grass: Scarlet Oak, Sweet Gum,

Sugar Maple. Though darkness gathers, praise our crazy

fallen world; it's all we have, and it's never enough.

Barbara Crooker, from Radiance

Wordless Wednesday - Dew Holding the Sky

Flowing Ever Onward

Many many thanks for the kind notes after last week's post about the sixth anniversary of this little chunk of planet blog. It is a fine thing to be here among so many friends and kindred spirits - many deep gasshos (bows) for being here and along on this journey with Himself, Spencer and I and the gentle recording eye of the Pentax.

Perhaps such occasions should be marked by something special, a photograph, a painting, a cairn of stones heaped up somewhere in the wilds, a batch of scones, a pot of tea, a brand new right-out-of the box beeswax pillar candle, lighted and sending its radiance and and honey fragrance into the world. The best thing of all is what I did do - go out to the woods and just sit on a rock for an hour or two.

Impromptu zazen sessions in wild places are always good medicine. One can watch the great wide world in transcendent flowing movement, listen to the wind singing through the bare trees and water dancing its way along in the creek, feel the earth breathing deep and slow underneath the fallen leaves.  One can send her roots down into the good dark earth, harmonize her own breathing with the Old Wild Mother's and get back in tune with the elements, returning home later to go along as she has so far, but rested, easy of heart, quieter and at peace.

No matter how I am feeling when I set out on another wild ramble, I always come back feeling refreshed and renewed, as bright and shiny as a brand new copper penny. Billy Collins captured the feeling beautifully.

The best time is late afternoon
when the sun strobes through
the columns of trees as you are hiking up,
and when you find an agreeable rock
to sit on, you will be able to see
the light pouring down into the woods
and breaking into the shapes and tones
of things and you will hear nothing
but a sprig of birdsong or the leafy
falling of a cone or nut through the trees,
and if this is your day you might even
spot a hare or feel the wing-beats of geese
driving overhead toward some destination.

But it is hard to speak of these things
how the voices of light enter the body
and begin to recite their stories
how the earth holds us painfully against
its breast made of humus and brambles
how we who will soon be gone regard
the entities that continue to return
greener than ever, spring water flowing
through a meadow and the shadows of clouds
passing over the hills and the ground
where we stand in the tremble of thought
taking the vast outside into ourselves.

Billy Collins

(From Directions in The Art of Drowning)

Monday Morning Comfort

Later in the season, the morning treat is likely to be a slice of the the old family recipe fruitcake, brimming with currants, raisins, citron, almonds and apricots and tenderly aged in good dark rum or brandy. 

With grey skies beyond the window this morning and snow in the offing, there are lovely gluten free Florentines to go with our dark roast coffee.

Lovingly robed in chocolate, the almost indecently sumptuous cookies melt on the tongue like snowflakes, and their Old World richness lingers like a blessing or a poem.  One can almost forget about the snow.

Ribbons and Tatters

Paper Birch (Betula papyrifera)

and Blue Sky

The All Gathered Moon of November

November's full lunar orb is usually the the second last moon of the calender year, and certainly a colder moon than October's golden visitation was. As is often the case at this time of year, I  briefly considered staying indoors but wrapped up anyway, and Spencer and I went out to the garden with tripod and camera. Lady Moon was concealed behind clouds for the most part, and for a while we wondered if she would hide her radiant face completely this time around or part the veil for a while and pour her light over us. At last, there she was in all her radiance...

Spencer is accustomed to his mother's lunar studies now, and he leaned comfortably against me and looked up at the sky last night, content to be there and certain that whatever we were doing out there in the darkness, it was worth doing.

The old tree which has held the rising full moon in its arms every month for so many years was no longer there with us last evening.  Having expired and gone to its leafy reward long ago, it was felled and taken away yesterday, every branch and twig of it. Standing in the darkness, we remembered the old tree, and we thought of the beloved friend and journeying companion who departed this life and "went on ahead" last week.  This November's moon is about loss, but it is about trust too, trust in each other and those we love, trust in the wild and elemental grace of existence and what I like to call "the great round" of our days and nights.

We also know this moon as the: Blood Moon, Buffalo Moon, Cold Begins Moon, Dark Moon, Deer Rutting Moon, Twelfth Moon, Falling Leaves Moon, Fog Moon, Freezing Moon, Frosty Moon, Geese Going Moon, Hunter's Moon, Large Tree Freeze Moon, Little Bear's Moon, Long Moon, Mad Moon, Moon of Cold, Moon of Fledgling Hawk, Moon of Freezing, Moon of Storms, Moon of the Falling Leaves, Moon of the Shaker Leaves, Moon of the Turkey and Feast, Moon the Rivers Begin to Freeze, Moon When All Is Gathered in, Moon When Deer Shed Antlers, Moon When Deer Shed Their Antlers, Moon When Horns Are Broken Off, Moon When the River Freezes, Moon When the Rivers Start to Freeze, Moon When the Water Is Black with Leaves, Mourning Moon, Moon of Much Poverty, Ring Finger Moon, Sacrifice Moon, Samoni Moon, Sassafras Moon, Snow Moon, Snowy Mountains in the Morning Moon, Trading Moon, Trail Moon, Tree Moon, White Frost on Grass & Ground Moon, White Moon, Whitefish Moon, Willow Moon, Winter Divided Moon, Yew Moon.

Among the many names for this month's moon, I am rather fond of Yew Moon and Moon of Falling Leaves, but for me, this will always be Christel's Moon.

Thursday Poem - Unchurched

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

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

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

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

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

Dolores Stewart
from The Nature of Things
(printed here with the kind permission of the author)

Dolores Stewart is one of the finest and most thoughtful poets writing today, and her second collection of poems, The Nature of Things was recently published by Bellowing Ark Press.  Every offering in the volume is a treasure - it was difficult to choose a single poem from it for this week's selection.

Wordless Wednesday - Tree Light

Adrift On Inland Seas

For the late Zen master and renowned photographer, John Daido Loori, I suspect it was tide pools, beaches and heron spiced estuaries - they drew him like a magnet to faraway shorelines, carrying camera, tripod, lenses and diverse pockets of related peripherals. He loved the shapes and the colors, the contrasts where the sea meets the land, and he could stand for hours, watching the play of wind across waves and rock, rippled sand and tide pools, forests of seawashed kelp.

Not for me, at present anyway, the pacific bays and beaches near Point Lobos that Daido loved so much, the fog wrapped headlands and promontories graced by weathered stones.  I've been there and loved those places, have photographed them and recall them at the drop of a frayed hat or the sway of my favorite windbells, but I live inland now and far from the earth's greater oceans.  Far from Daido's salty shorelines though, I have eloquent expanses of my own, inland seas of foothills, gorges and quiet grassy coves, winding rivers and gnarled old trees, morning fogs, flowing frosty fens and dancing reeds.

Inland seas sing like the sirens of old, holding beauties beyond measure in every season. In November there are deep lake waters fringed with frosted grasses and tamarack reflections.  There are wide hills and  fields of blowing milkweed as far as one can see, entrancing the eye in sere and austere arrays, in perfect panoplies of cream and taupe and gray.This season draws one in like a magnet, and I dissolve in its midst like a contented and wind tossed leaf.

Thank you all so much for your kind words and wishes yesterday on the sixth anniversary of this place! It is a joy to consider us all pottering along together for another circling of the calendar in the Great Round of time.

Barn and Late Turning Maple

By November's Icy Fingers Touched

Friday Ramble - Standing on the Edge

A strange, liminal time of the year is this, for the old Celtic year has passed away, and we stand on the forward edge of a brand new year, in the north a chilling contraption of fallen leaves and frozen earth, short days, darkness, frost and and wind.

The word edge has been around forever, dating at the very latest from the tenth century. We have it through the Middle English egge, the Old English ecg and the Old Germanic ecke, all meaning "corner". It is kin to the Latin acer meaning "sharp", and the Greek akmē meaning "point", and at the root of all these forms is the Proto-Indo-European (PIE) ak- meaning "sharp".

The storm tossed highlands seem empty in November. Migratory birds have (for the most part) departed for warmer climes. Most of our wild and furry "year round" residents are in deep hibernation now; the fertile earth and her life giving waters are freezing up, even as we watch with our collars turned up.

On trips into the woods, long shadows fall across our trail, and their edges are as sharp as the finest craftings of the blade smith's art. For all the early winter emptiness, frost and morning sunlight change the Two Hundred Acre Wood into something rich and elegant and inviting: glittering fronds artfully curved and waving in the fields, milkweed sculpted into pleasing shapes, bare trees twinkling like stars, the edges of blackberry leaves rosy and sparkling with frost crystals.

November always seems chthonic to me. That engaging word with its bewildering arrangement of vowels and consonants springs from the Greek khthonios, meaning "of the earth", and it's usually employed in describing subterranean matters and deities of the underworld.  When we use chthonic to describe something, we are focusing on what is deeper or within, rather than that which is apparent at first glance or resting on the surface. Implicit in the adjective are notions of rest, sleep, fertility and rebirth - mortality and abundance coexisting and enfolding each other in a deep embrace.

A dearly loved friend passed beyond the fields we know a few days ago, and thoughts of mortality and abundance have been much with me this week.  Christel was my adopted big sister, and she was one of the wisest and strongest women I have ever known.  Hers was an open heart - she walked through this world loving it fiercely, appreciating its grandeur, grace and reciprocity, cherishing its innate abundance and wildness. Lit from within, she fairly blazed with life and passion, and she lighted up every room she entered. Somewhere beyond the here and the now, she is still alight, and I have to remember that.

Grieving, I find myself restless and unable to settle anywhere for long, rising before dawn and going outside to watch the early stars, piling up books on the old oak library table and then forgetting about them, brewing endless pots of tea and letting them go cold, staring out the window for hours at a time or standing silently at the edge of the woods.  I am grateful for having known and loved and walked through this world with my big sister, but there's a hole in my heart and the wind is blowing through it.

Thursday Poem - Frost in the Highlands

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

Winter stirs among the shortening days,
whispering of cold and icy moons to come
in the rattling dry breath of the long nights.
These elderly bones move creaking through
landscapes of bare trees and rail fences,
sparkling leaves and grasses, fallen twigs.

Patterns everywhere, and not of my making,
but the Old Wild Mother's weaving, marbled
stones, hoary branches and mottled foliage,
footprints of wolf and deer along the trail,
puddles 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 cedar fence creaking as I leaned on it
at dusk one night last year in balmy June. 
If I listen, I can hear the stream away in its 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.

kerrdelune

Wordless Wednesday - In the Wind

Falling Into the Fund of Things

Sunflowers are impressive entities in summer, when one can watch the statuesque and spirited youngsters turning their brilliant heads to follow the sun around the sky all day long. Young ones are flexible enough to follow the sun, and they do just that - mature flower heads face east toward the rising sun for the most part and do not move.

What we think of as a single sunflower bloom is actually a composite, a collection of over a thousand tiny florets or flowers arranged in a perfect spiraling sequence.  Each floret is inclined toward the next floret by approximately 137.5°,  known in mathematics as the golden angle.  The arrangement creates a series of interconnecting spirals in which the number of left oriented spirals and the number of right oriented spirals are successive Fibonacci numbers.

A fan of golden angles and Fibonacci sequences for years, I am always happy to discover another one and seeing a sunflower in any season is a happy thing. In these short, dark November days, withered specimens of Helianthus annuus are downright wondrous in their delicate earthy coloration, their spikiness and sculptural complexity, their stalwart determination to engender progeny and perpetuate their genetic matter, mothering whole dynasties of mile-high stalks, fuzzy leaves and beaming golden faces when springtime rolls around next time.

In his fine poem, "Enriching the Earth", Wendell Berry describes the earth's late autumn cycling as "slowly falling into the fund of things", and I have deep fondness for the notion.  Going to seed in this last quarter of the year is a good thing, a fine thing, a natural and necessary thing.  Alas, I lack the delicate coloration, complexity and elegance of form displayed by sunflowers peering over the fence and dispersing their abundant seed in November.  If I can be said to resemble anything at all these days, it's a gnarled and twisty old ironwood tree in the forest.  Gorgeous things they are in their own way, and though I have no beauty of my own, I am happy to stand among them out in the leaf strewn wood.

Happy November everyone!