The Hunter's Moon of October

October gifts us with the first cold moon of the season.  Lady Moon is often veiled in drifting clouds for several nights in a row - this time around, thanks to Hurricane Sandy.  That she is a rather spooky moon is perhaps not surprising, given that Samhain (or Halloween) is only two days away.

The last day of October signified summer's end for the ancient Celts.  As Himself, Spencer and I shivered in the garden last evening and hoped to see the full moon (an exercise in futility), there were no two ways about it - summer is over and  autumn is well and truly in residence. Oh, there are splendid sunny days now and then, but nights are chilly, and the wind has icy fingers after dark.

In less than a week, the deer hunting season will begin, and so October's glorious moon is traditionally known here as the "Hunter's Moon".  That is what my Algonquin ancestresses called it, and so it has always been.  This month's full moon is no brighter than the other full moons in a calendar year, but it always seems so because of the position of the ecliptic in the sky in late autumn.

As a lover of moon lore, I find it interesting that Lady Moon is a prominent motif in Halloween stories and decorations, and I'm always on the lookout for new appearances.  Witches on broomsticks, bats, dancing skeletons, jack-o'-lanterns, ghosts, spectral owls and crooked trees - they all make their appearances silhouetted against ghostly full moons and vast inky skies. In truth, Lady Moon will be in her twelfth cycle of the year and just past new when Halloween arrives this year - she will have risen from her fruitful darkness and be journeying to brightness in the great cauldron of night.

We also know this moon as the: Acorns Cached Moon, Banksia Moon, Big Chestnut Moon, Big Wind Moon, Blackberry Moon, Blood Moon, Chrysanthemum Moon, Corn Ripening Moon, Drying Grass Moon, Falling Leaves Moon, Frosty Moon, Hallows Moon, Ivy Moon, Joins Both Sides Moon, Kantlos Moon, Kindly Moon, Leaf Falling Moon, Leaf Dance Moon, Leaves Change Color Moon, Maple Moon, Michaelmas Daisy Moon, Middle-finger Moon, Moon When Birds Fly South, Moon of Poverty, Moon When Geese Leave, Moon of Changing Seasons, Moon of Harvesting, Moon When Deer Rut, Moon of Acorn Gathering, Moon When Corn Is Taken In, Moon of Falling Leaves, Moon That Turns the Leaves White, Moon of First Frost, Moon When They Store Food in Caches, Moon of Long Hair, Moon When Quilling and Beading Are Done, Moon When the Water Begins to Freeze on the Edge of Streams, Nut Moon, Pekelanew Moon, Raking Moon, Samhain Moon, Shedding Moon, Small Trees Freeze Moon , Song Moon, Striped Gopher Looks Back Moon, Strong Moon, Ten Colds Moon, Travel in Canoes Moon, Trees Felled by Fire at Butt Moon, Trout Moon, Turkey Moon, Vintage Moon, White Frost on Grass & Ground Moon, Wild Turkeys Moon, Wilted Moon, Wine Moon, Winter Coming Moon.

Please, please, please....

Please, just be out of the storm and safe today.

Foggy Foggy Pond

The beaver pond is still and smooth, the gnarled cedars along the farther shore nebulous and cloaked in drifting fog that swirls as though stirred by a vast, benign and blessing hand.

Earth and water are warmer than the air this morning, and the serendipity coming together of the three elements spins a pearly veil over everything in sight. Sunlight or autumn rain - either will disperse the fog, but there is heavy rain in the cards for this day, and most likely it will be rain that lifts the veil.

In what seems like only a few breaths, the countryside has morphed into its early winter configuration, trees bare and somewhat mournful on their slopes, fallen leaves ankle deep in the woods and stark windblown fields arrayed in grey and taupe. The hawthorn by the pond has lost its leaves entirely and wears only a few frost touched berries.

Just out of sight is the artist in her wellies and oilskins, carrying (as usual) cameras, lenses and filters, brush, pen and field notebook. Entranced as she is by the magical ambiance at this early hour, she is thinking that it would be even more so with a single beam of sunlight coming through the trees beyond the pond and shining through the fog to generate voluminous shadows in three fey dimensions.

She was a feeling a little lost when she got here, and in truth, she is still feeling lost, but paradoxically, she is also home.

Bronzed and Gilded

Thursday Poem - Assurance

You will never be alone, you hear so deep
a sound when autumn comes. Yellow
pulls across the hills and thrums,
or in the silence after lightning before it says
its names — and then the clouds' wide-mouthed
apologies. You were aimed from birth:
you will never be alone. Rain
will come, a gutter filled, an Amazon,
long aisles — you never heard so deep a sound,
moss on rock, and years. You turn your head —
that's what the silence meant: you're not alone.
The whole wide world pours down.

William Stafford

Wordless Wednesday - Cloudscapes

For the Great Canadas

When I awakened 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 darkness with their happy honking. How can one not be uplifted in hearing such 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 we encounter in our pottering, we never tire of watching them. Wherever we am and whatever we are doing, we 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 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.

Still in the Stream and Singing

 

Viriditas: Visions of the Green Saint, Mary Sharratt

Lucky me and lucky us!  This morning, Mary Sharratt is visiting us us to write about the quality of Viriditas (or greening power) as described in the writings of Hildegard of Bingen.  I read and reviewed the book a few days ago and was blown away by Mary's remarkable treatment of one of the greatest minds of the twelfth or (for that matter) any century.  It was simply wonderful when Hildegard was finally canonized in May of this year, almost nine hundred years after her passing, and what a grand thing it is that she was named a Doctor of the Church earlier this month.  What took them so long?

Just a reminder that this coming Wednesday I shall be drawing a name for a copy of Mary's new book, Illuminations.  

Viriditas: Visions of the Green Saint  

by Mary Sharratt

Born in the lush green Rhineland in present day Germany, Hildegard von Bingen (1098–1179) was a visionary nun and polymath. She founded two monasteries, went on four preaching tours, composed an entire corpus of highly original sacred music, and wrote nine books addressing both scientific and religious subjects, an unprecedented accomplishment for a 12th-century woman. Her prophecies earned her the title Sybil of the Rhine. An outspoken critic of political and ecclesiastical corruption, she courted controversy. 

In May 2012, 873 years after her death, she was finally canonized. In October 2012, she will be elevated to Doctor of the Church, a rare and solemn title reserved for theologians who have significantly impacted Church doctrine. Previously there were only thirty-three Doctors of the Church, and only three were women (Catherine of Siena, Teresa of Ávila, and Thérèse of Lisieux).

But Hildegard’s life and work transcends faith boundaries. Her visions of the Feminine Divine and of Viriditas, the sacred manifest in nature, have made her a pivotal figure in feminist spirituality.

Hildegard’s concept of Viriditas, or greening power, is her revelation of the animating life force manifest in the natural world that infuses all creation with moisture and vitality. To her, the divine was manifest in every leaf and blade of grass. Just as a ray of sunlight is the sun, Hildegard believed that a flower or a stone was God, though not the whole of God. Creation revealed the face of the invisible creator. Hildegard celebrated the sacred in nature, something highly relevant for us in this age of climate change and the destruction of natural habitats.

I, the fiery life of divine essence, am aflame beyond the beauty of the meadows, I gleam in the waters, and I burn in the sun, moon and stars . . . . I awaken everything to life.

Hildegard von Bingen, Liber Divinorum (Book of Divine Works)

Hildegard’s philosophy of Viriditas went hand in hand with her celebration of the Feminine Divine. Although the established Church of her day could not have been more male-dominated, Hildegard’s visions revealed the Feminine Divine. She called God Mother, and said that she could only bear to look upon divinity in her visions if God appeared to her in feminine form. Her visions revealed God as a cosmic egg, nurturing all of life like a womb. Masculine imagery of the creator tends to focus on God’s transcendence, but Hildegard’s revelations of the Feminine Divine celebrated immanence, of God being present in all things, in every aspect of this greening, burgeoning, blessed world.

According to Barbara Newman’s book Sister of Wisdom: St. Hildegard’s Theology of the Feminine, Hildegard’s Sapientia, or Divine Wisdom, creates the cosmos by existing within it.   

O power of wisdom!

You encompassed the cosmos,

Encircling and embracing all in one living orbit

With your three wings:

One soars on high,

One distills the earth’s essence,

And the third hovers everywhere.

Hildegard von Bingen, O virtus sapientia

This might be read as an ecstatic hymn to Sophia, the great Cosmic Mother.

Mary Sharratt’s Illuminations: A Novel of Hildegard von Bingen is published in October by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt and is a Book of the Month and One Spirit Book Club pick. Visit Mary’s website at: http://www.marysharratt.com

October Sunset

We live in a sea of light.

Henry Plummer

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)

Wordless Wednesday - Limpid Stream

On the Library Table: Illuminations, Mary Sharratt

Mary Sharratt’s gorgeous new novel begins as eight-year-old Hildegard von Bingen is given over by her family to the Roman Catholic church.  The young Hildegard is already experiencing visions, and her family fear she will be unmarriageable as a result. Then there is the matter of her dowry, for she is the tenth child in her family.

The future bestowed upon the child is austere beyond belief - she is to be the servant of a young aristocrat and consecrated anchorite named Jutta, renowned for her beauty, her severe penances and her religious devotion.

To be an anchorite was appalling, for they were walled up in tiny cells as a kind of living death, a single meager meal a day pushed through a slot, no contact with the outside world whatsoever, never going beyond their four walls after their consecration as hermits and brides of Christ.  Although such an existence might well have killed the young Hildegard (or at the very least quenched her intelligence and spirit), she somehow managed to prosper in her isolation, to learn diverse arts and even develop a measure of compassion for the moody and tempestuous Jutta.

When freed from the anchorage on the death of Jutta after thirty years, Hildegarde took her rightful place in the world as a Benedictine abbess, an artist and philosopher, a gifted composer, physician, scientist and author.  The depth and breadth of her learning and accomplishments is staggering.  Now, several centuries after her passing into the great beyond, Hildegarde's perception of God from a woman's point-of-view still sings as clearly as any bell.

To quote Mary Sharratt:  "The cornerstone of Hildegard’s spirituality was Viriditas, or greening power, her revelation of the animating life force manifest in the natural world that infuses all creation with moisture and vitality. To her, the divine is manifest in every leaf and blade of grass. Just as a ray of sunlight is the sun, Hildegard believed that a flower or a stone is God, though not the whole of God. Creation reveals the face of the invisible creator.”

This is the story of girl child neglected, ignored and then cast away by her family, someone who rose from dread misfortune to found her own Benedictine convent and become a legend in the living world far beyond her monastic abode.  Hildegard von Bingen is one of the greats of all history, and she can have no finer champion than Mary Sharratt.  Mary has done something incandescent and transcendent in writing Illuminations - she summons Hildegard's time and the truth of her existence so beautifully that we are right there (first in the anchorage and then in the convent) with the gifted young nun.

This is probably the best book I shall read this year, and I can't recommend it highly enough.  If you only read one book this year, make it this one.  This is a wonder.

In Their Own Sweet Time of Turning

Jacks and Ivy

For Little Sisters Now Departed

This week's visitor to the asters was probably the last "bumble" of the season.

Temperatures here have plummeted, and the furnace has been turning itself on in the wee hours of the morning. Putting one's bare feet down on the wooden floor at sunrise is definitely an awakening experience.

Yesterday, the first snows of the season arrived in a fine whirling dance - they didn't stay of course, but we are definitely on our way into the long, dark and cold times at the end of the calendar year, and heavy frosts mean that our bumble times are over for another year.

To all the little sisters who came to the garden this summer, our heartfelt thanks...

Thursday Poem - Poetics

I look for the way
things will turn
out spiralling from a center,
the shape
things will take to come forth in

so that the birch tree white
touched black at branches
will stand out
wind-glittering
totally its apparent self:

I look for the forms
things want to come as

from what black wells of possibility,
how a thing will
unfold:

not the shape on paper -- though
that, too -- but the
uninterfering means on paper:

not so much looking for the shape
as being available
to any shape that may be
summoning itself
through me
from the self not mine but ours.

A.R. Ammons

Wordless Wednesday - Sumacs in Red and Bronze

 

Looking Through

Sometimes, words are just de trop or too much, and this is one of those delicious mornings - the world is made of blue and gold and deep winey red.  Every single particle of it is filled with light and singing.

Mrs. Peel (Emma) Is Dancing

 

Happy (Canadian) Thanksgiving

Tomorrow is actually the designated day, but we are celebrating today due to various family constraints and responsibilities.  There is a plump free range turkey breast in the refrigerator, heaps of harvest vegetables and savory baked goods all over the house.

There were things we should have been doing yesterday, but the lake called in her siren voice, and off we went to visit her.  Overnight, the birches along the shore had turned, and they were a sight to behold, their perfect gold lighting up the water, reflections shimmering like silk in motion.

On such a day, how can one not be thankful?  Whether or not you are observing Thanksgiving this weekend, have a good one.

Early Sun and Oak Leaves

Wordless Wednesday - Held (II)

Pickled, Potted and Just Jamming

 

Here we are again in our usual domestic autumn alchemies and the throes of the annual "putting things by" frame of mind -  we're all wrapped up in the splendid exercise and the feelings that go along with it.  There are jars all over the house at the moment, baskets of late fruit and tomatoes lining the counter and threatening to take over the place, the fragrance of spices and brine anointing the air and wafting about like incense.

As much of a botheration and production as it all is, we wouldn't miss this for the world, and the colors and smells and tastes are sublime.  When I set the jars under the window in the kitchen, they catch the sun in the most amazing way.  Will we line everything up alphabetically this year or according to color?

Some things never change though...  The purple of potted beets delights the eye, but tucking sealers into a boiling water bath yesterday afternoon, I found myself thinking that the larder needed a little more red - particularly that fine deep intense earthy red I am seeing everywhere in the shops this year.  In chiffon the color is absolutely stunning, and I wish I had somewhere to wear such things. 

The right word for this time of the year is brimming...

Sensuous Reds and Deep Dark Blues

Virginia creeper 

(Parthenocissus quinquefolia)