The Frosty Moon of November

Off you go on a cold November evening, all wrapped up to the ears and carting telescope, tripod, camera and peripherals. Yup, it's full moon night, and you are SO looking forward to your lunar doings.  The thermometer is reading well below zero, but you're primed and frisky and ready to roll.

Alas, the sky is an ocean of heavy rolling cloud from here to there, and there is no moon to be seen.  After some long time, you motor dejectedly back indoors lugging what seems to be the equivalent of a whole truckload of stuff.  How on earth do you manage to carry all this stuff around over hill and dale, sometimes on skis or snowshoes or riding a bicycle?  Boats, canoes and kayaks are easy.

A mug of hot chocolate beckons, and so does the lovely new bag of marshmallows in the pantry.  We will simply gaze into the apple logs on the hearth and remember other November moons (sigh), then trot in here to the computer and visit all our favorite astronomy websites.  A not-so-long-ago article at Caltech's site details the university's annual Halloween pumpkin experiment, and it is hilarious reading.

We also know this moon as the All Gathered Moon, Beaver Moon, Bison Moon, Blood Moon, Buffalo Moon, Chrysanthemum Moon, Cold Begins Moon,  Corn Harvest Moon,Dark Moon, Deer Rutting Moon, Eleventh Moon, Falling Leaves Moon, Fire Friend Moon, Fog Moon, Freezing Moon, Freezing River Maker Moon, Frost Moon, Geese Going Moon, Harvest Moon, Holy Frost Moon,  Hunter's Moon, Jacaranda 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, Mourning Moon, Moon of Much Poverty, Prunus Moon, Ring-finger Moon, Sacrifice Moon, Samoni Moon, Sassafras Moon, Snow  Moon, Snow Moon,  Snow Moon, Snowy Mountains in the Morning Moon, Summer’s End Moon, Trading Moon, Trading Moon, Trading Moon, Trail Moon,  Tree Moon, White Frost on Grass & Ground Moon,  White Moon, Whitefish Moon, Willow Moon, Winter Divided Moon, Yew Moon

Wordless Wednesday - Frost and Winter Leaves

Elemental Conversations

Every once in a while, there comes a perfect blue day dusted with wisps of high drifting cloud like cotton.  It is cold out here, but if she is warmly dressed and out of the wind, one can almost believe it is summer for a moment or two.  

Then the wind asserts its primacy and goes rampaging across the tin roof, making the lightening rods on its summit shiver and sway.  It comes in at doors and windows without invitation, and it moans through every crack in the weathered barn walls.  One suddenly remembers it is November.

The barn has been standing since the 1800s though, and she is not fazed by late autumn and early winter blusterings.  Her foundations are local granite, and her bones are cedar timbers several feet in diameter.  Snug and firm on her Lanark hill, she patiently watches the clouds roll by, conversing with the impetuous wind in all its madcap oscillating moods and fancies.  I wonder what they are saying.

Fog Along the Ridge

Knowing the World and Our Fellow Travelers

The problem, often not discovered until late in life, is that when you look for things in life like love, meaning, motivation, it implies they are sitting behind a tree or under a rock. The most successful people in life recognize, that in life they create their own love, they manufacture their own meaning, they generate their own motivation. For me, I am driven by two main philosophies, know more today about the world than I knew yesterday. And lessen the suffering of others. You’d be surprised how far that gets you.
— Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson, American astrophysicist 

Dancing With the North Wind

Friday Ramble - Crepuscular

Crepuscular rolls trippingly off the tongue - it has a lovely ring to it, and the combination of consonants and vowels is such that one can wrap her mouth around the sounds like a good bit of saltwater toffee. The word comes to us through the good offices of the Latin crepuscul(um) meaning twilight or dusk, and it claims kinship with the Latin crepus/creper meaning murky or obscure. There is no relationship with crepe (as in crepe paper or crepe rubber).  That word hails from the Old French crespe and Latin crispus meaning curly. Crepuscular and crepe are birds of vibrant but differing plumage.

It's all about light and things liminal, the enchanted siren space between darkness and light.  Crepuscular describes the magical hours at dawn and dusk when the hinterland between light and darkness is most visible, when the whole world seems to be bathed in a golden glow, and everything seems to be standing in a stronger light than at other times of the day.

Most of all, there are are crepuscular rays, beams of sunlight made visible by snow, rain or dust in the atmosphere and appearing to radiate from a single co-ordinate in the sky (usually the sun). Crepuscular rays occur near sunrise and sunset, streaming through openings in the towering clouds and pouring themselves out over the earth like molten honey. As they pass through the clouds, the columns of sunlight are separated by darker shaded areas, and the effect is that of a dazzling wheel, beautiful beyond words.

The ancient Greeks referred to crepuscular rays as "sun drawing water", from their belief that sunbeams drew water into the sky - it was their "take" on natural processes of evaporation. There are a number of other names for this natural phenomenon which lights up the sky at sunrise and sunset: Buddha’s Rays, Cloud Breaks, Divine Light, Gateways to Heaven, God's Fingers, Jacob's Ladder, Jesus Beams, Jesus God Sunsets, Paths to Heaven, Ropes of Maui (from the Maori creation tale in which the child goddess Maui Potiki snared the sun with ropes and tied it in place to make days grow longer) Spokes of Heaven, Stairways to Heaven, Sunrays, Sun Wheel, Volumetric lighting (a graphic design term)

Once seen, crepuscular twilights are never forgotten, and it's a photographer's dream to encounter them while holding her camera. In this long old life, I have seen them through Arctic ice, (northern Baffin island), flaming through cumulonimbus clouds on Lake Superior, streaming across a favorite lake in the Lanark highlands.  Painting their way across the burnished waters, the rays of light always seem like a road to me, and the road I am being shown is a way home.  No doubt about it, November light is a treasure.

Wordless Wednesday - Touched

Woman on the Edge

One of the photos the artist/photographer/scribe (perhaps she IS one of those things after all) will come back to over and over again in the coming months when cold winds blow  though her favorite valleys and snow lies deep on the highlands...

The river is cold and deep and blue and intense, and it wears a skim of ice here and there.  The nearby trees are bare for the most part, but the tamaracks (larches) on the far shore are still wearing their early winter golds and rusts, and it will be a few weeks before they too are shorn of their vibrant foliage by the north wind. The scene before her eyes shimmers, and it is simply breathtaking.

It is the combination of the golden trees and the blue river that calls her here, their natural and seemingly artless fusion into a harmonious painterly whole.  She stands on the shore for some time just watching the colors and the ripples, nary a worry or a rambling thought on her mind, content just to be there and resting easy in the moment.

Before leaving, she snaps a image or three, and it is only on arriving home much later that she realizes she has done the unthinkable and taken a picture of herself too.

Enfolded and Resting Easy

A Rose Made Out of Stars

Need a mere soupçon, a glass, a jar or perhaps a whole cauldron overflowing with wonder and mystery? Shown here is the astonishing pair of intertwined galaxies known as Arp 273 (from the Arp Atlas of Peculiar Galaxies), residing 300 million light years away in the beautiful constellation called Andromeda.

Andromeda itself is one of the most magnificent objects (or rather collection of objects) in the night sky.  The most famous deep sky object in it, and one of the loveliest, is the often photographed spiral galaxy cataloged as Messier 31 or NGC (New General Catalogue) 224. It also goes by the name of the "Great Galaxy in Andromeda".

The image above was taken by NASA's magnificent Hubble Space Telescope and published to celebrate its twenty-first anniversary in 2011.  I'm a frequent visiter to Hubble's own website as well as that of its caretaker, the Goddard Space Flight Center, and the images being published from its star studded journey are breathtaking.

In 2018, Hubble will be joined by the great new infrared James Webb Space Telescope, and the new star child promises discoveries beyond the scope of human imagination.  Orbiting in space a million miles from the earth, the Webb will allow us to peer for the first time out to the rim of our own universe and beyond, seeing new solar systems, evolving galaxies and infant stars never before visible to those of us who love starry starry nights and haunt them with our telescopes and cameras.

The larger of the spiral galaxies shown here is known as UGC (Uppsala General Catalogue) 1810, and its disc is tidally distorted into a rose-like shape by the gravitational pull of its companion galaxy below, known as UGC 1813. The swathe of blue jewels across the top of the image is the combined light from clusters of intensely bright and sizzling hot young blue stars, glowing fiercely in ultraviolet light.

This is incredibly cool stuff, and if I were just a few years younger, I would be begging for a menial job at Goddard or its sister site at the California Institute of Technology, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, just to be where everything is happening.  Is this art?  You bet it is, and it is heavenly.

Ambrosia in My Cup

Sometimes what we are seeking is right there in front of us at the beginning of day through we see it not: pale sunlight coming through the window and high drifting clouds beyond, the lively chatter of starlings in flight.

Within, there is the hum of the kettle on the fire, the perfect turquoise glaze of pot and drinking vessels, fragrant steam rising, sweet ambrosia in the cup.

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,

November stillness flowing like a shadow

down 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,

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)

Got a little ahead of myself and accidentally published this yesterday....

Wordless Wednesday - Frosted

At the Edge of a Year

We are usually out before sunrise, Himself and Spencer and I, wandering in the park or sometimes by the lake as a November morning fog wraps itself around us in billows and swirls and nebulous clouds. Spencer potters along in his own nosy German Shorthair fashion, seeking interesting smells and wild creatures to point, reflecting happily on his life with us and thinking about fine rambles in the woods in Lanark when the hunting season has gone the way of all good and earthly things in a few weeks' time.

At some time in the wee hours on Sunday, Daylight Saving Time became a thing of the past, and time danced backward an hour or so in the little blue house in the village. This week also marks an anniversary of sorts.  It frames seven years of blogging at Beyond the Fields We Know - seven years of logging on here in the morning, posting bad photos and muttering along for a few paragraphs. An astonishing state of affairs, and the thought boggles the old mind... I still can't quite come to terms with my temerity in setting this e-journal up in the first place, let alone doing the blogging thing faithfully for seven years in a row.

This is a diary of sorts; these are my morning pages or artist's pages, and so they shall remain pretty much as they are. I'm not contemplating significant changes to this little corner of the blogging planet during the coming year, and I expect life will simply go along as it has so far. Apprentices of wonder are we, and we will continue to meander along at our own pace, watching morning fogs enfold the village and bare trees swaying against the sky, oak leaves raining dew like honey in the park, old Helios going down like a great ball of fire over Dalhousie Lake at the edge of the year. Enfolded in the Great Round of time, we and the small adventures of our journeying will continue to make our way here and spill our wanderings out on the computer screen a few hours after sunrise.

Departed Cassie is often with us on our wanderings; we can hear her soft breathing and feel her dancing along beside us, but her happy feet make no sound in the fallen leaves on the trail. We four are a tribe, and we belong together. The words that came to mind as we all pottered along in the fog together a few days ago were those of the incandescently gifted Mary Oliver.

The years to come -- this is a promise --
will grant you ample time

to try the difficult steps in the empire of thought
where you seek for the shining proofs you think you must have.

But nothing you ever understand will be sweeter,
or more binding,
than this deep affinity between your eyes and the world.

Mary Oliver, Excerpt from Terns

Thank you for journeying along here with me. You are more precious and wonderful than you can ever know.

Alight at the Close of Day

Friends Along the Trail

White-breasted Nuthatch
(Sitta carolinensis)

And so it begins..... Food for our small woodland friends is disappearing rapidly, and we have just begun our traditional winter "thing" of hanging feeders and suet at various places along the trail into the deep woods and keeping them filled. In the depths of the long white season, there will be deer feeding stations as well: grain and apples, heaps of fragrant cedar cut for the resident White-tails to feed on.

When we arrived yesterday morning, the feeders were already empty, and a whole throng of chickadees was waiting for us in the trees, dancing about and chirruping a rowdy welcome in the cold sunlight. Within a few days, they will be sitting on my shoulders as I top up their food supply, and oh how they will sing.

White-breasted Nuthatches have begun to visit within the last few days, and this one was a flurry of motion, zooming into the feeder and then wheeling away to a nearby pine with its beak full of sunflower seeds. Once in place, it hammered its breakfast against the bark of the tree to dislodge the husk and reveal the tasty contents. Its sharp nasal song soon brought its mate to the feeder too.

For the moment, lugging bags of seed and suet up the trail is fairly easy going, but we are already in training for deep winter forays along the trail, wearing snowshoes and pulling toboggans of food for our wild companions. It will not be long, and yesterday I found myself thinking about putting up some sort of windbreak so that I can do some serious bird photography this winter.

Dressed for the Season

Thursday Poem - Sometimes

Sometimes, I am startled out of myself,

like this morning, when the wild geese came squawking,

flapping their rusty hinges, and something about their trek

across the sky made me think about my life, the places

of brokenness, the places of sorrow, the places where grief

has strung me out to dry. And then the geese come calling,

the leader falling back when tired, another taking her place.

Hope is borne on wings. Look at the trees. They turn to gold

for a brief while, then lose it all each November.

Through the cold months, they stand, take the worst

weather has to offer. And still, they put out shy green leaves

come April, come May. The geese glide over the cornfields,

land on the pond with its sedges and reeds.

You do not have to be wise. Even a goose knows how to find

shelter, where the corn still lies in the stubble and dried stalks.

All we do is pass through here, the best way we can.

They stitch up the sky, and it is whole again.

Barbara Crooker

(from Radiance)

Wordless Wednesday - Touched

The Splendid Leaf Deep Trail

And the Winners Are...

The winners of the draw for copies of Mary Sharratt's exquisite Illuminations are Prairie Star and Mystic Meandering.  Can you both contact me with your mailing info?

Water, Stones and Floating Leaf

Thursday Poem - The Moment

The moment when, after many years
of hard work and a long voyage
you stand in the centre of your room,
house, half-acre, square mile, island, country,
knowing at last how you got there,
and say, I own this,

is the same moment when the trees unloose
their soft arms from around you,
the birds take back their language,
the cliffs fissure and collapse,
the air moves back from you like a wave
and you can't breathe.

No, they whisper. You own nothing.
You were a visitor, time after time
climbing the hill, planting the flag, proclaiming.
We never belonged to you.
You never found us.
It was always the other way round.

Margaret Atwood

(from Morning in the Burned House)