For Imbolc (Candlemas)

Here we are again on the eve of Imbolc or Candlemas. Strange to relate, this festival in the depths of winter celebrates light and warmth, the stirring of green things within the earth, new life and the beginning of springtime. Once called "Bride's day", the observance is consecrated to Brigid, a deity of fire, creativity, wisdom, eloquence and superb craftsmanship.  She is patroness of the forge and smithy, poetry and the healing arts, particularly midwifery. Hers are the candle, the lantern, the hearth and the forge, and light is her special province.  Poets, bards, storytellers, musicians, painters, weavers, potters, midwives, healers, cunning folk, chandlers (candlemakers) and blacksmiths - she watches over them all.

We are made of light ourselves, and that makes us Brigid's children - creatures forged from the dust of stars which once lighted the heavens and ceased to exist long ago. Within our cells are encoded the wisdoms of the ancient earth and all its cultures, the star knowledge of unknown constellations and "The Big Bang" which created not just our own world, but the vast cosmic sea in which it floats.

The stardust of which we are made has spontaneously assembled into diverse life forms over and over again, lived and expired, then dissolved back into the stream of being. In our time, “we” have been many things, worn many shapes and answered to many names. In this lifetime I exist as an eccentric,  tatterdemalion, and perhaps unique collection of wandering molecules called Catherine or Cate, but in previous appearances I was someone or something completely different. Buddhist teacher, thinker, activist and deep ecologist Joanna Macy says that since every particle in our being goes back to the first flaring of space and time, we are as old as the universe itself, about  fifteen billion years. In other words, we are the universe, and it is us.

Merry Imbolc to you and your clan. Happy Candlemas and Happy Brigid's Day too. May the boundless blessings of Light be yours.

First Light

Thursday Poem - The Snowman

One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;

And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter

Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,

Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place
For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

Wallace Stevens, from Harmonium

Wordless Wednesday - Who has seen the wind?

Longing for Light

I lurch awake before sunrise and make coffee, then wait for early sunlight to make its way through the south facing kitchen window.  Sometimes there is sunlight these mornings, but mostly there is not. Northern days begin to stretch out languorously at the beginning of a new year, but we are into February's middling pages before change can be seen and felt in morning's velvet touch through the frosted panes of our longing.

In January, I find myself longing for light and chasing it whenever I I glimpse it for even a moment: village streets at sunrise, my sleeping garden, sunlight and sparkles dusting trees in the Lanark woods or glistening like sequins in the snow when the clouds roll back. Like Midas Crook in Ali Shaw's novel, The Girl With Glass Feet, I pursue the light through my frozen highland landscape with notebook and lens, falling into crevices now and again, blundering into trees and old stones, occasionally getting stuck in a snowdrift on my snowshoes and flailing (or thrashing) my way free.

There is a fine elusive old truth resting out there in the intangible interstices between earth and sky, light and shadow. On woodland rambles, I trace long blue lines of shadow in the snow with my fingers and measure the difference in their slant from day to day. The shapes whisper that springtime is already on its way, but this morning they are also saying that it is going to be a while.

This morning, there is blue sky beyond my windows, and it shades gloriously to pink and gold and purple near the horizon, but the weather is very cold here (-28 C.), and we have a long long way to go before springtime puts in an appearance. Until it does turn up, I shall look for dancing motes of light in the woodland and within myself, and I shall remember that deep within their dreaming roots, all trees hold the light.

Light Over the Trail

The Wolf Moon of January

For all its lambent lustre and pearly radiance, January's moon is one of deep cold, snow and hunger in wild places.  Not long ago, we perched right here and photographed waves of departing geese against a rising autumn moon, and here we were again this weekend. The great birds were long gone of course, but their parting songs were a faint echo on the wind.

January's lunar orb is the coldest moon of the calendar year. We stoke fireplaces and wood stoves and huddle by our hearths on long winter nights, brew endless pots of tea and countless cauldrons of soup, count sticks of firewood and kindling.  We wrap ourselves up and take toboggan loads of nosh into the forest for the hungry and ever hopeful birds, the deer. On wild jaunts, we look about for the first signs that daylight hours are stretching out again, measure the incline, intensity and sharpness of the deep blue shadows falling across our trail as we crunch along. The north wind holds dominion over our native hills, and it cuts like a knife. During the last winter Olympics, an ad supporting the Canadian team proclaimed: "We are Winter” (“Nous sommes l'hiver”), and truer words were never spoken. Winter is something we do up here, and we do it very, very well.

On clear winter nights, timber wolves in Lanark raise their voices in song, and coyote clans on the other side of the Two Hundred Wood sing a magnificent harmony, the two choruses performing a descant that rises and falls in waves across the inky snow and travels for miles - it's almost Gregorian, a Kyrie eleison so gorgeous it gives us goosebumps and leaves us breathless every single time we hear it.

As we waited for Lady Moon to appear last evening, we remembered that in three or four weeks, great horned owls will be nesting in our woods again, and a few weeks after that, the maple syrup season will (hopefully) be starting in the highlands. Of such small and hopeful notions, our winter days are made.

We also know this January moon as the: After Yule Moon, Big Cold Moon, Buckeyes Ripe Moon, Carnation Moon, Center Moon, Ceremonial Initiate Moon, Cold Moon, Cooking Moon, Turning Moon, Earth Renewal Moon, First Moon, Frost in the Tepee Moon, Frozen Ground Moon, Great Moon, Great Spirit Moon, Greetings Maker Moon, Her Cold Moon, Hibiscus Moon, Holiday Moon, Ice Moon, Lakes Frozen Moon, Little Winter Moon, Long Moon, Man Moon, Midwinter Moon, Moon After Yule, Moon of the Bear, Moon of the Child, Moon of Darkness, Moon of Flying Ants, Moon of Life at It's Height, Moon of Strong Cold, Moon of Whirling Snow, Moon When Animals Lose Their Fat, Moon When Limbs of Trees Are Broken by Snow, Moon When Snow Drifts into Tipis, Moon When the Snow Blows like Spirits in the Wind, Moon When the Sun Has Traveled South, Moon When the Old Fellow Spreads the Brush , Moon When Wolves Run Together, Ninene Moon, No Snow in Trails Moon, Old Moon, Pine Moon, Plum Blossom Moon, Quiet Moon, Rivros Moon, Rowan Moon, Severe Moon, Snow Moon, Snow Thaws Moon, Snowdrop Moon, Snowy Path Moon, Strong Cold Moon, Sun Has Not Strength to Thaw Moon, Thumb Moon, Trail Squint Moon, Two Trails Moon, Weight Loss Moon, Whirling Wind Moon, White Waking Moon, Winter Moon, Winter's Younger Brother Moon

Always an admirer of wolves, I like the name "Wolf Moon", but I am also fond of "Great Spirit Moon" and "Earth Renewal Moon".

Fence and Sundown Light

Friday Ramble - Listen

This week's word predates 950 CE (Common Era) and has its roots in the Middle English lis(t)nen, the Old English hlysnan; the Middle High Germanic lüsenen, the Swedish lyssna,  and possibly the Sanskrit śroṣati, all meaning "to hear" or "to give ear to".  It is kin to list which also names the French liste and the Old High German leiste among its antecedents.

Listening means hearing someone or something, but more than that, it is to be thoughtfully intent and focused, to cultivate radiant attention and concentrate on that someone or something with all one's being.  Within both words (listen and attention) are notions of observant caring, courtesy, consideration and rapt awareness. Consider is probably my favorite synonym for this week's word, and it, as I once wrote here, has its origins in the Middle English consideren and Latin considerare, both meaning "with the stars" or "in the company of the stars".

An icy wind howls through the gutters of the little blue house in the village this morning - it goes rushing around corners, whistling a hollow resonant tune that sounds like my battered and dented Tibetan singing bowl. There is tinkling and crackling up by the eaves as the icicles there protest the ebullient presence trying so hard to bring them down. When they tumble and shatter, the icicles ring like bells against the snow.

Steaming mug in hand, I shiver by the back door and listen to the day unfolding, and it seems to me that these ordinary winter morning sounds are almost symphonic in their expression, in their perfect, seemingly effortless orchestration. The intervals between the notes being played are as expressive as the notes themselves, and I remember a handful of compositions by avant garde composers John Cage and Steve Reich, works in which silence is a key element.

When it snows again later, I will be able to hear the snow coming to rest on the stones in my garden, and the evergreens out there will sway and seem to be singing softly. Taken individually, snow and evergreens are deliciously fragrant, but blended together, they're sublime and intoxicating. Such moments are some of my favorite intervals in all of life - eldritch musics indeed, and what the legendary Finn mac Cumaill called "the music of what happens". He believed there was no finer or more beautiful sound on this hallowed earth.

Thursday Poem - Love After Love

The time will come
when, with elation
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror
and each will smile at the other's welcome,

and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you

all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,

the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.

Derek Walcott

Wordless Wednesday - The Church of Winter Trees

On the Snowbound Ridge

What makes one climb a hill on a bitterly cold day in January?

It could be the wild and rather melancholy pleasure that arises out of viewing expanses of snow demarcated by rocks, trees, old rails and pipe gates, nary a building in sight.  Perhaps it's Zen notions of emptiness, stirred up by the sound of the hollow wind sweeping the hills, sculpting random waves and abstract shapes as it passes.  It could be the inky blue of the deep shadows that lie over and around everything.  It might be an unexpressed desire for the order and containment represented by old cedar rails and rusty wire, a yearning for the beguiling realms that always seem to beckon beyond summits and rude gates.

In winter, the land reveals itself to a patient wanderer as it does at no other time during the year. One can see the true contours of the countryside and trace its rocky bones with her eyes, feel the land's peaceful sleep and share its slow dreams, sometimes even discern the shape of the springtime to come (although spring seems far away on such a day as this). If one is quiet and observant, there are swaths of subtle color to be seen in the snow and shadows, and there is music in the wind.  Who knew that blue came in so many entrancing shades?

There is no profound rhyme or reason for this week's frozen interval on the ridge - at least that I can figure out at the moment.  I was out on a hill among the rocks and snow people, and that was enough. And oh, the light...

The Patient Guest

Sunday - Saying Yes to the World

Every one of our mysterious and miraculous senses, including mind, is a way of knowing the world and ourselves.

We are larger than any one way of knowing, and can enjoy all of them as different incomplete and complimentary modes for appreciating what is, and for participating in what is with gusto and delight for the moments, timeless and fleeting, that we are here for.  We can rest in not knowing as well as in knowing, in the beauty of form and function and in their mystery, on any and every level that the senses and the mind, our instruments and our instincts, and our efforts to understand, deliver to us in any moment.

Jon Kabat-Zinn, Coming to Our Senses, Healing Ourselves and the World Through Mindfulness

Up in My Tree

Friday Ramble - Enough/Enoughness

The adjective form of this week's word dates from before the year 900, having its origin in the Middle English enogh, and Old English genōh; both are cognate with the German genug, Gothic ganohs and  Old Norse nōgr.  The Old English geneah (it suffices) and Sanskrit naśati (reaches or reaching) are kindred words.

Roget gives us the following: abundant, adequate, ample, full, sufficient, suitable, acceptable, bountiful, comfortable, competent, complete, copious, decent, enough already, plentiful and satisfying.  Frugal and its noun form frugality are modern kin and words I sometimes use in conversation.

I find myself thinking of Lewis Hyde, and if you haven't already read his The Gift or Trickster Makes This World, please consider doing it. To cultivate enoughness is see things differently, to make the best possible use of what we are given, to appreciate what we already have and embrace the non-commercial aspects of our creativity. It is to tread lightly on the earth, reducing our ecological footprint and lessening our demands on a world strained almost beyond its regenerative powers by human excess, greed and contempt.

Cultivating enough, we use what we have been given with grace, respect and thanksgiving.  We partake of a wild and earthy fruitfulness, a careful abundance and an ethic of universal stewardship. We walk through this world rooted and knowing our place in it, live as the good stewards, artists and creators we were meant to be. Lewis Hyde says it a lot better than I ever could.

Thursday Poem - At Sunrise

at sunrise on winter days

our trail is through newly fallen white,

and every footfall a waxing moon

muffled footsteps rising

through snow-drowned spruces,

hearts beating along in time

goldenrod and milkweed,

great spruces weighted under snow,

all nod in early greeting

ghost choirs of summer grosbeaks
sing above our heads, icicles forming

along rooflines as we pass by

winter rounds the village out,

smoothing the contours of house and street,
spinning deserts out of snow

in this morning softness, I know myself

at last — perfect, still and so complete

nothing abandoned or left behind.

Cate

Wordless Wednesday - Cup of Winter

 

All the Colors of Morning

"In our life there is a single color, as on an artist's palette, which provides the meaning of life and art. It is the color of love."
Marc Chagall

Morning light comes slowly on these middling pages in January.  First is a diffused blush on the horizon, then a deep magenta sky and rosy clouds high over the trees, flamboyant coppery gold dancing through everything, a burnished glow flowing like honey over the village. Trees, chimneys and snowy rooflines are silhouetted against the early radiance, and they contribute their own glow to the day that is just coming into being.

These are my "stained glass hours", and they have illustrious kindred; the rose window of the Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris, the panels of Edward Burne-Jones and William Morris, the stained glass creations of Louis Comfort Tiffany, the magnificent creations of Marc Chagall: his paintings of the biblical Song of Songs, the stained glass windows (especially the Reuben window) depicting the Twelve Tribes of Israel he designed for the synagogue of Jerusalem's Hadassah Medical Centre.  Then there are the windows he created as a memorial for Sarah d'Avigdor-Goldsmith in All Saints Church, Tudeley, Kent.  Commissioned by her parents to create a single commemorative window after Sarah's untimely death in a sailing accident, Chagall attended its dedication and saw the pre-Norman structure for the first time. He thought it was magnificent and decided to create panels for the other eleven windows.

Compelled for some reason to be up and about before the light show starts, off I go to find a seat by the window and partake of the abundance. I bring a mug of tea, a heavy shawl and the camera.  Chagall often seemed to be seeing the beauty of the earth through stained glass, and wrapped up in a winter morning's exquisite colours, I seem to be doing the same thing.  Nature and Chagall are artists—I am merely a doddering observer, training my lens on the high perfect light of morning and floundering for words to describe it.

Suspended in Winter Time

Sunday - Saying Yes to the World

Whether through the patterns left in snow, or geese honking in the dark, or through the brilliant wet leaf that hits your face the moment you are questioning your worth, the quiet teachers are everywhere, pointing us to the unlived portion of our lives. When we think we are in charge, the lessons dissolve as accidents or coincidence. But when we’re humble enough to welcome the connections, the glass that breaks across the room is offering us direction, giving us a clue to the story we are in.
Mark Nepo, The Exquisite Risk: Daring to Live an Authentic Life

Fringing the Frozen Lake

Friday Ramble - Reflect/Reflection

On a bitterly cold day in January, she wraps up and goes out for a ramble with her camera and notebook.  She is feeling a little restless and in search of something, but she has no idea what that something is or rather, what it will turn out to be. She thinks she will recognize it when she sees it.

There is snow everywhere, and not much color to be seen in the landscape, but she pauses in a quiet scrap of field where an intermittent stream flows in season.  There is no water flowing now, but in one place the north wind has brushed away the snow blanketing the little river, and the frozen surface is revealed in all its fractal perfection.

The sun slips below the horizon and everything flashes, burnished ice capturing the end-of-day light and reflecting it back again, holding it up like an offering, like a mirror in which the sky can see itself. There are oceans, islands and cloud archipelagos just drifting along up there, and down here too. The chiaroscuro scene is one of effortless, untrammeled reciprocity—no reservations, no limitations, no holding back.

The words reflect and reflection emerge from the distant Middle English reflecten and Latin reflectere, both meaning "to bend".  When we use either word in mundane conversation these days, we think of light and mirrors and occasionally deep thought processes, everything and anything at all except bending. There were no deep thoughts at the edge of the little stream this week, but whatever notions she entertained there were probably closer to the original meaning of reflection than than they were to anything else she could think of offhand.

Watching the slow flush and shimmer of sunset moving across the ice, she felt like bending and giving a gassho or a bow of some kind. The place, the time of day, the light - oh, that one could burnish her own life like this.  Words and images can't do justice to such moments, and all efforts to do so are echos, soupçons, whispers on the north wind. This is enough, she tells herself, this is enough.

Thursday Poem - January

Dusk and snow this hour
in argument have settled
nothing. Light persists,
and darkness. If a star
shines now, that shine is
swallowed and given back
doubled, grounded bright.
The timid angels flailed
by passing children lift
in a whitening wind
toward night. What plays
beyond the window plays
as water might, all parts
making cold digress.
Beneath iced bush and eave,
the small banked fires of birds
at rest lend absences
to seeming absence. Truth
is, nothing at all is missing.
Wind hisses and one shadow
sways where a window's lampglow
has added something. The rest
is dark and light together tolled
against the boundary-riven
houses. Against our lives,
the stunning wholeness of the world.

Betty Adcock from Intervale

Wordless Wednesday - Easy Landing

Dancing With the North Wind

What an unexpected gift they can be, these bitterly cold and diamond bright days when sunlight shines through clouds and lights on the snow blowing across these hills and through the spruce trees on the ridge.

There I was a few days ago on the northern slope of my favorite hill, trying to trace the contours of the north wind with my own two eyes, trying to capture it with a camera and commit it to digital memory so that I might paint it some day soon.  One cannot actually see the wind of course, but rather the swirling choreography and elemental movements of its pas de deux with the season.  Now and then I caught a glimpse, and it was grand and humbling, all at the same time.

Never mind that my hood was pulled up all the way, that I was wrapped up in every warm garment I possessed to hold the deep cold at bay and keep out the very same wind I was trying to grasp with my lens.  I looked for all the world like a yeti or an inukshuk out there among the shifting clouds of blowing snow and ice crystals.

I whispered descriptive words like a mantra, and somehow or other, they conferred a sense of comfort and balance on an icy day in January - winter, sunshine, hills and sleeping trees, frost, ice and blowing snow.

The merest suggestion of light on a winter morning is a fine thing, and I sometimes think that if I stand out here long enough, I might be able to embrace the poignant stillness that the fine American poet Wallace Stevens called "the mind of snow".  I have, however, a very long way to go. The mind may have longed for a moment of snowy kensho this week, but it also craved firelight and warmth and a large mug of Darjeeling tea.

Along the Trail

Sunday - Saying Yes to the World

 

Do you have doubts about life? Are you unsure if it is really worth the trouble? Look at the sky: that is for you. Look at each person’s face as you pass them on the street: those faces are for you. And the street itself, and the ground under the street, and the ball of fire underneath the ground: all these things are for you. They are as much for you as they are for other people.  Remember this when you wake up in the morning and think you have nothing. Stand up and face the east. Now praise the sky and praise the light within each person under the sky. It’s okay to be unsure. But praise, praise, praise.
Miranda July

The Road Goes Ever On

Friday Ramble - First of the Year

Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known.

Carl Sagan

She is standing on the edge of something, but what precisely?  Is it the leading edge of nightfall or the trailing edge of a winter day?  Is it the selvage of this bitterly cold and windy field in the Lanark highlands or the deftly stitched hem of 2016, a shiny new calendar year?  Perhaps she is standing on the threshold of a fey insight of some kind, a wild and canny knowing, an unknowing?

There is something out here longing to be known, or at least recognized, but the hour is too cold to linger and entertain puckish or arty thoughts.  Her frozen fingers could not grasp pen, pencil or sketchbook if her life depended on it. The camera, on the other hand, is clear of eye and lens and unwavering in its commitment.  It lights on and then dwells lovingly on every tump of snow, each strand of rusty wire and burnished blade of winter grass, every mist wrapped spruce and floating cloud of golden sundown light.

What I would like this squeaky clean new year to be all about is just showing up and being fully present when I get here, loving what I see just as it is and not imposing my imperfect self, my fumbling mediocrity and my feeble preconceptions on what is already perfect.  May it be so.

Happy New Year everyone!