Thursday Poem - Fern Hill

Now as I was young and easy under the apple boughs
About the lilting house and happy as the grass was green,
The night above the dingle starry,
Time let me hail and climb
Golden in the heydays of his eyes,
And honored among wagons I was prince of the apple towns
And once below a time I lordly had the trees and leaves
Trail with daisies and barley
Down the rivers of the windfall light.

And as I was green and carefree, famous among the barns
About the happy yard and singing as the farm was home,
In the sun that is young once only,
Time let me play and be
Golden in the mercy of his means,
And green and golden I was huntsman and herdsman, the calves
Sang to my horn, the foxes on the hills barked clear and cold,
And the sabbath rang slowly
In the pebbles of the holy streams.

All the sun long it was running, it was lovely, the hay
Fields high as the house, the tunes from the chimneys, it was air
And playing, lovely and watery
And fire green as grass.
And nightly under the simple stars
As I rode to sleep the owls were bearing the farm away,
All the moon long I heard, blessed among stables, the nightjars
Flying with the ricks, and the horses
Flashing into the dark.

And then to awake, and the farm, like a wanderer white
With the dew, come back, the cock on his shoulder: it was all
Shining, it was Adam and maiden,
The sky gathered again
And the sun grew round that very day.
So it must have been after the birth of the simple light
In the first, spinning place, the spellbound horses walking warm
Out of the whinnying green stable
On to the fields of praise.

And honored among foxes and pheasants by the gay house
Under the new made clouds and happy as the heart was long,
In the sun born over and over,
I ran my heedless ways,
My wishes raced through the house high hay
And nothing I cared, at my sky blue trades, that time allows
In all his tuneful turning so few and such morning songs
Before the children green and golden
Follow him out of grace.

Nothing I cared, in the lamb white days, that time would take me
Up to the swallow thronged loft by the shadow of my hand,
In the moon that is always rising,
Nor that riding to sleep
I should hear him fly with the high fields
And wake to the farm forever fled from the childless land.
Oh as I was young and easy in the mercy of his means,
Time held me green and dying
Though I sang in my chains like the sea.

Dylan Thomas

Wordless Wednesday - Summertime and the livin' is easy

Holding the Sun Within

Oh, how they hold the sun, these gloriously yellow gerbera blooms. Kin to dahlias, daisies, marigolds, calendulas, coneflowers, chrysanthemums, zinnias, and the great towering sunflowers, they drink in midsummer's morning light and store it within the frilly tutus of their lavish petals. 

Then they dish it out like honey, and even the old garden roses behind are them moved and uplifted by their frothy golden magnificence, their almost imperceptible swaying movement, the soft, sighing music of their duet with the wind.

Now and then, I falter in winter as all living northern creatures must from time to time.  I mourn the paucity of light in the snowy world beyond the windows and find myself filled with vague longings and a gentle melancholy.

Then I remember how my garden loves the light in summer.  I am renewed by the remembrance, and I do a little blooming of my own within.

Nectar and Early Light

Morning Cloak and Milkweed

Nymphalis antiopa

Sunday - Saying Yes to the World

... the universe is not simply a place but a story, a story in which we are immersed, to which we belong, and out of which we arose.

This story has the power to awaken us more deeply to who we are.  For just as the Milky Way is the universe in the form of a galaxy, and an orchid is the universe in the form of a flower, we are the universe in the form of a human.  And every time we are drawn to look up into the night sky and reflect on the awesome beauty of the universe, we are actually the universe reflecting on itself.  And this changes everything.

Brian Swimme and Mary Evelyn Tucker, Journey of the Universe

Little Spirit of the Garden

Eastern Cottontail (Sylvilagus floridanus)

Thursday Poem - Daily

These shriveled seeds we plant,
corn kernel, dried bean,
poke into loosened soil,
cover over with measured fingertips

These T-shirts we fold into
perfect white squares

These tortillas we slice and fry to crisp strips
This rich egg scrambled in a gray clay bowl

This bed whose covers I straighten
smoothing edges till blue quilt fits brown blanket
and nothing hangs out

This envelope I address
so the name balances like a cloud
in the center of sky

This page I type and retype
This table I dust till the scarred wood shines
This bundle of clothes I wash and hang and wash again
like flags we share, a country so close
no one needs to name it

The days are nouns: touch them
The hands are churches that worship the world

Naomi Shihab Nye, 
(from The Words Under the Words: Selected Poems)

Wordless Wednesday - Rose

The Midsummer Moon of June

What else can one call a full moon that falls on the eve of the summer solstice, but the "Midsummer Moon"? This year, no other name will do.

Summer reigns in the northern hemisphere, and we focus our thoughts on Helios ascendant, not the quieter (but no less radiant) Lady Moon lighting our nights in a tapestry of twinkling stars. When June's full moon makes its appearance, we are tending our gardens and thinking ahead to autumnal rhythms of harvesting, gathering and storing, anything at all except winter, cold and long nights.

In the eastern Ontario highlands, corn and oats reach for the sky and fields of barley are "pinking up" nicely.  The first grain harvest of the year is underway, and farm fields are freckled with bales of timothy (blue grass), alfalfa and sweet clover. Is there anything on the planet to compare with the fragrance of freshly cut clover?

Deer graze in the deep shadows along fence lines at dusk, and wild turkeys forage in high oak groves, gabbling their pleasure at the dainties on offer. Our cups are brimming over, but daylight will begin to wane this week, and cooler times will be on their way - we accept their coming of course, but for the moment, our musings are all wrapped up in warmth, sunlight flickering through old trees and birdsong in the overstory.

We also know this moon as the: Bass Moon, Big Mouth Moon, Big Summer Moon, Blackberry Moon, Bulbs Mature Moon, Columbine Moon, Corn Tassels Appear Moon, Dancing Moon, Duckling Moon, Dyan Moon, Egg Hatching Moon, Egg Laying Moon, Egg Moon, Eucalyptus Moon, Fatness Moon, Fish Spoils Easily Moon, Fishing Moon, Flowering Cherry Moon, Full Leaf Moon, Gardening Moon, Green Corn Moon, Hoeing Moon, Honey Moon, Hot Moon, Lady Slipper Moon, Leaf Dark Moon, Litha Moon, Lotus Moon, Lovers' Moon, Mead Moon, Middle of Summer Moon, Midsummer Brightness Moon, Midsummer Moon, Moon of Horses, Moon of Little Fawns, Moon of Making Fat, Moon of Planting, Moon of the Turtle, Moon When Green Grass Is Up, Moon When June Berries Are Ripe, Moon When the Buffalo Bulls Hunt the Cows, Moon When the Hot Weather Begins, Moon When the Leaves Are Dark Green, Moon When the Leaves Come out, Moon When They Hill Indian Corn, Oak Moon, Peony Moon, Planting Moon, Pomegranate Moon, Raspberry Moon, Ripening Moon, Ripening Time Moon, Sixth Moon, Sockeye Moon, Solstice Moon, Strawberry Moon, Strong Sun Moon, Summer Moon, Sun High Moon, Thumb Moon, Turning Moon, Watermelon Moon, Windy Moon.

Happy Litha, happy Midsummer.  May the manifold blessings of light be yours.

Sphinx on the Threshold

Blinded Sphinx (Paonias excaecatus)

The Blinded Sphinx moth takes its name from prominent blue eye spots on each of its bright pink hind wings. When at rest, its hind wings and eye spots cannot be seen, hence the name.

These beautiful moths are nocturnal creatures and seldom seen by day.  Like other adult members of the giant silk moth clan such as the Atlas, Cecropia, Luna, Polyphemus and Promethea moths, they lack mouth parts, and so they cannot feed.  Unable to take in nourishment, they live for only a handful of days after emerging from their chrysalises, just long enough to find a mate and perpetuate their genetic material.  It is sad to think that something so exquisite inhabits the earth for such a short time.

My sphinx perched on the door of the little blue house in the village this weekend.  As it appeared in full daylight, I can only assume it was nearing the end of its brief but utterly sublime existence. Starting this paragraph, I wrote "My specimen perched..." then thought a creature so magnificent should be called by its proper name and not simply as a specimen, especially near the end of its allotted days. I addressed it as "sphinx" and thanked it for visiting me at a time when I desperately needed to see such a wonder.

Sunday - Saying Yes to the World

As the pen rises from the page between words, so the walker's feet rise and fall between paces, and as the deer continues to run as it bounds from the earth and the dolphin continues to swim even as it leaps again and again from the sea, so writing and wayfaring are continuous activities, a running stitch, a persistence of the same seam or stream.
Robert Macfarlane, The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot

A Bouquet From the Squirrels

Friday Ramble - Solstice

Here we are on the Friday before Midsummer, the Summer Solstice or Litha. Sunday night is midsummer eve, and Monday is the longest day of the calendar year, the Sun poised at its zenith or highest point and seeming to stand still for a fleeting interval before starting down the long slippery slope toward autumn, and beyond that to winter. This morning's image was taken by the front gate of our Two Hundred Acre Wood in the Lanark highlands some time ago, and it is one of my favorites, capturing the essence of midsummer beautifully with tall trees and hazy sky in the background, golden daisies, purple bugloss and silvery meadow grasses dancing front and center.

This week's word has to be solstice of course, and it has been around since at least the thirteenth century, coming down to us from Middle English and Old French, thence the Latin sōlstitium,  a combination of sōl (sun) and -stit/stat. Both stit and stat are variant stems of the verb sistere, meaning to make something stand still. Thus, solstice means simply "sun standing still".  It is our little blue planet that is in constant whirling motion though, and not the lifegiving star at the center of our universe. The idea that the sun is in motion is a holdover from the ancient geocentric model (or Ptolemaic system), which held that Earth was the center of all things, and everything else in the cosmos revolved around it.

Whither has the year flown?  Summer has just arrived, but it's all downhill from here, at least for six months or so.  After Monday daylight hours will wane until Yule (or the Winter Solstice) around December 21 when they begin to stretch out again.  Longer nights go along on the cosmic ride during the latter half of the calendar year, and that is something to celebrate for those of us who are moonhearts and ardent backyard astronomers. The Old Wild Mother strews celestial wonders by generous handfuls as the year wanes, spinning spectacular star spangled tapestries in the velvety darkness that grows deeper and longer with every twenty-four hour interval.

How does one go about marking this sunlit moment between the lighter and darker halves of the year? My notion of midsummer night skies as a vast cauldron of twinkling stars is appropriate and magical too.  The eight festive spokes on the old Wheel of the Year are all associated with fire, but the summer solstice more than any other observance. Centuries ago, all Europe was alight on Midsummer eve, and ritual bonfires climbed high into the night from every village green.

According to Marian Green, midsummer festivities included morris dancing, games of chance and storytelling, feasting and pageantry and candlelight processions after dark.  Prosperity and abundance could be ensured by jumping over Midsummer fires, and its embers were charms against injury and bad weather at harvest time.  Embers were placed on the edges of orchards and fields to ensure good harvests, and they were carried home to family hearths for protection.  Doorways were decorated with swags and wreaths of birch, fennel, St. John's Wort and white lilies.

My midsummer morning observance is simple and much the same as any other morning of the year, a little more thoughtful perhaps.  I make it a point to be outside or near a window with a mug of Jerusalem Artichoke (or Earth Apple as it is called here) tea and watch the sun rise.  There's a candle on the old oak table and a lighted wand of Shiseido incense (Plum Blossom) in a pottery bowl nearby. The afternoon holds a few hours of pottering in local flea markets with family and friends, a quiet meal as the sun goes down and night falls, a little stargazing and moon watching later. We cherish the simplicity of our small doings, and the quiet pleasure of being surrounded by kith and kin. This year, there is also serious medical stuff to think about.

Happy Midsummer to you and your clan this year, however you choose to celebrate (or not to celebrate) the occasion.  May the sun light up your day from sunrise to sunset, and your night be filled with stars from here to there.  May all good things come to you.

Thursday Poem - Aunt Leaf

Needing one, I invented her—
the great-great-aunt dark as hickory
called Shining-Leaf, or Drifting-Cloud
or The-Beauty-of-the-Night.

Dear aunt, I'd call into the leaves,
and she'd rise up, like an old log in a pool,
and whisper in a language only the two of us knew
the word that meant follow,

and we'd travel
cheerful as birds
out of the dusty town and into the trees
where she would change us both into something quicker—
two foxes with black feet,
two snakes green as ribbons,
two shimmering fish—and all day we'd travel.

At day's end she'd leave me back at my own door
with the rest of my family,
who were kind, but solid as wood
and rarely wandered. While she,
old twist of feathers and birch bark,
would walk in circles wide as rain and then
float back

scattering the rags of twilight
on fluttering moth wings;

or she'd slouch from the barn like a gray opossum;

or she'd hang in the milky moonlight
burning like a medallion,

this bone dream, this friend I had to have,
this old woman made out of leaves.

Mary Oliver
(from Twelve Moons, 1978)

Wordless Wednesday - Reaching Up and Out

The Purpled Alcove

The colony resides in a sunny hillside alcove on the Two Hundred Acre Wood, and although it is surrounded by a dense thicket of armored Prickly Ash, it can be seen from quite a distance. Because of the wicked thorns, I usually avoid the area, (although I'm wearing the marks of an encounter this morning), and local deer also give a wide berth to Zanthoxylum americanum. The thicket is a favored nesting place of indigo buntings, and the birds flit merrily in and out in summer, lighting up the hill with plumage in a fetching variation of my favorite color.

In Greek, the word iris means "eye of heaven", and it is the name of a goddess - our sumptuous summer blooms take their name from Iris, goddess of the rainbow. Messenger of the gods on Mount Olympus, she carried messages between heaven and earth along the rainbow, and another of her sacred tasks was carrying the souls of deceased women to the Elysian fields, the final resting place of those who were heroic and virtuous in life.

There has always been something alluring and powerful about irises and the number three.  One form or another of the three-petaled iris grows in almost every tropical or temperate corner of island earth, and the flower has been associated with individual cultures for time out of mind.

In its purple form, the iris symbolizes royalty and divine protection, and it was cherished by Merovingian monarchs (such as Clovis) who used it as a device on military banners and painted it on their walls. To my mind, there is something incongruous about the flower being used as a heraldic device by a legendary confederation of bellicose Frankish tribes. Perhaps they simply liked the color? After the Merovingians along came the combative Carolingian kings, and the iris became the "fleur-de-lis" beloved of France today.

For ancient Indian and Middle Eastern cultures, the iris represented life, virtue and resurrection.  For us, the wildflower (along with the Showy Lady's-slipper) is emblematic of summer, and when it comes to purple, the irises have it all.

Little River Singing Through

Sunday - Saying Yes to the World

May a good vision catch me.

May a benevolent vision take hold of me, and move me.

May a deep and full vision come over me, and burst open around me.

May a luminous vision inform me, enfold me.

May I awaken into the story that surrounds,

May I awaken into the beautiful story.

May the wondrous story find me;

May the wildness that makes beauty arise between two lovers

arise beautifully between my body and the body of this land,

between my flesh and the flesh of this earth,

here and now,

on this day,

May I taste something sacred.

David Abram,
The Alliance for Wild Ethics

My Peonies After Rain

Friday Ramble - River

To trace the history of a river or a raindrop . . . is also to trace the history of the soul, the history of the mind descending and arising in the body. In both, we constantly seek and stumble upon divinity, which like feeding the lake, and the spring becoming a waterfall, feeds, spills, falls, and feeds itself all over again.
— (Gretel Ehrlich, Islands, The Universe, Home)

This week's word comes to us through the good offices of the Middle English and Anglo-Norman rivere and the Vulgar Latin riparia, thence the proper Latin riparius and ripa all meaning "of a bank" or simply "bank". The word's closest kin is the adjective riparian, and we use it to describe the fertile ground along waterways and those who live in such places - to be called riparian is a fine thing..

From the cedared coves and quiet fields of their beginning places to the lakes where they end their journey, a thousand and one little rivers in the Lanark highlands lift their voices, whispering, murmuring, laughing, singing, occasionally roaring. At sunset or in cool morning light, reflections of sky and clouds and trees fill every pool and eddy. After dark, the moon pours its light over everything and seems as much a dweller in the quiet waters as it is in the sky above.

Solitary voices, choruses and concertos, there is attentive presence and connection in every note, and what a metaphor for life and journeying.  If I could have named myself, the name would probably have been "River". As it happens, the youngest member of the family now wears the name, and I would like to be around to explore rivers, puddles and tide pools with her in a few years.

Wherever we land up living out our days, we are never far from rivers of one sort or another, and they are fine motifs for wandering.  If fortunate, we will know many, learning their language and cadence, tracing the patterns of their ebbing and flowing, committing their rumbling chants and fluid harmonies to fragile memory — the canticles of earth's rivers are the music of our journey.

Thursday Poem - Bio

I am a leaf-dance in the woods.
I am the green gaze of the ocean.
I am a cloud-splitter in the sky.
I arrived robed in red
out of nowhere and nothing.
I whisper between pages.
I disappear in the painting.
I rest between musical notes.
I awake among strangers
in a country I never imagined.
I am timbales and bells,
a parade under your window.
I am the riddle I cannot solve,
hands on the clock's face,
seven crows on a branch.
I am the one whose footfall
changes the pattern of stars.

Dolores Stewart from The Nature of Things

(reprinted here with the poet's kind permission)

Wordless Wednesday - Celebration

In the Pink

Swamp Butterfly Weed, also called Swamp Milkweed,

Rose Milkweed and White Indian Hemp

(Asclepias incarnata )

On a recent walk in the Lanark Highlands, I recorded pages of blooming "stuff" in my field notebook and pulled it out this morning for another look - not a shabby gathering for just a brief ramble in the woods, fields and fens of the Two Hundred Acre Wood and along the beaver pond.

Anemone (Canada, Rue, Wood), Bird's-foot Trefoil, Black Mustard, Bladder Campion, Boneset, Brown-eyed Susan, Buttercup, Cardinal Flower, Catnip, Chicory, Clover (tall yellow and white, short  pink, white and purple), Cohosh (Blue and Black), Common Milkweed, Crown Vetch, Daisy Fleabane, Dandelion, Day Lily, Deptford Pink, Elderberry, Everlasting Pea, Fragrant Water Lily (white), Hawkweed (orange and yellow), Heal-All, Hedge Bindweed, Honeysuckle, Lambs Quarters, Large Yellow Lady's Slipper, Leafy Spurge, Milkweed, Miterwort, Motherwort, Oxeye Daisy, Pickerelweed, Queen Anne's Lace (Wild Carrot), Red Baneberry, Rose Mallow, Shrubby Cinquefoil, Sow Thistle, Snakeroot, Spatterdock, St. John's Wort, Swamp Butterfly Weed (Swamp Milkweed), Thimbleberry, Thimbleweed, Toadflax, Tufted Vetch, Turkish Mullein, Vipers Bugloss, Vervain, Virgin's Bower (Wild Clematis), Wild Basil, Wild Bergamot, Wild Cucumber, Wild Parsnip, Yarrow, Yellow Goatsbeard

Such exercises are never simple laundry lists, but a wild and curious expression of the abundance on offer here in summer, an appreciation too of what Mother Earth holds out to us in her own good time and seasons - they're also powerful reminders of what a special place this little blue planet is.

Most of the species listed this morning provide shelter and sustenance for wild cousins, munching for the furry and nectar for the winged.  Always of particular interest is milkweed which draws Monarch and Viceroy butterflies and serves as nurseries for their eggs and caterpillars.  Stands of kindred Swamp Butterfly Weed near the pond sport bright pink buds, and they sport dragonflies and damsel flies as do the silvery spatterdock leaves a little further out.

The tall water grasses along pond and stream were in ceaseless windy motion this week, a panoramic blur of dancing emerald green that made focusing a sometime thing.  A family of wood ducks detached themselves from the reeds and flew away protesting to splash down in the center with much quacking, beyond the loving scrutiny of eyes and lens. A few swallowtails fluttered in the distance, and the air over the water was full of iridescent dragonflies. It's all good, even if the deer flies and mosquitoes were out and about in profusion.

The Green and the Gold

Large Yellow Lady's Slipper

(Cypripedium parviflorum var pubescens)

Sunday - Saying Yes to the World

We need story, we need deep mythic happenings, as much as we need food and sun: to set us in our place in the family of things, in a world that lives and breathes and throws us wild tests, to show us the wildernesses and the lakes, the transforming swans, of our own minds. These minds of ours, after all, are themselves wild, shaped directly by our long legacy as hunters, as readers of wind, fir‑tip, animal trail, paw‑mark in mud. We are made for narrative, because narrative is what once led us to food, be it elk, salmonberry or hare; to that sacred communion of one body being eaten by another, literally transformed, and afterward sung to.
Sylvia Linsteadt, from Turning Our Fairy Tales Feral Again

Swallowtail and Honeysuckle

Canadian tiger swallowtail (female)

(Papilio canadensis)

Friday Ramble - Reflect

Feeling vaguely restless, she goes for a walk along the lake at twilight with camera in hand and a field notebook in her pocket. She is searching for something, and she knows not what that something is, or rather, what it will turn out to be.  She reckons she will recognize it when she sees it.

She stops on a favorite swath of beach, the setting sun painting a trail across the water, and the ripples at her feet offering up a dazzling reflection in return. There are wide vistas, islands and magical archipelagos floating in the limitless sky as Helios drops out of sight for another day - a sense of fine cloud drifting adventures up there too. Bulrushes and fronds of pickerel weed fringe the margins of the lake, every stem swaying and sighing and casting  a fey reflection. Loons drift on the current like little boats, and herons haunt the shallows nearby. The scene is one of joyous untrammeled reciprocity - no reservations, no limitations and no holding back, just exquisite buttery light and deep shadow, the inky shapes of trees, the cadence of the waves as they greet the shore.

The word reflect has been with us since the fourteenth century, coming from the Old French reflecter and the Middle English reflecten, thence the Latin reflectere, all meaning to bend or bend down. Until the fifteenth century, the common usage had to do with diverting things, with turning things aside or deflecting that which is undesirable. Some time around 1600 CE, we began to use the word to describe processes of thought and quiet contemplation. When we use the word in conversation today, we are usually musing about deep thought processes, about light and mirrors - anything and everything except bending.

No deep musings as I stood by the lake a few nights ago, but my thoughts were probably closer to the original meaning of the word reflect than they were to anything else.  Watching the slow flush of this perfect world at sunset, I felt like bending in a deep reverential bow or gassho.   I could manage a bow of sorts that evening, but anything more was out of the question.  So be it.

Nothing I ever capture on a memory card, nothing I sketch or write down here can do justice to such moments. All my fumbling clumsy efforts are a mere soupçon, a shadow, an echo of the Great Mystery - just reflections and a few bars of what the legendary Celtic warrior Finn called “the music of what happens".  The music is the earth's own wild and sweet music, and it's the finest music in the world.

And the rest of the week with its "toings and froings", the clinics and surgeons, my biopsies and scans? Little or nothing lingers in memory, but my sundown at the lake will stick around as long as I can draw a breath.

Thursday Poem - Questions Before Dark

Day ends, and before sleep

when the sky dies down, consider

your altered state: has this day

changed you? Are the corners

sharper or rounded off? Did you

live with death? Make decisions

that quieted? Find one clear word

that fit? At the sun's midpoint

did you notice a pitch of absence,

bewilderment that invites

the possible? What did you learn

from things you dropped and picked up

and dropped again? Did you set a straw

parallel to the river, let the flow

carry you downstream?

Jeanne Lohmann
(from The Light of Invisible Bodies)

Wordless Wednesday - Scarlet

Oriental poppy (Papaver orientale)