Friday Ramble - The Season of last Things

This is the season of last things, and how poignant they are in their shapes and colors, in every fiber of their being.

The last antique roses are blooming in our garden, the last ripening tomatoes cling to their vines in the veggie patch, and the last purple grapes dangle in local arbors.  The last vibrant scarlet Virginia creepers wrap old wooden fences in the village, and the last crimson berries sway on our hawthorn.  Maple, oak and beech leaves from old maples flutter through the air like birds, coming to rest on benches in the park and the chilly dark earth below them.

As much as I love autumn, this season always takes some getting used to, and I am working on it again this time around.  Many farewells were said this week, and I tried to remember, too, to say thanks to the myriad entities who enriched our lives this year and are now passing away.  Bumbles, dragonflies and cicadas - wherever they alight in their journey, and whatever they come to be the next time around, may they all be well and happy.

At first light, autumn hedgerows wear spiderwebs from here to there, swaying and glistening and hung with dew like pearls.  I remember an October morning a few years ago when a neighbor in the village rang our doorbell a few minutes after sunrise, breathless and wide-eyed and ecstatic.  While walking her dogs in a nearby field, she had discovered a vast and dewy orb weaver's web that I just had to come out and capture with Pentax and macro lens.  My friend is now in an assisted living accommodation, and I think of her whenever I pass the cedar hedge where we stood wondering together at the break of day, as happy as two hoary old clams can ever be. 

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 the silence after lightening 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,
from Smoke’s Way, 1983

Wordless Wednesday - On the Edge

Drifting Along in a Fog

On late September mornings, the village is cloaked and mysterious. The earth is warmer than the air above, and the meeting of the two elements turns otherwise mundane landscape features into entities fey and luminous. I almost typed "early autumn" in the first sentence of this paragraph, but as of the equinox a few days ago, autumn is properly upon us, and she is comfortable in her tenure of mist, rain, wind and madcap tumbling leaves.

Fog swirls around everything, draping the whiskery trees like a veil, smoothing hard edges and rounding the contours of house and street. The north wind scours leaves from trees near home, and they rustle underfoot as Spencer and I go along on our early walks.  Out of the pearly gray and the sepia comes a sound now and again: rain beating a staccato rhythm on the roof of the little blue house in the village, birds conversing in the hedgerow, geese unseen in the mist and singing overhead.  Doors open and close as sleepy residents collect their morning papers.  There is the soft growl of automobiles and the rumble of buses, the muffled cadence of joggers gliding through the park, children chattering on their way to school, commuters heading downtown to work. Once in a while, we hear the whistle of a faraway train, usually only a faint echoing in the air.

On such mornings, the world seems boundless, brimming with luminous floating Zen possibility, soil and trees and sky and mist giving tongue in a language that is wild and compelling.  Part of me is curled up and engaged in a slow breathing meditation, counting my breaths, in and out, in and out. Other parts are out there drifting along with the fog and so happy to be doing it.  Emaho!

Autumn Scarlet and Bokeh

Sunday - Saying Yes to the World

I breathe in the soft, saturated exhalations of cedar trees and salmonberry bushes, fireweed and wood fern, marsh hawks and meadow voles, marten and harbor seal and blacktail deer. I breathe in the same particles of air that made songs in the throats of hermit thrushes and gave voices to humpback whales, the same particles of air that lifted the wings of bald eagles and buzzed in the flight of hummingbirds, the same particles of air that rushed over the sea in storms, whirled in high mountain snows, whistled across the poles, and whispered through lush equatorial gardens…air that has passed continually through life on earth. I breathe it in, pass it on, share it in equal measure with billions of other living things, endlessly, infinitely.
Richard Nelson, The Island Within

On a Late September Night

Friday Ramble - Embracing the Season

It's small things that engage our attention at this time of year, fallen leaves like confetti on the old wooden dock at the lake, woodland maples arrayed in red and gold, tall sunflowers inclining their heads and dropping thousands of seed children, damp furrows where a garden once bloomed and fruited, bronzey oak leaves on the trail touched by cold and crackling wonderfully underfoot in their earthy sepias and rosy creams, the way flickering sunlight bends and flows across our path on walks in the woods.

Lines of swallows congregate and chatter on telephone lines before migrating.  Skeins of geese pass high overhead, and there are the steady wing beats and plaintive calls of loons saying goodbye and heading for warmer moorings. Great herons still haunt local waterways, but they will not be far behind the loons in departing.  Beech trees in our woods are turning, and their copper leaves fall in burnished showers.  Is it just me, or is there a restless melancholy spirit loose in the village and haunting the countryside in late September?

Far from last month's thoughts of salads and cold drinks, I find myself pondering soups and stews, corn fritters and gingerbread, the first McIntosh apples lovingly folded into a baked crumble with oatmeal, maple syrup and cinnamon.  Thoughts of comfort food are a sure indication of autumn, all by themselves.

Life becomes quieter as daylight hours wane in the last quarter of the calendar year. Temperatures tumble, migratory kin leave, and we drink every blessed thing in like wine.  Gloves on our gnarly paws, and collars turned up against the wind, we ramble and ponder and feast our senses on the colors, sounds and spicy fragrances of autumn.  Then we come home to tea and toast and ginger cookies at nightfall.  It's all good.

Thursday Poem - Fall Song

Another year gone, leaving everywhere
its rich spiced residues: vines, leaves,

the uneaten fruits crumbling damply
in the shadows, unmattering back

from the particular island
of this summer, this NOW, that now is nowhere

except underfoot, moldering
in that black subterranean castle

of unobservable mysteries - roots and sealed seeds
and the wanderings of water. This

I try to remember when time's measure
painfully chafes, for instance when autumn

flares out at the last, boisterous and like us longing
to stay - how everything lives, shifting

from one bright vision to another, forever
in these momentary pastures.

Mary Oliver
from American Primitive)

Wordless Wednesday - Happy Equinox

For the Autumn Equinox (Mabon)

Here we are again on the morning preceding the autumn equinox, and here I am again, waxing wordy and thoughtful about a seasonal turning that celebrates natural equilibrium, harvest and community.

The autumn equinox is a pivotal cosmic hinge wearing many names: Harvest Home, Mabon, the Feast of Ingathering, Equinozio di Autunno and Alban Elfed, to name a few.  Mabon is probably the most common of the bunch on this side of the Atlantic, but the connection between the Welsh hunter god and tomorrow is flimsy to say the least—Mabon's only likely link with the occasion is that it may have been his birth date, but we have no way of knowing. I can't help thinking that Ceres, Demeter, John Barleycorn, Lugh or Persephone would have been better candidates for a tutelary deity presiding over autumn harvest rites. Having said that, I remain fond of the "Great Son" of the Mabinogion, also a knight of the Round Table.

In the old Teutonic calendar, the autumn equinox marked the beginning of the Winter Finding, a ceremonial interval lasting until Winter Night on October 15, also the date of the old Norse New Year. For moderns, the autumn equinox marks the end of summer and the beginning of autumn.  In Christian tradition, tomorrow's festival is closely associated with St. Michael the Archangel—his feast takes place a few days from now on September 25 and is known for obvious reasons as Michaelmas. The purple Michaelmas Daisy with its golden heart (pictured above) is one of my favorite wildflowers. Seasonal patterns are reversed south of the equator, and this is the day before the vernal equinox (Ostara) down below.

The autumn equinox is about abundance and harvest, but most of all, it is about balance and equilibrium—it is one of two astronomical coordinates in the whole year when day and night are (or rather seem to be) perfectly balanced in length. Like all the old festivals dedicated to Mother Earth, it is a liminal or threshold time, for we are poised between two seasons, summer and autumn.

One holds out hopeful thoughts on the autumn equinox, that skies overhead will be brilliantly blue and full of singing geese by day, that trees and vines and creepers will be arrayed in crimson and gold, and a splendid yellow moon visible against a blanket of stars by night.  This time around, the moon will be a waning gibbous moon and a radiant presence in the sky a little after nine. 

There is a yellow chrysanthemum on our threshold, and sometimes the flowers are accompanied by leaves fallen from the great oak nearby. The oak is our guardian tree, and the "mum" is our nod to the season, a homage of sorts. Together, oak trees, fallen leaves and blooms convey a silent benediction on anyone who knocks at our door, treads the cobblestones or just passes by in the street.

Tomorrow, we can be still for a few minutes, take time to think about and savor our bond with the place where we have been planted this time around.  We can offer up thanks for home and hearth, for the bounty we are harvesting and "putting by" to see us through the long winter nights to come.  We can celebrate clan, tribe, community and sharing - all the fine old qualities that unite us in a dancing train spiraling on down the years, from our ancestors and their seasonal migrations to present times, and our own tattered motley selves.

Whatever you call it and however you choose to celebrate it (or not celebrate it), a very happy Autumn Equinox, Harvest Home, Mabon, Feast of Ingathering, Equinozio

Step into my parlor . . .

Female Goldenrod Spider (Misumena vatia) and Heritage Rose

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

The Harvest Moon of September

September's moon is my favorite in the whole turning year.  It is also (above all others), the one I can't describe or take a good photo of, no matter how extensive my preparations and meticulous my labors.  Every year, I potter off to a good vantage point, set up camera, telescope and tripod, check my settings and wait patiently for night to fall. The moon rises, and I stand breathless in the darkness, trying to capture her magnificence with my lens, grasping a scant handful of inadequate words to describe the most beautiful moon of the year.  Bearing witness to this month's full moon is a personal seasonal rite, and if I had to brew up a name of my own for it, that name would be "Hallelujah Moon".

I once described the matter as something of a cosmic joke, this business of standing outside after dark and taking photo after photo of every full moon but never a good one. Well, here we are again, another glorious Harvest Moon has just gone by, and another folder of mediocre images has been captured.  It brings to mind the Zen teaching tale in which a monk on his deathbed was asked to describe his life, and he replied blithely, "just one mistake after another..."

Last night's full moon was not quite a super moon, but she was only an hour or two away from perigee (the point at which the moon is closest to earth), and super moon or not, she was impressive.  In the greater scheme of things, it doesn't matter how my efforts turned out - it was being there that mattered.  I was delighted to be around for another glorious harvest moon, and I hope to be around for many more. Luna rose splendidly at the appointed hour, and we (Himself, Spencer and I) were out in the darkness together, watching her do her thing.  As we packed up our stuff later, we couldn't help thinking that such magnificence deserved a gesture of some kind, a chorus, a chant or a benediction - something grander and more luminous than our rickety bows and sighs of contentment.

We also know this moon as the:  Acorn Bread Moon, Acorns Gathered Moon, All Ripe Moon, Aster Moon, Autumn Moon, Barley Moon, Between Harvest Moon, Blood Berry Moon, Eating Indian Corn Moon, Black Calf Moon, Calf Grows Hair Moon, Chrysanthemum Moon, Corn Moon, Corn Maker Moon, Dancing Moon, Deer Paw the Earth Moon, Dog Salmon Return to Earth Moon, Elderberry Moon, Drying Grass Moon, Fruit Moon, Hay Cutting Moon, Her Acorns Moon, Holy Moon, Hulling Corn Moon, Index-finger Moon, Leaf Fall Moon, Leaf Yellow Moon, Leaves Changing Color Moon, Little Chestnut Moon, Maize Moon, Mallow Blossom Moon, Moon of Falling Leaves, Moon of First Frost, Moon of Full Harvest, Moon of Much Freshness, Moon When the Leaves Fall, Moon of Plenty, Moon When the Corn Is Taken in, Moon When the Plums Are Scarlet, Moon When Deer Paw the Earth, Moon When Calves Grow Hair, Moon When Everything Ripens and Corn Is Harvested, Moose Moon, Morning Glory Moon, Mulberry Moon, Nut Moon, Papaw Moon, Rice Moon, Rudbeckia Moon, Seed Moon, Shining Leaf Moon, Silky Oak Moon, Singing Moon, Soaproot Dug For Fish Poison Moon, Sturgeon Moon, Wavy or Snow Goose Moon, Wine Moon, Wood Moon, Yellow Leaf Moon.

Friday Ramble - September's Gold and Purple

Autumn days here are warm and sunny for the most part, but nights are becoming chilly, and we have already retrieved flannel sheets and patchwork quilts from the cedar chest. No doubt about it, daylight and the calendar year are waning, and the world is slowly turning its attention toward the long white season.

One craves color in September, not just any old color but shades dazzling, intoxicating and downright riotous. Velvety taupe and cream milkweed pods disclosing dancing silks in late September are all very well, but give me colors before the snow flies, and hallelujah, here they are.

Think bronze chrysanthemums, burgundy sedums and fall blooming asters, scarlet maple leaves, russet oak and golden birch. Think autumn nights when the sun goes down in flames over favorite lakes and rivers in the Lanark highlands.  Think cold clear mornings when one's breath sparkles in the air, when early light turns the awakening world to gold, erasing for a few moments the shifting ephemeral boundaries between land and water and sky.

In the garden behind the little blue house, my heritage rose offers several hopeful buds, and Michaelmas daisies are coming into flower. When the day warms up, each and every swaying bloom wears a jeweled bumble, a honey bee or a wasp, sometimes a tiny goldenrod spider lying in wait for its next meal too. If only I could capture everything with my lens or find the right words to describe it.

Thursday Poem - Other Kingdoms

Consider the other kingdoms. The
trees, for example, with their mellow-sounding
titles: oak, aspen, willow.
Or the snow, for which the peoples of the north
have dozens of words to describe its
different arrivals. Or the creatures, with their
thick fur, their shy and wordless gaze. Their
infallible sense of what their lives
are meant to be. Thus the world
grows rich, grows wild, and you too,
grow rich, grow sweetly wild, as you too
were born to be.

Mary Oliver

Wordless Wednesday - Turning

Autumn at the Gate

A single burnished leaf from the burr oak in the front yard floats down and comes to rest in the pot of yellow “mums” on the threshold of the little blue house in the village. Nights are cooling down, and it will not be long until we have to carry the pot indoors every evening as darkness falls and the wind rises.

As the oak leaf makes itself comfortable among our potted blooms, a long v-shaped skein of geese passes overhead. Above the wedge of high-flying geese and slightly to their right, the waxing moon is translucent in the evening sky.

The swallows of summer are packing their bags and making ready to leave, their places on telephone wires to be taken by hosts of chirruping sparrows and chatterings of ebullient starlings who are putting on winter stars and flashing their yellow beaks.

The first McIntosh apples of the year have appeared at farm gates, and several “Macs” rest flushed and rosy in a bowl on the kitchen counter.  We carried a lovely big brown paper bag of apples home from a local orchard a few days ago. Most are destined for eating, but later there will be applesauce and pies, perhaps a few jars of cinnamon scented apple butter too.

No doubt about it—Lady Autumn is standing outside our gate, and she is rattling the rusty latch vigorously.  The lady knows the magic words that will grant her entrance, and she knows the tune that goes with them.

Lad Among the Leaves

Sunday - Saying Yes to the World

To be alive in this beautiful, self-organizing universe--to participate in the dance of life with senses to perceive it, lungs that breathe it, organs that draw nourishment from it--is a wonder beyond words. Gratitude for the gift of life is the primary wellspring of all religions, the hallmark of the mystic, the source of all true art. Furthermore, it is a privilege to be alive in this time when we can choose to take part in the self-healing of our world.
Joanna Macy

Small Wonder

Friday Ramble - Autumn

Autumn comes to us through the Middle English autumpne and the Old French autompne, thence the Latin autumnus, and the Latin likely derives from even older Etruscan forms - the first part of autumnus (autu) may come from the Etruscan autu, related to avil, or year. There may also be a connection with the old Venetic autu or autah, meaning much the same thing. The second part of autumnus (mnus) comes from menos meaning loss, minus, or passing.  There we have it - the year is passing away.

At the end of our etymological adventure is the burnished notion that autumn, both word and the season, signifies the ebb of another calendar year in what I like to call simply, "the Great Round," the natural cycle of our days and seasons. September is about harvest and abundance, but it is about balance too.

The Autumn Equinox on September 21 is one of the two times in the  year when day and night are perfectly balanced in length, the other being the Vernal Equinox on March 21. On that day, (also called known as Mabon or "Harvest Home"), the sun seems to pass over the equator on a long journey southward, moving steadily away from us.  Things are actually the other way around though, and it is the earth and her unruly children who are in motion. Between the Midsummer Solstice (Litha) in late June and the Winter Solstice (Yule) on or about December 21, the planet's northern hemisphere tilts away from the radiant star at the center of its galaxy.

This week, early evening skies are lit by a waxing gibbous moon, but the hours before sunrise are without moonlight and the breathtaking constellations of winter are starting to appear, a veritable treasure trove of deep sky wonders and breathtaking beauty, a gift for stargazey types like me. Spencer and I stood in the garden this morning and watched Orion climbing higher into the southeastern sky, Sirius lower and beyond the giant's right foot. The Pleiades, Auriga's Messier clusters and Gemini's double star Castor were also visible. A tapestry of stars covered the sky from here to there, and when the sun peeked over the horizon, every roof in the village was dappled with dew. With mornings like these, how can one feel anything except rich and jubilant in spirit?

On our early walks, there are twigs, pine cones and needles everywhere, fallen leaves drifting around our ankles and making a fine rustling music.  The earthbound foliage on our trail is going transparent and turning into stained glass in splendid buttery colors.  We stop now and again to look at all the wonders around our feet, and it's a wonder we ever get anywhere at all.

Thursday Poem - Song of Autumn

In the deep fall
don't you imagine the leaves think how
comfortable it will be to touch
the earth instead of the
nothingness of air and the endless
freshets of wind? And don't you think
the trees themselves, especially those with mossy,
warm caves, begin to think

of the birds that will come — six, a dozen — to sleep
inside their bodies? And don't you hear
the goldenrod whispering goodbye,
the everlasting being crowned with the first
tuffets of snow? The pond
vanishes, and the white field over which
the fox runs so quickly brings out
its blue shadows. And the wind pumps its
bellows. And at evening especially,
the piled firewood shifts a little,
longing to be on its way.

Mary Oliver

Wordless wednesday - Fallen

Taking Wing

It's the first Tuesday in September, and village children are off to their first day at school today, walked all the way there (or just to the bus stop) by proud parents and family pets.  The kids wear jackets in confetti colors, carry backpacks and lunch boxes in pink, turquoise and lime green, tote pint-sized umbrellas patterned in flowers or bunnies or polka dots. They bloom like peonies in the street, and watching from the windows, I do a little blooming too.

Only a short distance away, other brightly arrayed children have hatched out in village hedgerows, and they are strengthening their wings for the long journey south to begin in a week or so—every single Monarch butterfly is a stained glass jewel, a wild, vivid and breathtaking wonder. There are vibrant hues everywhere I look in September, and they make me feel like dancing.

After the Rain

Sunday - Saying Yes to the World

In this world of onrushing events the act of meditation—even just a "one-breath" meditation—straightening the back, clearing the mind for a moment—is a refreshing island in the stream...  Meditation is not just a rest or retreat from the turmoil of the stream or the impurity of the world. It is a way of being the stream, so that one can be at home in both the white water and the eddies.  Meditation may take one out of the world, but it also puts one totally into it.
Gary Snyder, Just One Breath

First Apples

Thursday Poem - September Mosiac

Before we come with rakes and crackling
energy to clean it up,
the backyard is precisely
as the dog prefers it -- left alone,
a natural selection
of leaf, stick, bone, pod, seed, and stone.

But we are cosmic instruments
of music and disturbance, only
animals by half,
and will not let the season bleed
its shifting earth designs
of stone, bone, leaf, stick, pod, and seed.

Some earthscapes rearranged
are gardens, or hillsides
shorn to make a path for wired poles
or graveyards stiff with grief
or clearcut forests. Let me take care
of seed, stone, pod, bone, stick, and leaf.

Let me recall the universe
is breathing in my breath, it plays
its tune in me, it dreams my being --
an unnamed, unrecorded  god
becoming conscious as I am
of leaf, seed, stick, stone, bone, and pod.

I am a painting made of sand and pollen.
Structure and spirit
are my codes. Nothing of life
is random or a trick
I draw myself a part of all
with pod, leaf, bone, seed, stone, and stick

The circle of the seasons turns
and never comes back quite the same.
Fertile impulses in time
will overgrow the patterns I have sown,
return to animal wilderness
of stick, pod, stone, leaf, seed and bone.

Let me be glad
new seasons bud from stick and leaf,
new forces split a pod and spill the seed,
new rhythms rise from stone and bone.

Dolores Stewart,
(from Doors to the Universe)
Bellowing Ark Press, 2008

Happy September everyone! You may visit Dolores online here.