Looking Through Winter Fingers

Friday Ramble - Last of the Year

How right to start the last ramble of the year with sunlight falling across a bend in the Clyde river in the Lanark Highlands near Hopetown. The river is an "old age" meandering tributary, and her currents curve through woodlands, valleys and farm fields, crafting flood plains here and there, carving deep channels and cherishing every turning they encounter on their way. The river is a wild spirit, a veritable crone among waterways, and she resists freezing as long as she can, muttering and crooning and tumbling along on her journey.

In the depths of winter, I perch on the bank and listen to the river as she sings underneath the ice.  At times, she seems to be performing a duet with the wind, and there's a kind of Zen counterpoint at work, two unbridled entities utterly independent in their contours and rhythm, but meticulously interwoven and seamless in their harmonies.  Putting all notions of complex orchestration and conventional choreography aside, there's lovely music in the air on icy winter days. The sound of moving water has always been a leitmotif for me, and I often think that my existence can be measured in rivers, currents and intermittent streams rather than cocktails, jewelry, pairs of shoes and coffee spoons.

This is the right place to stand on the trailing edge of the calendar year. In springtime, I watched as willows on the farther shore leafed out and turned silvery green, then looked on a few weeks later as the river overflowed her banks and asserted her claim to the fertile fields on both sides.  In summer, I counted bales of hay and captured images of deer and wild turkeys feeding at dusk.  In autumn, I watched the sun go down over the same willows, so golden of leaf that they too seemed to be made of falling sunlight.  In the now, snow frosts every twig and tree, and light shining through them dazzles the eyes.

This is where I came with Spencer to collect my thoughts when my husband (now in remission) was diagnosed with cancer some time ago, and again when I got my own diagnosis this summer. It is where we come now to replenish the energies and inner directives needed to get through big life stuff like chemo and radiation. There have been times lately when we all thought we were unraveling, but the Clyde works her magic, and she knits us back together again, every single time. With Himself and Spencer and the river on my side, I will get through this.

Thank you for coming along on Friday rambles with me this year, and may we share many more such rambles in the shiny new year that is waiting for us all, just around the bend.

Thursday Poem - Clearing

I am clearing a space
here, where the trees stand back.
I am making a circle so open
the moon will fall in love
and stroke these grasses with her silver.

I am setting stones in the four directions,
stones that have called my name
from mountaintops and riverbeds, canyons and mesas.
Here I will stand with my hands empty,
mind gaping under the moon.

I know there is another way to live.
When I find it, the angels
will cry out in rapture,
each cell of my body
will be a rose, a star.

If something seized my life tonight,
if a sudden wind swept through me,
changing everything,
I would not resist.
I am ready for whatever comes.

But I think it will be
something small, an animal
padding out from the shadows,
or a word spoken so softly
I hear it inside.

It is dark out here, and cold.
The moon is stone.
I am alone with my longing.
Nothing is happening
but the next breath.

Morgan Farley

Wordless Wednesday - The Power of Three

By Holiday Pen and Spoon

In the days before Christmas, I awakened from time to time with a whole bag of chilling thoughts.  What if I had forgotten someone, neglected to carry out some holiday task or other?  What if the free range organic turkey breast (and all the stuff that went with it) was a complete fiasco and our holiday meal was a disaster? What if guests fell on our sidewalk, had an accident on the way over for dinner? In predawn darkness, my unsettled mind worried, fretted, pondered and spun on its axis like a tiny, cold and unknown planet somewhere beyond the rim.

What was I worrying about? Refrigerator and larder were stuffed full of good things to be cooked up or roasted.  Gifts were wrapped and waiting to be opened. There was a fine list clipped to the refrigerator and getting longer by the hour.  There was a telephone to use in contacting guests and offering to provide alternative ways for them to get to our threshold.  There was e-mail.

Somewhere in the midst of all the toings and froings on Christmas morning, I looked down at one of my lists and found myself engaged in what can only be described as a moment of eccentric pleasure: at the lovely thick lined paper I was writing on, at my old Waterman pen and how it felt in my hand, at the color of the ink and the effortless way it was flowing onto the page, at the sound of the silky nib lightly caressing the paper.

In hectic times, such small pleasures are vivid, graceful and unexpected, a comfort in one's life.  They are also a powerful reminder that things usually turn out somehow, if not as one expects they will, then certainly as they should.

Christmas was perfect, and I would love to be around for several more.

Calling the Sun Home, Week IV

Merry Christmas

Into the Woods

Friday Ramble - The Eyes of Winter

There is ice everywhere on the trailing edges of a calendar year, and the puckish lenses of eye and camera linger lovingly on it.  We are spending most of our time indoors at the moment, but winter's attentive eyes are passionate for all that, and it is astonishing what can be seen from one's window on a winter morning near the end of December.

Ice glosses trees in the village and dangles in artless suspension from eaves, roof lines and wind chimes. As glossy as hard candy, it sheathes roads, driveways and cobblestones.  When the winter sun touches it, the layers are revealed as lacy blankets draped over streets, sleeping hills and fields with crystalline fronds of grass and ferns poking out here and there. Lovely stuff, ice, whether seen in an urban setting or the snow-drowned countryside.

Obviously, all this ice is trying to tell us something, and occasionally I get the message.  There is effortless grace and form and natural perfection in every seasonal turning if we can cultivate the patience and wits to see it.  Everything around us has a story to tell, and we need trailing edges, liminal intervals and seasonal turnings to learn and grow, to exercise the wonder and connection and creativity that is our birthright.

Winter's fruitful darkness is a doorway through which we must pass to ready ourselves for an exuberant blooming somewhere up the trail. Beyond these dark turnings at the edge of the calendar year, light, enlightenment, warmth and wonder await us.

Thursday Poem - The Shortest Day

And so the Shortest Day came and the year died
And everywhere down the centuries of the snow-white world
Came people singing, dancing,
To drive the dark away.
They lighted candles in the winter trees;
They hung their homes with evergreen;
They burned beseeching fires all night long
To keep the year alive.
And when the new year’s sunshine blazed awake
They shouted, revelling.
Through all the frosty ages you can hear them
Echoing behind us - listen!
All the long echoes, sing the same delight,
This Shortest Day,
As promise wakens in the sleeping land:
They carol, feast, give thanks,
And dearly love their friends,
And hope for peace.
And now so do we, here, now,
This year and every year.
Welcome Yule!

Susan Cooper, The Shortest Day
 
One of my personal Yuletide holiday traditions is to read the five volumes of Susan Cooper's magnificent "Dark is Rising" cycle.  Yule has just passed by, but her lovely Christmas Revels poem is perfect for this whole holiday interval in which we celebrate the return of light to the world.

Happy Solstice, Merry Yule

Among the Dreaming Trees

What makes one climb a hill on a bitterly cold day and stand freezing in a community of snowy evergreens?

It could be the wild and somewhat melancholy pleasure that comes from looking at expanses of snow demarcated by rocks, trees and hills, nary a building in sight.  It could be Zen notions of emptiness, stirred up by the sound of the hollow north 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 could be an unexpressed desire for the order and containment, a vague and inchoate yearning for the wild and beguiling realms that always seem to beckon beyond summits and slopes.

In winter, landscape reveals itself to the 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 glimpse 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 was no profound rhyme or reason for this week's sojourn on the hill - at least that I can figure out at the moment.  North wind or no north wind, I was out among the rocks and snow people, and oh, the perfect light...

Calling the Sun Home, Week III

Sunday - Saying Yes to the World

For the future residents of the earth: may their world still be packed with mysteries.  May they still grow giddy on the eve of a great adventure.  May they become more responsible to one another and the planet.  May they keep their taste for the renegade.  May they never lose their sense of innocence and wonder.  May they live to chase brash and astonishing dreams.  May they return to tell me, if such a thing is possible, so that I can know the answers to a thousand scrupulous puzzles, hear of whole civilizations that bloomed and vanished, learn what travel to other solar systems has revealed and behold the marvels that arose while I was gone.  If that’s not possible, then I will have to make due with the playgrounds of mortality, and hope that at the end of my life I can say simply, wholeheartedly that it was grace enough to be born and live.
Diane Ackerman, Deep Play

Looking Across the Field

Friday Ramble - For the Winter Solstice

After a time of decay comes the turning point. The powerful light that has been banished returns. There is movement, but it is not brought about by force.  The idea of RETURN is based on the course of nature. The movement is cyclic, and the course completes itself. Therefore it is not necessary to hasten anything artificially. Everything comes of itself at the appointed time. This is the meaning of heaven and earth.

24. Fu / Return (The Turning Point), from the I Ching or Book of Changes
 
Next Tuesday is the eve of Yule, one of the four truly pivotal points in the calendar year, and the I Ching describes this brief interval in the Great Round more eloquently than I ever could. The winter solstice is one of only two times in the calendar year (along with the summer solstice) when the sun seems to stand still for a brief interval - that is what "solstice" means, that the sun is standing still. This week's word has been around in one form or another since the beginning times, and it comes to us from the Latin noun sōlstitium, itself a blend of the noun sōl [sun] and the verb sistere [to stand still].

December days are short and dark and sometimes icy cold, dense clouds from here to there most of the time.  The earth below our feet sleeps easy under a blanket of snow and glossy ice. For all that, there is a feeling of movement in the landscape, a clear sense that vibrant (and welcome) change is on its way.  Sunlight is a scarce quantity here in winter, and we look forward to having a few more minutes of sunlight every single blessed day after Wednesday - until next June when sunlight hours will begin to wane once more. The first few months of the year will be frigid going, but hallelujah, there will be sunlight now and again.

As I build a fire in the old fireplace downstairs, I find myself thinking of the ancestors and their early seasonal rites, how they too must have watched winter skies, fed the fires burning on their hearths for warmth, lit candles to drive the dark away and rejoiced in this poignant turning when the light returns.

Solstice customs here are quiet and of some years standing: a trek into the woods (brief this time around for health reasons) and a walk along the trail with grain, apples and cedar for the deer, suet and seed for the birds.  On the way home, we deliver fruitcake (my great grandmother's recipe) and Yule gifts to friends in the highlands, then return to the little blue house in the village for oranges, clementines and winter apples, for candlelight, firelight and mugs of tea. We will look out as as darkness falls and give thanks for the returning light.

Thursday Poem - You Darkness

You darkness, that I come from,
I love you more than all the fires
that fence in the world,
for the fire makes
a circle of light for everyone,
and then no one outside learns of you.

But the darkness pulls in everything:
shapes and fires, animals and myself,
how easily it gathers them! —
powers and people —

and it is possible a great energy
is moving near me.

I have faith in nights.

Rainer Maria Rilke
(translation by Robert Bly)

The Elder Moon of December

Last night's full moon was the last full moon of this calendar year, although it seems only yesterday that Spencer and I were out in the garden shivering and watching the first full moon of the year rise over sleeping trees. Whatever the season, the trees on our hill in the Lanark highlands frame the rising moon splendidly, leafed out in spring and summer, robed in russet leaves in autumn, bare of branch and embracing in winter.

The thirteen moons of a calendar year wear different names, faces and personalities according to one's culture, where one happens to live in the world and what the seasonal activities of one's native place are. There are common threads or themes to lunar lore, and the moon's names provide food for thought about the nature of community, hearth and connection. They speak eloquently of timeless natural rhythms and the calendar of the seasons: springtime and green things springing from the earth, planting and weeding, hunting, harvesting and gathering in, rest and regeneration.

December's moon falls at the darkest time of year in the north, and for me it will always be the Elder Moon or the Long Nights Moon. The elder tree is December's symbol in the Celtic tree calendar, and this month's moon falls during the darkest time of the year, so both names are apt. This is also my birthday month, and I have particular fondness for the great lunar pearl shining over us by night.

It makes me happy to think that when January's full moon appears, daylight hours will be lengthening, and we will be on our way to Spring and warmth. Having said that, we will be making our slow and careful way through bitter cold, deep snow, (hopefully) and high winds, and there is a long way to go. Now and then, the vaults of heaven will be full of stars at night, and there will be confetti skies at sunrise. Such celestial doings make journeying through the Great Round a joyous undertaking, and in all the frenetic "toing and froing" of the holiday season, that is a fine thought to cling to.

We also know this moon as the: Ashes Fire Moon, Bauhinia Moon, Bear Moon, Beginning of the Winter Moon, Big Bear's Moon, Big Winter Moon, Birch Moon, Center Moon's Younger Brother, Cold Moon, Cold Time Moon, Bitter Moon, Deer Shed Their Horns Moon, Dumannos Moon, Eccentric Moon, Evergreen Moon, Frozen over Moon, Heavy Snow Moon, Holy Moon, Hellebore Moon, Her Winter Houses Moon, Hunting Moon, Ice Lasts All Day Moon, Ice Moon, Little Finger Moon, Little Spirits Moon, Long Nights Moon, Long Snows Moon, Midwinter Moon, Moon of Cold, Moon of Long Nights, Moon of Much Cold, Moon of Popping Trees, Moon of Putting Your Paddle Away in the Bush, Moon of Respect, Moon When Buffalo Cow's Fetus Is Getting Large, Moon When Deer Shed Their Horns, Moon When Little Black Bears Are Born, Moon When the Young Fellow Spreads the Brush, Moon When the Wolves Run Together, Moon When the Sun Has Traveled South to His Home to Rest Before He Starts Back on His Journey North, Narcissus Moon, Night Moon, Oak Moon, Paulownia Moon, Peach Moon, Poinsettia Moon, Popping Trees Moon, Poppy Moon, Real Goose Moon, Sap Moon, Sjelcasen Moon, Solstice Moon, Snow Moon, Star Frost Moon, Turning Moon, Twelfth Moon, Under Burn Moon, White Orchid Tree Moon, Winter Maker Moon, Winter Moon, World Darkness Moon, Yule Moon.

Among other monikers for this month's full moon, I am also fond of "Midwinter Moon" and "Little Spirits Moon".

The road goes ever on and on...

Calling the Sun Home, Week II

Sunday - Saying Yes to the World

Long before writing was invented, human beings read their world. They interpreted their dreams and the flights of birds. They read the intestines of sacrificial animals and the memories of their ancestors. They read the things that surprised them, or the things that reminded them of something else. Most of all, they read in the places where there were holes—spaces—gaps. They filled up the blanks of the universe, as though they were pages, with writing.  Leonardo advised aspiring artists to “discover” the pictures to be found in cracks on walls; Chinese sages were conceived as their mothers stepped into the footprints of unicorns; all of us make up our lives out of the cracks in the walls of our past memories and the unicorn prints of our futures. The making of a life is similar to the making of a text.  We live by reading our own stories.

Whatever we do in our lives, we make a text of our lives. Whether or not our stories belong to the shared patterns of the great, true stories—the myths—they are the texts from which we find out our relation to the divine, to one another and to the self.

Linda Sexson, Ordinarily Sacred

Little Friend on the Trail

Chickadee and Hawthorn

Friday Ramble - Anoint

The world is nebulous behind its frosty veil, and scenes that seldom invite a thoughtful glance later in winter are curiously soothing and comforting.  Fields are dusted with white like icing sugar, and old rail fences entice one's attention with a few rimed strands of rusty wire looped around their uprights.  I am beguiled by the silvery texture and dry fragrance of weathered cedar posts, by frozen grasses blowing in the wind, by withered leaves fluttering through the air like birds.

This week's word comes to us from the Middle English anoynten, the past participle anoynt and the Old French enoint, all three originating in the Latin inunctus or inungere meaning to daub something or to sprinkle it with unguents, oils. salves or other liquids.  In modern parlance, when we anoint something, we consecrate it or make it sacred, and there is often an element of ritual or ceremony involved in such undertakings, a dedication to service.

The trail across the field and up into the forest to fill our bird feeders is a sinuous ribbon winding among trees, around thickets, brambles and frozen milkweed.  Bare trees arch overhead, and their eloquent branches are anointed with snow.  Every snowflake is a star, and we are moving through a winter cosmos, a whole world of stars, and no two the same. When the wind quiets for a few minutes, one can actually hear snow falling in the woods, and the sound is precious beyond words, one of my favorite musics in this hoary old span of earthly days.

It always seems to me that something wonderful is waiting to be known after the first snows anoint the highlands, something in no hurry to reveal itself as we make our way into the woods with food for our wild kin.

The French conductor Pierre Boulez wrote: "Just listen with the vastness of the world in mind. You can't fail to get the message." We listen, and there is no question whatsoever, this place is already sacred. It is enough just to be here and know that the grand, the fey and the elemental dwell in these winter woods and fields. Coming face to face with them on the trail is not necessary.

Thursday Poem - Winter Light

It's a milkiness poured from
a great glass bottle,
a carafe of blanc de blanc, iced,
a light shot with pale gold,
opalescent blue,
the distillation of pearl . . . .
In this icy light, the ghostly fronds
of ice ferns cover the glass,
as the sky descends,
erasing first the far blue hills,
the cornfield hatch-marked with stubble,

coming to our street—

the sky flinging itself
down to the ground.
And the earth, like a feather bed,
accumulates layer on layer. . . .
The snow bees are released from their hive,
jive and jitter, sting at the blinds.
Down here, under this glazed china cup,
the minor fracas of our little lives
is still under the falling flakes.
And the great abalone shell of the sky
contains us, bits of muscle, tiny mollusks.
These winter nights
are never black and dense,
but white, starlight
dancing off the land.
And then the luminous dawns,
the pearled skies full of hope
no matter what else we know.

Barbara Crooker

Wordless Wednesday - Touched

A Yuletide Reading List

This morning's offering is a tradition of sorts, an annual posting of favorite reading materials for and about the holidays and the return of the light to our world. Some of these books are out of print, but they can occasionally  be found in book shops, and they are often happy campers in your local library.  May the list be a candle in your window, bringing warmth, comfort and festive spirit to you and yours.

The Yule interval would not be complete without a rereading of Susan Cooper's Dark is Rising sequence in all its exquisite entirety, and the five books are: Over Sea, Under Stone, The Dark is Rising, Greenwitch, The Grey King and Silver on the Tree. Also, at least four of my friend Dolores Stewart Riccio's delightful Circle novels take place at  (or near) Yule, and I shall be reading them again this year too - all  are highly recommended.

Decking the Halls: The folklore and traditions of Christmas plants,
Linda Allen

Christmas Folklore and Superstitions,
A.R. Bane

The Oxford Book of Days,
Bonnie Blackburn and Leofranc Holford-Strevens

Echoes of Magic: A Study of Seasonal Festivals through the Ages,
C.A. Burland

Ancient Ways: Reclaiming Pagan Traditions,
Pauline and Dan Campanelli

Wheel of the Year: Living the Magical Life,
Pauline and Dan Campanelli

The Book of Christmas Folklore,
Tristram Potter Coffin

A Crown of Candles: How to Throw a Fabulous Lucia Party,
Joanna Powell Colbert

Lights of Winter: Winter Celebrations Around the World,
Heather Conrad and DeForest Walker
 
Medieval Holidays and Festivals: A Calendar of Celebrations,
Madeleine Pelner Cosman

Christmas and Christmas Lore,
T.G. Crippen

The Return of the Light: Twelve Tales from Around the World for the Winter Solstice,
Carolyn McVickar Edwards

The Magic of the Winter Solstice: Seasonal Celebrations to Honour Nature's Ever-turning Wheel,
Danu Forest

Kindling the Celtic Spirit,
Mara Freeman

Wheel of the Year: A cookbook of celebrations and rituals from a modern pagan household,

Megan Duncan Edwards Gammack

A Calendar of Festivals: Traditional Celebrations, Songs, Seasonal Recipes and Things to Make,
Marian Green

How to Celebrate the Winter Solstice, 

Thomas Harrop

The Sun in the Church: Cathedrals As Solar Observatories,
John L. Heilbron

Celebrate the Solstice: Honoring the Earth's Seasonal Rhythms Through Festival and Ceremony,
Richard Heinberg

Celestially Auspicious Occasions: Seasons, Cycles and Celebrations,
Donna Henes

Stations of the Sun: A History of the Ritual Year in Britain,
Ronald Hutton

The Winter Solstice
Ellen Jackson

The Dance of Time: The Origins of the Calendar: A Miscellany of History and Myth, Religion and Astronomy, Festivals and Feast Days,
Michael Judge

The Solstice Evergreen: History, Folklore and Origins of the Christmas Tree,
Sheryl Karas

Perpetual Almanack of Folklore,
Charles Kightly

Sacred Celebrations: A Sourcebook,
Glennie Kindred

A Coyote Solstice Tale,
Thomas King and Gary Clement

Beyond the Blue Horizon: Myths and Legends of the Sun,
Moon, Stars, and Planets,
F.C. Krupp

The Ancient Celtic Festivals: and How We Celebrate Them Today,

Clare Walker Leslie and Frank E. Gerace

Yule: Rituals, Recipes & Lore for the Winter Solstice,

Llewellyn and Susan Pesznecker

Celebrations Of Light : A Year of Holidays Around the World,
Nancy Luenn and Mark Bender (Illustrator)

Blue Moons and Golden Suns: Meditations and Celebrations,

Amari Magdalena

The Winter Solstice: The Sacred Traditions of Christmas,
John Matthews and Caitlin Matthews

Rituals of Celebration: Honoring the Seasons of Life through the Wheel of the Year,

Jane Meredith

Christmas in Ritual and Tradition,
Clement A. Miles

Yule: A Celebration of Light and Warmth (Holiday Series),
Dorothy Morrison

Christmas Folklore,

Cory Nelson and Kyle Pressly

Christmas in New Mexico: Recipes, Traditions, and Folklore for the Holiday Season, 
Lynn Nusom 

Christmas Ornament Legends: A Collection of Stories, Traditions, and Folklore from the Old World,
Old World Christmas

Sacred Origins of Profound Things: The Stories Behind the Rites and Rituals of The World's Religions,
Charles Panati

Celebrating Winter Solstice, 
Theresa Reel 

The Shortest Day: Celebrating the Winter Solstice
Wendy Pfeffer and Jesse Reisch

The Old Magic of Christmas: Yuletide Traditions for the Darkest Days of the Year
Linda Raedisch

Pagan Christmas: The Plants, Spirits, and Rituals at the Origins of Yuletide,

Christian Rätsch and Claudia Müller-Ebeling

All Around the Year, Holidays and Celebrations in American Life,
Jack Santino

Circle Round: Raising Children in the Goddess Tradition,
Starhawk, Anne Hill and Diane Baker

Keeping Christmas: Yuletide Traditions In Norway And The New Land,
Kathleen Stokker

When Santa Was A Shaman: Ancient Origins of Santa Claus and the Christmas Tree,
Tony van Renterghem

How to Celebrate Winter Solstice,
Teresa Villegas

The Fires of Yule: A Keltelven Guide for Celebrating the Winter Solstice,
Montague Whitsel

A Foxfire Christmas: Appalachian Memories and Traditions,

Eliot Wigginton and Bobby Ann Starnes

Calling the Sun Home

Days grow ever shorter; snow falls now and then, but does not stay.  Rivers and lakes are freezing over, and an icy north wind howls in the eaves of the blue house in the village.

At nightfall, I pull draperies closed and shut out the gloom beyond the windows, taking refuge in warmth and delight in small seasonal rites. I brew pots of tea (one after the other), pummel loaves of bread, concoct fiery curries and spicy cookies, draw, read and dream, plot gardens for next year (more roses and herbs, perhaps a whole Medicine Wheel garden) and forge grand schemes which will probably never see the light of day.

As dark as the days ahead may be, there is light to come. Here we are in December, and that means that in only three weeks, our days will begin to lengthen again. Hallelujah! It will be months until it is warm and light here again, but at least we will be on our way, and Yule just may be my favorite day in the whole turning year. When it arrives, there will be celebrations and silliness, candles, music and mulled cider to drive away the darkness and welcome old Helios back to the world. He is still here of course - it's the Old Wild Mother's seasonal wobble that makes him seem more distant than he actually is at this time of the year.  We and the hallowed earth are in constant spinning motion, not the magnificent star at the center of our universe.

As in previous years, I am lighting a candle at dusk every Sunday in an observance called the Advent Sun Wheel, a practice crafted by the late Helen Farias of the Beltane Papers and continued by Waverly Fitzgerald at the School of the Seasons. In doing so, I join a circle of friends and kindred spirits like Joanna Powell Colbert and Beth Owl's Daughter in honoring the fruitful darkness and calling the sun home.  The Sun Wheel actually began a week ago and continues until Yule, but I have been a little under the weather thanks to chemo and started my observance a week late this time around. Beth and I are on the same cancer journey this year, and I send her light and healing on her way. Let there be light, abundance and rude good health for all of us!

Elderly magpie creature that I am and ever a passionate collector of seasonal lore, I am very interested in your own "before Yule" practices. A belated Happy December to everyone!

Sunday - Saying Yes to the World

The wild. I have drunk it, deep and raw, and heard it's primal, unforgettable roar. We know it in our dreams, when our mind is off the leash, running wild. 'Outwardly, the equivalent of the unconscious is the wilderness: both of these terms meet, one step even further on, as one,' wrote Gary Snyder. 'It is in vain to dream of a wildness distinct from ourselves. There is none such,' wrote Thoreau...

And as dreams are essential to the psyche, wildness is to life.

We are animal in our blood and in our skin. We were not born for pavements and escalators but for thunder and mud. More. We are animal not only in body but in spirit. Our minds are the minds of wild animals. Artists, who remember their wildness better than most, are animal artists, lifting their heads to sniff a quick wild scent in the air, and they know it unmistakably, they know the tug of wildness to be followed through your life is buckled by that strange and absolute obedience. ('You must have chaos in your soul to give birth to a dancing star,' wrote Nietzsche.) Children know it as magic and timeless play. Shamans of all sorts and inveterate misbehavers know it; those who cannot trammel themselves into a sensible job and life in the suburbs know it.

What is wild cannot be bought or sold, borrowed or copied. It is. Unmistakeable, unforgettable, unshamable, elemental as earth and ice, water, fire and air, a quintessence, pure spirit, resolving into no contituents. Don't waste your wildness: it is precious and necessary.

Jay Griffiths, Wild: An Elemental Journey

Standing Their Ground

Friday Ramble - Comfort

This week's word hails from the Middle English word comforten, meaning to make strong, thence from the Old French verb conforter, meaning to strengthen. Both forms probably have their origins in a Latin expression consisting of com (a prefix conveying intensity) and fortis meaning strong. Notions of comfort have at their core the idea of being strengthened, soothed and calmed, and the strength involved is not brawn or brute force, but vitality, courage and fortitude - one of the synonyms (and so far unplumbed here) for strength in my tattered thesaurus is connection. It made me think of something penned by Clarissa Pinkola Estes in Women Who Run With the Wolves: "We are strong when we stand with another soul. When we stand with one another, we cannot be broken."

Family and community go right at the top of the list when it comes to comfort, and there is comfort to be found in other things, activities and places (especially liminal places).  Mirabile dictu, my comforts can be revisited anywhere and any time in their radiant stillness: bowls of cafe-au-lait served up in my favorite coffee shop, the village on a foggy morning in early December with warmly dressed villagers and whiskery trees appearing out of the mist like magic and then disappearing again; the first snowfall of the season; a fire in the old fireplace burning apple or birch wood; a lovely big  fat book, my favorite teapot wafting clouds of freshly brewed chai steam into the air, the Two Hundred Acre Wood in Lanark, rambles among the old trees there with Himself and Spencer (at any time of the year).

There's a special stretch of shoreline on Dalhousie Lake where we love to go in early winter to say goodbye to the geese, and one breathtaking view from the edge of a road in Lanark. One looks out over miles of rolling pine clad ridges and shadowed alleys, and being there expresses the Great Mystery in ways I cannot begin to describe here - the vista never fails to nourish and enchant.  I revisit it often in my thoughts and in every season, but most often in late November and early December when the fog rolls in. This week, the image is on my desktop, and looking at it before going off to chemo was like a meditation.

Precious beyond words are things that convey comfort, peace of mind and elemental grace in a world which often seems to be barking mad and totally out of balance.  One takes her comfort where she finds it at this time of the year when days are short and, for the most part, dark. Now and again though, individual hours sparkle, and sometimes they sing like birds.  One of these mornings I just may start drawing flocks of migrating geese in the foam of my caffè latte.

Thursday Poem - Invocation to the Guardian

You who were with me before I was born,
dark shining on dark,
be with me now.
You who will stay with me after I die,
light traveling on light,
be with me now.

You who are nameless
in the marketplace of ten thousand things,
how shall I call you?
You who are invisible between the stars,
how shall I see you?

You who nurture me with silent wisdom,
speak to me now.
I am listening beyond the sounds of night,
I am looking beyond the sights of the day.
You who fill the infinite void,
travel small on my shoulder now,
show me the way.

Dolores Stewart, from Doors to the Universe
(reprinted with permission)