Sunday - Saying Yes to the World

As time went by, I realized that the particular place I'd chosen was less important than the fact that I'd chosen a place and focused my life around it. Although the island has taken on great significance for me, it's no more inherently beautiful or meaningful than any other place on earth. What makes a place special is the way it buries itself inside the heart, not whether it's flat or rugged, rich or austere, wet or arid, gentle or harsh, warm or cold, wild or tame. Every place, like every person, is elevated by the love and respect shown toward it, and by the way in which its bounty is received.
Richard Nelson, The Island Within

Springtime in a Jar

Friday Ramble - Rain and Rusty Undertakings

In recent weeks, we awakened (for the most part) to gray skies and rain beating a staccato rhythm that shunned meter and metronome. Puckish breezes cavorted in the eaves and ruffled tiny leaves in the garden like decks of playing cards. A thousand and one little waterfalls appeared out of nowhere, and limpid, impromptu streams danced their way through village gutters carrying twigs, oak leaves, pine needles and fallen petals. Here and there were precious islands of stillness. Sheltered by overhanging trees, a friend's pond was like glass, its white and scarlet koi hovering almost motionless in the early light with their open mouths like tiny perfect "o"s. Sometimes they seemed to be swimming in sky.

At times, there was water in our garage, and the old Passat rested in a shallow pool until the accumulation gurgled its way down through frantically working drains. When the waters receded, I used an trowel to scoop rust into mason jars and tucked them carefully away. Natural iron oxide pigments produce lovely ochre and umber hues, and my gleanings will be used in projects somewhere up the trail, possibly on other rainy days. My fingers are trying to cope with the effects of chemotherapy (painful peripheral neuropathy to name one such), and it will probably be a while until I can actually do anything with a brush, but that doesn't stop me from thinking up "stuff". 

While claiming my rusty bounty, I thought about the fact that humans have been using iron oxides in artistic undertakings as far back as the prehistoric caves of Lascaux. I would be a happy camper indeed if I ever managed to produce something a scrap as vibrant as the Chinese horse. I thought too about the fact that a heady brew of rust (iron oxides), carbon dioxide and water is where sentient life begins, and that the Japanese word for rust is sabi (錆) as in wabi sabi (侘寂), the all enfolding aesthetic or world view centered on notions of transience, simplicity and naturalness or imperfection. 

Clouds and rain, then sunshine and blue sky, then back to clouds and rain again, who knows what spring days will hold? When good weather prevails, we go off to the woods, and I lurch up the trail a few hundred feet, a long way from the miles of rugged terrain I was once able to cover, but there is gratitude in every step.

On wet days, we listen to a little Bach or Rameau on the sound system, read and drink tea. We watch raindrops dappling the windows, the painterly way in which trees, little rivers and old wood fences are beaded with moisture and shining in the grey. Each and every raindrop is a minuscule world teeming with exuberant life, whole universes looking up at us, great and bumbling creatures that we are. Rain or shine, up and down, in and out, them and us, it's all good.

Thursday Poem - In Passing

How swiftly the strained honey
of afternoon light
flows into darkness

and the closed bud shrugs off
its special mystery
in order to break into blossom:

as if what exists, exists
so that it can be lost
and become precious

Lisel Mueller, from Alive Together

Wordless Wednesday - A Little Green

Home again and pinking up

It was late in the day when I returned from the hospital yesterday, but I did not have to stay there, and that was a good thing.

I awakened late this morning, and although I feel as though I have been trampled by elephants, I am cheerful for all that.

These early tulips bloom in a sunny, sheltered alcove in a friend's garden, and dappled with early dew, they are always a treat for the eyes.  If not quite as rosy and "in the pink" as they are, I am working on it.

Morning's Cup in Early Bloom

It is going to be one of those days, so I am starting it in the early hours with a small magic that uplifts my spirit, gladdens my heart, strengthens my resolve and makes me smile. Is there anything as enchanting, visually fetching and "happy making" as a fragrant cup of flower tea and goji berries?

A little Mozart is wafting through my headphones, and it completes the invocation nicely. No matter what the cancer clinic tosses my way today, I will be ready for it, just hope the painful stuff can be kept to a minimum. Wish me luck!

Sunday - Saying Yes to the World

We sleep, allowing gravity to hold us, allowing Earth—our larger body—to recalibrate our neurons, composting the keen encounters of our waking hours (the tensions and terrors of our individual days), stirring them back, as dreams, into the sleeping substance of our muscles. We give ourselves over to the influence of the breathing earth. Sleep is the shadow of the earth as it seeps into our skin and spreads throughout our limbs, dissolving our individual will into the thousand and one selves that compose it—cells, tissues, and organs taking their prime directives now from gravity and the wind—as residual bits of sunlight, caught in the long tangle of nerves, wander the drifting landscape of our earth-borne bodies like deer moving across the forested valleys.
David Abram, Becoming Animal

For Earth Day

Honor Earth, the Old Wild Mother of us all.

Plant trees, milkweed for Monarch butterflies or start a bumblebee garden. Give up nasty critter killing pesticides. Go earth friendly in household cleaning products. Say no to GMOs and factory farming. Reduce, reuse, recycle. Walk a little (or better still, a lot) more lightly on the planet.

In light of proposed budget cuts to the Environmental Protection Agency, NASA's Earth science study programs and public broadcasting services, consider making personal contributions to such agencies and groups.  They need us now, more than ever before.

Reject the power of collective delusion.  Be a caring steward of the little blue world we are all walking around on together, not just today, but every day.

Rain, rain, rain...

Friday Ramble - Bloom

Blue skies and fluffy clouds overhead, birdsong, avian courtship rites and nest building birds everywhere - the village is opening out and greening up before our eyes as Spencer and I potter about and peer into hedgerows. Spring does not make a quiet entrance this far north - she comes over the hill with an exuberant bound, reaches out with a twiggy hand, and everything bursts into bloom. When we went off to the park a few mornings ago, the first daffodil of the season was blooming in a sheltered, sunny alcove, and we both did a little dance.

How can this week's word be anything except bloom? The word originates in the Middle English blo or blome, meaning to open up and flower lavishly, to glow with health and well-being, to be as sleek and glossy as an otter, as dewy and flushed with sunlight as a garden tulip or an early blooming orchid in a wild and wooded place. There are probable connections (or roots) between bloom and bhel in Proto-Indo-European, the hypothetical common ancestor of all modern European languages - in that ancient, oral and unscribed tongue, bhel means to grow, swell, or unfold, to leaf out or come into flower.

Perhaps a better word for this week would be sex, because that is what springtime's lush colors, alluring fragrances, velvet textures and warbling ballads are about - the Old Wild Mother's madcap dance of exuberance, fertility and fruitfulness. Every species on the planet seems focused on perpetuating its own heady genetic brew, and the collective pleasure in being alive is almost tangible.   

Forsaking appointed chores, we poke around in the garden, lurch about in village thickets and contemplate the blue sky for long intervals.  It's simply a matter of blooming wherever one happens to be planted.  Spencer is already a master of that splendid Zen art, and his silly old mum is working on it.

Thursday Poem - An April Night

The moon comes up o'er the deeps of the woods,
And the long, low dingles that hide in the hills,
Where the ancient beeches are moist with buds
Over the pools and the whimpering rills;

And with her the mists, like dryads that creep
From their oaks, or the spirits of pine-hid springs,
Who hold, while the eyes of the world are asleep,
With the wind on the hills their gay revellings.

Down on the marshlands with flicker and glow
Wanders Will-o'-the-Wisp through the night,
Seeking for witch-gold lost long ago
By the glimmer of goblin lantern-light.

The night is a sorceress, dusk-eyed and dear,
Akin to all eerie and elfin things,
Who weaves about us in meadow and mere
The spell of a hundred vanished Springs.

Lucy Maud Montgomery

Wordless Wednesday - First Crocus

Of Fog and Things Unseen

On the other side of the windows this morning is drifting fog and a row of skeletal trees doing their best to put out leaves, catkins and flowers. This is turning out to be a late springtime, and they have a way to go.

The air is warmer than the earth below it, and the meeting of the two makes everything translucent and magical. Somewhere in the early morning haze is a robin calling for rain, a woodpecker (probably a pileated from the volume of the hammering) driving its beak into one of the old maples. Now and again, he (or possibly she) pauses, takes a few deep breaths and gives a wild unfettered laugh that carries for quite a distance in the murk. Even a bird in the fog, it seems, knows the value of taking a break from its work now and again, just breathing in and out for a minute or two and giving voice to a cackle of amusement.

I can't see either robin or woodpecker for the mist wrapping everything, but the sounds they are making are welcome musical elements in a springtime morning that is all about the nebulous, the wondrous and unseen.

Alight in the Window

Skies are grey, and there is rain in our forecast for the nth day in a row.  No drought in the eastern Ontario highlands this year, and that is a fine thing.

In the street, a west wind cavorts in the gutters, ruffles dead leaves and other detritus like playing cards. It eases around the corner of the little blue house in the village and sets the copper wind bells on the deck in exuberant motion.

In the kitchen, coffee is in progress and and a little Mozart (The Magic Flute) fills the air, but something more is needed this morning, something that will invoke springtime and blue skies, summon sunlight into this day.

A pot of red and yellow tulips in the window is the perfect cantrip. Alight from within, they are jeweled lanterns, every one.

Sunday - Saying Yes to the World

I want to write my way from the margins to the center. I want to speak the language of the grasses, rooted yet soft and supple in the presence of wind before a storm. I want to write in the form of migrating geese like an arrow pointing south toward a direction of safety. I want to keep my words wild so that even if the land and everything we hold dear is destroyed by shortsightedness and greed, there is a record of participation by those who saw what was coming. Listen. Below us. Above us. Inside us. Come. This is all there is."
Terry Tempest Williams, from Red: Passion and Patience in the Desert

First Bloodroot

Bloodroot (Sanguinaria canadensis)

Friday Ramble - Trailing Springtime Light

She opens her eyes at sunrise, the trailing edges of woodland dreams brushing against her still foggy mind—impressions of roots, warm earth and mossy stones, budding ferns and wildflowers in shady places, flickering sunlight and clear blue sky seen through old trees, the songs of little rivers in their blithe becoming.

There was worry in her dreams, and it lingers as she slowly comes to life with her mug of tea after rambling for hours in the dark. What if she is just floundering through life this time around and not doing anything worthwhile? What if she is unable to get across how rare and precious and fleeting we all are, this planet we are wandering together, every blessed dancing particle in the cosmos?  There is so much grace and grandeur and wildness that she despairs of ever capturing even a small scrap of it with words and images. It is humbling to be a miniscule clump of mediocrity in such a vast and wondrous dimension.

In shadowy alcoves in the woods there are scraps of snow here and there, but warmed by the springtime sun, greenery is appearing out of the leaves and mosses in nooks here and there.  The tender ferns springing from the granite in her favorite gorge are content just to be there and basking in the cool sunlight of their native place.  Perhaps, like them she gets to come back and leaf out over and over again until she gets things right.  She remembers Joanna Macy's words, and she is comforted:

It is my experience that the world itself has a role to play in our liberation. Its very pressures, pains, and risks can wake us up -- release us from the bonds of ego and guide us home to our vast, true nature. For some of us, our love of the world is so passionate that we cannot ask it to wait until we are enlightened.
Joanna Macy, World as Lover, World as Self

Somehow or other, she will be here among these hills forever and drinking in the wild light.  Her molecules will disperse and reassemble and cavort in many other life forms, but they may remember in some small measure or scrap of their being what it was like to be here this time around.  That is quite enough.

Thursday Poem - Planting Trees

In the mating of trees,
the pollen grain entering invisible
the domed room of the winds, survives
the ghost of the old forest
that stood here when we came. The ground
invites it, and it will not be gone.
I become the familiar of that ghost
and its ally, carrying in a bucket
twenty trees smaller than weeds,
and I plant them along the way
of the departure of the ancient host.
I return to the ground its original music.
It will rise out of the horizon
of the grass, and over the heads
of the weeds, and it will rise over
the horizon of men’s heads. As I age
in the world it will rise and spread,
and be for this place, horizon
and orison, the voice of its winds.
I have made myself a dream to dream
of its rising, that has gentled my nights.
Let me desire and wish well the life
these trees may live when I
no longer rise in the mornings
to be pleased by the green of them
shining, and their shadows on the ground,
and the sound of the wind in them.

Wendell Berry

The Seed Moon of April

When April's full moon comes calling and lights up the night, there is (or ought to be) tiny new grasses underfoot, the astringent scent of life-giving sap flowing through twigs and branches as the earth undertakes her reckless prodigal flaring into spring.  This northern part of the world awakens slowly, and in April we northerners tend to go a little mad, cavorting like ecstatic fools on the cusp between winter and spring as we wait for temperatures to rise and the landscape to come to life.  In her resemblance to a great cosmic egg or seed, this month's full moon expresses the greening to come and the new life quickening in the earth far below her light.

A puckish and unpredictable thing is life in the great round and "the matter of moons". We go faithfully out with tripod and camera month after month, always hoping to see the moon on her special night but never really sure - especially in springtime when the lady is concealed by rain clouds for days at a time.  It rained here last evening and there was no moon to be seen, but Spencer and I were fortunate the night before.  Luna rose above the bare trees in inky, cloudless skies, and we were there to watch her ascend.

Around this time every year, I find myself all wrapped up in vague longings that evade description, wandering for hours in the woods and reaching for something that can't be articulated in words or captured on a memory card. Some of the restlessness can be attributed to my being here all winter while family members, neighbors and friends rambled away to warmer climes, but the simple truth is that I too long to sprout leaves and burst into shaggy riotous bloom. The moon in her fullness has a way of quieting my nebulous springtime longings, and sometimes old stones lull them too, as do little garden jungles of rain dappled leaves and flocks of Canada geese passing overhead on their way to the river. There's a gentle kind of wabi sabi melancholy in such yearnings that becomes stronger and more compelling with every passing year. This moon brought new health issues to cope with, but I am getting to be an old hand with this cancer "stuff".

We also know this restless yearning moon as the: Ashes Moon, Big Spring Moon, Broken Snowshoe Moon, Budding Trees Moon, Bullhead Moon, Cherry Blossom Moon, Daisy Moon, Fish Moon, Flower Moon, Fourth Moon, Frog Moon, Glittering Snow on Lake Moon, Grass Moon, Gray Goose Moon, Great Sand Storm Moon, Green Grass Moon, Growing Moon, Half Spring Moon, Hare Moon, Ice Breaking in the River Moon, Leaf Split Moon, Loon Moon, Maple Sap Moon, Moon of Greening Grass, Moon of the Big Leaves, Moon of the Red Grass Appearing, Moon of Windbreak, Moon When Geese Return in Scattered Formation, Moon When Nothing Happens, Moon When the Geese Lay Eggs, Moon When They Set Indian Corn, Moon, Pink Moon, Planter's Moon, Planting Corn Moon, Planting Moon, Poinciana Moon, Red Grass Appearing Moon, Ring Finger Moon, Snowdrop Moon, Snowshoe Breaking Moon, Spring Moon, Sprouting Grass Moon, Strawberry Moon, Strong Moon, Sugar Moon.

To everything there is a season

It began with skeins of of geese flying in from the south and singing their return, with happy duck splashings in local waters and much quacking in roadside puddles, with a single heron perched on the shore of Dalhousie Lake and wondering why on earth she came home so early in the season.

It continues with larks and killdeer, beaky snipe and woodcock, with a handful of plucky robins, the graceful "v" shape (dihedral) of five turkey vultures soaring majestically over the Two Hundred Acre Wood and rocking effortlessly back and forth in their flight. From below, the light catches their silvery flight feathers and dark wing linings, and the great birds are as magnificent as any eagle.

A solitary goshawk perches in a tree on the hill, and a male harrier goes looping over the western field in graceful circles. Both birds are hungry after their long journey north, and they train their fierce yellow eyes on the field below, ever on the lookout for a good meal.

This morning, a male cardinal is singing his heart out in the ash tree in the garden, and an unidentified spring warbler lifts its voice somewhere in the darkness.

There is gladness everywhere, and even the soft rain is a friend.

They're Back!

Sunday - Saying Yes to the World

The world is blue at its edges and in its depths. This blue is the light that got lost. Light at the blue end of the spectrum does not travel the whole distance from the sun to us. It disperses among the molecules of the air, it scatters in water. Water is colorless, shallow water appears to be the color of whatever lies underneath it, but deep water is full of this scattered light, the purer the water the deeper the blue. The sky is blue for the same reason, but the blue at the horizon, the blue of the land that seems to be dissolving into the sky, is a deeper, dreamier, melancholy blue, the blue at the farthest reaches of the places where you see for miles, the blue of distance. This light that does not touch us, does not travel the whole distance, the light that gets lost, gives us the beauty of the world...

Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost

One Small Rite in the Middle of the Night

Friday Ramble - Oscillate

This week's word doesn't turn up often in conversation, but I like the sound of it, and it has an interesting history, possibly going back to the Latin oscillum, meaning "small mouth".

In Georgics, the poet Virgil used oscillum to describe a small mask of Dionysus (or Bacchus) hanging in a sacred grove in the countryside and dancing about in the wind. From the original Latin noun, a verb arose in the same patrician language to describe something that moves back and forth like a pendulum, like a set of wind chimes, clothes on a line or a child's swing. Thence came the verb scillti, which describes the action of rotating from side to side. At the end of all our wordy explorations lies the noun oscillation, first seen in 1658, and its verb form oscillate, both words connoting swinging movement of some kind.

The word's origins are both mythic and intriguing. Seeing it in print, or hearing it spoken aloud, my thoughts wander off toward the carved wooden mask of a god, dangling from a tree in the ancient Roman countryside and swaying in the wind. Who would ever have guessed that vineyards and grapey Bacchanalian doings could be associated with the simple act of something swinging to and fro in the breeze?

Why such a word this morning and honor it with a Friday Ramble? The weather here has been erratic in the last week or so, swinging (or oscillating) wildly between snow and rain, icy cold and mild temperatures, brilliant sunlight and days of murky twilight. The situation will continue for a while longer, and both rain and snow are may be in the cards for the next week.

Now and then, there are pools of melt water in village streets, but mostly there are rags of white stuff and sneaky swaths of black ice, relics of the interval's wild "toing and froing" between one end of the weather pendulum's arc (or oscillation) and the other.  We call such sweeps "amplitudes", arising from the Latin amplitudo (or amplus), meaning large.  Thus, there is largeness, breadth and fullness at work in our tumultuous days, not merely mindless flapping (or oscillating) about with both winter boots and umbrella, and the camera of course.

And then there are the vibrant umbrellas blooming like peonies in the street outside our windows.  When I was a child, I had a favorite story about a big green umbrella that was carried away by the wind and went traveling, eventually seeing the whole wide world. Perhaps I will meet the perfect big green umbrella this year and do a little blooming of my own.

Thursday poem - Swiftly

Swiftly the years, beyond recall,
Solemn the stillness of this fair morning.
I will clothe myself in spring clothing,
And visit the slopes of the Eastern Hill.
By the mountain stream a mist hovers,
Hovers a moment, then scatters.
There comes a wind blowing from the south
That brushes the fields of new corn.

T'ao Ch'ien (translation by Arthur Waley) 

Reginald H. Blyth called this "the best translation of the best poem in the world". We are still several weeks away from seeing new corn in northern fields, but for me, T'ao Ch'ien's eight lines are the essence of April and springtime.

Wordless Wednesday - Into the Light

Purple Crocus (Crocus vernus)

Rain, Wind and Espresso

It is still dark outside, and through the window comes the rustle of the wind across the roof, the steady spatter of rain falling on the deck.  Here in the kitchen, there is the burble and hiss of the De'Longhi espresso machine, the rattle and hum of the refrigerator in the corner.

By rights, there should be the smell of toast too, but it will be an hour or so before I can handle even the idea of toast.  April is a "bang up" month for migraines, and I have awakened with a whopper - thought about doing prescription meds for it when I opened my eyes this morning but opted for an earthenware beaker of industrial strength espresso instead.  The stuff in my cup approaches the consistency of solid propellant rocket fuel. Steam rises in arty curls from the surface, and a splendid darker froth rings its shores.

Why is it my thoughts always turn to Paris when it is raining?  With beaker in hand, I am looking through my rainy day "stash" of Cavallini rubber stamps, vintage postcards and notebooks - the small ones with maps of France, old French postage stamps or the Eiffel tower gracing their covers.

Rain or no, it will be a grand day, and when the migraine has expired in my espresso sea, I am just going to curl up in a corner somewhere and read.

How Sweet It is

Sunday - SayingYes to the World

Touch is a reciprocal action, a gesture of exchange with the world. To make an impression is also to receive one, and the soles of our feet, shaped by the surfaces they press upon, are landscapes themselves with their own worn channels and roving lines.
Robert Macfarlane, The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot

Easing Into Spring