Friday Ramble - For the Roses

One has to love entities so exotic and lavishly endowed. The roses of summer are glorious creatures in their time of blooming, be their flowering an interval lasting a few days or one lasting all summer long.

All artful curves and lush fragrance, velvety petals and fringed golden hearts, the blooms are lavishly dappled with dew at dawn, and they're a rare treat for these old eyes as early sunlight moves across them. If we are fortunate, there will be roses blooming in our garden until late autumn, and we three (Himself, Beau and I) hold the thought close.

The word rose hails from the Old English rose, thence from the Latin rosa and the Greek rhoda. Predating these are the Aeolic wrodon and the Persian vrda-, and at the beginning of it all, the Proto-Indo-European (PIE) form wrdho- meaning "thorn or bramble". Most of our roses have thorns to reckon with, and none more so than this morning's offering We can see this exquisite bloom from our bedroom windows, and watching it, we find ourselves falling in love with roses all over again.  They are particularly lovely as they mature, graceful as they fade and wither and dwindle, their petals falling away and fluttering to the earth like confetti.

There's a bittersweet and poignant aspect to such thoughts after the summer solstice, and I remember feeling the same way last year around this time. Here we are again in the second half of a calendar year and pottering down the luscious golden slope to autumn and beyond. Bumbles love roses, and they spend their sunlight hours flying from one bloom to another. My pleasure in the season and a gentle melancholy seem to be all wrapped up together in falling rose petals and blissed out bumblebees. 

Call it wabi sabi and treasure the feelings—elemental expressions of wonder, rootedness and connection, the suchness of all things. How sweet it is, thorns and all.

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

(Almost) Wordless Wednesday - Watching the Rain

His name is Beau, and he is a lovely boy.

Hotei in the Garden

Our garden Buddha sits in a sunny alcove, smiling under a canopy of antique rose and buckthorn leaves.  Birds serenade him in early morning, and rabbits visit him at twilight.  Bumbles and dragonflies buzz around him, spiders knit him into their webs, and sometimes butterflies land on him.  There is a steady rain of grass clippings, maple keys, leaf dust and falling needles from the tall evergreens swaying to and fro, way up over his head.

The old guy looks as though he is carved from stone, but he is actually made of polyresin, and he weighs only a pound or two.  I discovered him in the window of a thrift shop years ago, purchased him for a dollar or so and brought him home where he presides over the leafy enclave behind the little blue house from early April until late October. Since I am not supposed to pick up or carry anything weighing more than five pounds this summer, the big garden Buddha will stay in the garden shed until next year when I will be able to cart him outside myself and park him under the roses. This Hotei is not alone though - there is a polyresin sandhill crane nearby in a fetching shade of blue.

Often called simply the "Laughing Buddhha", Hotei is based on a wandering 10th-century Chinese Buddhist monk named Budaishi, thought to have been an incarnation of Maitreya, the Buddha still to come. Maitreya comes from the Sanskrit maitrī  meaning "loving-kindness". The old guy in our garden is revered as a god of contentment, the guardian of children, also (for some strange reason), the patron of bartenders. On his back, he carries a bottomless bag of food, drink and coins with which he assists those in need.  He holds a fan which has the power to grant wishes, and he sometimes holds a mala or Buddhist rosary.

No matter what kind of day I am having or how I feel, Hotei smiles from his leafy bower, and he makes me smile too.  That is something beyond price.

From the Bridge on a Summer Day

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

At Ease in the Green

Common baskettail (female)

(Epitheca cynosura)

Friday Ramble - Summer's Sweetly Ticking Clock

Somewhere in the dusty recesses of my noggin, the passage of these sultry summer days is being marked, and ever so wistfully.  There's a cosmic clock ticking away in the background, and I find myself pondering the lessons held out by this golden interval that is passing away all too swiftly.  The other three seasons of a northern calendar year are splendid of course, and there are surely other fine summers ahead, but this summer is waning, and its days are numbered. The summer solstice has just come and gone, and we are sliding gently down the hill toward autumn, shorter days and longer nights.

Thoughts of coming and going are ever inscribed on summer's middling pages, and they're unsettling notions, making for restlessness and vague discontent, a gentle melancholy concerning the transience of all earthly things.  A heightened awareness of suchness (or tathata) is a midsummer thing for sure, and for the most part, one goes gently along with the flow, breathing in and out, trying to rest in the moment and do the gardeny things that need doing.

Old garden roses are a perfect metaphor for the season and most bloom once in a calendar year, but what a show they put on when they do.  Their unruly tangles of wickedly thorny canes and blue-green leaves wear delicate pink (for the most part) blooms with crinkled petals and golden hearts.  Each rose is unique, and each is exquisite from budding until its faded petals flutter to earth like snowflakes. Around midsummer, fragrance lingers in every corner of the garden, and every year I fall in love with old roses all over again. It is nothing short of a miracle that creatures so beautiful and fragile thrive this far north.

Once in a while, I catch a glimpse of the Great Mystery while hanging out in the garden, and that is surely what this old life is all about.  I wish I didn't have to keep reminding myself of that, but then, there are my roses to remind me.

Thursday Poem - Directions

The best time is late afternoon
when the sun strobes through
the columns of trees as you are hiking up,
and when you find an agreeable rock
to sit on, you will be able to see
the light pouring down into the woods
and breaking into the shapes and tones
of things and you will hear nothing
but a sprig of birdsong or the leafy
falling of a cone or nut through the trees,
and if this is your day you might even
spot a hare or feel the wing-beats of geese
driving overhead toward some destination.

But it is hard to speak of these things
how the voices of light enter the body
and begin to recite their stories
how the earth holds us painfully against
its breast made of humus and brambles
how we who will soon be gone regard
the entities that continue to return
greener than ever, spring water flowing
through a meadow and the shadows of clouds
passing over the hills and the ground
where we stand in the tremble of thought
taking the vast outside into ourselves.

Billy Collins,
(from The Art of Drowning)

(Almost) Wordless Wednesday - Child of the Sun

Happy, happy Midsummer!
Bright blessings at this turning of the Wheel.

For Midsummer (Litha)

Here we are on the eve of Midsummer, also called the Summer Solstice or Litha. Tomorrow 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 slope toward autumn, and beyond to winter. This morning's image was taken near the 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.

Whither has the year flown? Summer has just arrived, but it's all downhill from here, at least for six months or so. After tomorrow, 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 (Mother Nature) 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. Night skies are a vast cauldron filled with brightly twinkling stars in the last half of the calendar year, and they are absolutely magical. 

How does one go about marking this sunlit moment between the lighter and darker halves of the year? 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. Not so long ago, all Europe was alight on Midsummer eve, and bonfires climbed high into the night from every village green. Midsummer festivities included morris dancing, games of chance and storytelling, feasting 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.  Village doorways were decorated with swags and wreaths of birch, fennel, St. John's Wort and white lilies. Summer arrived late this year, and our St. John's Wort will not bloom for a few weeks.

Midsummer observances here are simple. I make it a point to be outside or near a window with a mug of Jerusalem Artichoke (or Earth Apple as it is sometimes called) tea and watch the sun rise.  There's a candle on the old oak table and a lighted wand of summery incense in a pottery bowl nearby. The afternoon holds an hour or so of pottering in local flea markets, a quiet meal as the sun goes down and night falls, a little stargazing and moon watching later. We cherish the simplicity of such small doings, and the quiet pleasure of being surrounded by kith and kin. This year, our sweet Spencer will not be physically present, but he is here with us in spirit, and so is his big sister Cassie.

Happy Midsummer to you and your clan this year, however you choose to celebrate (or not 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.

The Green and the Gold

Large Yellow Lady's Slipper
(Cypripedium parviflorum var pubescens)

Sunday - Saying Yes to the World

Looking at the heavens places me in time and space - and beyond them. Gazing at the stars, I look through heaven’s wrinkle; the light I see now represents their past, having traveled many years across space to reach my eyes here on earth; the light they are emitting now will be visible only in some future, years away.

I and all the other lives on Earth are connected to the stars, held together by  gravity, the invisible glue that defines our universe, and bound elementally by a common material: stardust.  This atomic grit of interstellar space paints dark clouds on the Milky Way, condenses itself into swirls of gravity-bound suns and planets, and provides the minerals bonded by the push and pull of electrical charges into the molecules that form our cells. Like stardust and the other materials of life itself, we are in constant motion, changing shape as we pass through our lives, and after the makings of our bodies break down and are recycled, rearranged into other forms of life.

The stars remind me of where I come from and who I am.

Susan J. Tweit, Walking Nature Home

Wings for a Mourning Heart

Canadian Tiger Swallowtail

(Papilio canadensis)

Almost Eleven

Spencer would have been eleven next month, and he was our much loved companion from August 2008 until this week when he passed beyond the fields we know. He had been diagnosed with osteosarcoma in early May, and the disease rampaged through his system like wildfire.

Opiates were no longer holding our sweet boy's pain at bay, and we made the heartbreaking decision to send him off across the rainbow bridge a few days ago. He undertook his last journey on Wednesday with the gentle assistance of his veterinarian, Himself and I holding him close and crying. I hated leaving his dear little body behind for cremation, and I felt like a murderer that day. I still do.

Like most German shorthaired pointers (GSPs), our little guy was highly intelligent, and he was very athletic.  He was a strong swimmer, and he ran like the wind, had oodles of endurance and was a perfect sidekick in the woods. On woodland rambles, he was always at my side, and he defended me fiercely against moths, bumbles, dragonflies and grasshoppers, convinced that they were up to no good, and his mum was in grave danger.

He liked to run off with socks and slippers, and he excavated gargantuan holes in the garden when the spirit moved him. He understood almost everything that was said around here, and it was difficult to put anything over on him.  His elegant nose could sniff out cookies, homemade gelato, bison burgers and Brie at a distance of several kilometers. As a senior citizen, he developed an expressive grumble and wandered around the house commenting resonantly on just about everything he saw. We gave up chocolate because he couldn't have it too.

Spence had a heart as wide as the world.  He loved us with every particle of his being, and we loved him back with every particle of ours. The house is empty without him, and we can't believe he is gone. His bed, bowls, blankets and toys are where they have always been and where they will stay.  There is a hole in our hearts, and a raw wind is blowing through it, but we know his big sister Cassie was waiting for him in the sunny fields beyond the bridge.  Please let it be so.

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 The Way It Is" New and Selected Poems) Greywolf Press 1999

For our beautiful boy, Spencer, July 5, 2006 -  June 14, 2017

Wordless Wednesday - On the Rocks

Sad, very, very sad...

This is a painful post to write, and I contemplated saying nothing here at all but thought that would be a cop out.

On Wednesday afternoon, our beautiful Spencer will make the trip across the rainbow bridge, held gently by his parents (Himself and I) and assisted by Dr. Sue who has given him such loving care for the last nine years.

Our boy has gone everywhere with us since he arrived in August 2008 after Cassie's passing, and he has been the dearest and finest of companions, but helping him on this last journey is the most loving thing we can do.

Last month, moving about became difficult for him, and off to Dr. Sue we went. Tests were done and a small osteosarcoma in his right shoulder was identified. A second set of tests carried out yesterday showed clearly that the cancer had expanded aggressively.

For the moment, our sweet little guy is on morphine, and he is resting comfortably for the most part, but his comfort will be short lived, and we will help him on his way in a day or two. In the meantime, we are heartbroken and inconsolable. A world without our (in the immortal words of Chaucer) "veray parfit gentil knight" does not bear thinking about.

Like Honey in My Cup

Sunday - Saying Yes to the World

When you breathe in, breathe in the whole universe.

When you breathe out, breathe out the whole universe.

Osaka Koryu

Unfolding in Early Light

Lupins ((Lupinus perennis)

Friday Ramble - Reflect

Feeling vaguely restless and in need of something or other, I went for a walk along the lake at twilight this week. I didn't know what the something might be, but I hoped I would have the wits to recognize it when I found it.

When I paused on a favorite ribbon of beach near the bridge, the setting sun was painting a trail across the water, and the ripples at my feet offered up a dazzling reflection in return. There were islands and magical archipelagos floating in the seemingly boundless sky as Helios dropped out of sight for another day - a fine sense of cloud drifting adventures too, as if one could simply board a cloud and sail away. Bulrushes and fronds of pickerel weed fringed the lake, every stem swaying and sighing and casting a fey reflection. Loons drifted on the current like little boats, and herons haunted the shallows nearby. The scene was one of joyous untrammeled reciprocity - no reservations, no limitations and no holding back, just exquisite buttery light and deep shadow, inky shapes across the water, the cadence of the waves as they greeted 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.

There were no deep musings by the lake that night, and my thoughts were probably closer to the original meaning of the word reflect than they were to anything else.  Watching the slow fiery blush of the 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 capture with my camera, nothing I sketch or write down here can do justice to such moments. All the fumbling efforts are a 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 medical "toings and froings"? Such ordinary happenings run together, and little or nothing of them shines a light in memory, but sundown at the lake will stick around as long as I can draw a breath.

Thursday Poem - The 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 - Looking Through

At Last, Dragonflies

Female Four-spotted Skimmer

(Libellula quadrimaculata)

Coming Into the Light

 Spatterdock or Yellow pond-lily

(Nuphar advena)

Sunday - Saying Yes to the World

The world is its own magic.

Shunryu Suzuki

Clouds and Sundown Lake

Friday Ramble - Holding Light 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 summer's morning light and store it within the frilly tutus of their lavish petals.

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

Now and then, I falter as all living creatures must from time to time. On dreary days, I mourn the paucity of light in the world beyond my 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. If I could only take in light and store it as flowers do in their season - I am working on it.

Thursday Poem - To Say Nothing But Thank You

All day I try to say nothing but thank you,

breathe the syllables in and out with every step I

take through the rooms of my house and outside into

a profusion of shaggy-headed dandelions in the garden

where the tulips’ black stamens shake in their crimson cups.

I am saying thank you, yes, to this burgeoning spring

and to the cold wind of its changes. Gratitude comes easy

after a hot shower, when loosened muscles work,

when eyes and mind begin to clear and even unruly

hair combs into place.

Dialogue with the invisible can go on every minute,

and with surprising gaiety I am saying thank you as I

remember who I am, a woman learning to praise

something as small as dandelion petals floating on the

steaming surface of this bowl of vegetable soup,

my happy, savoring tongue.

Jeanne Lohmann,
(from The Light of Invisible Bodies)