For Imbolc/Candlemas

Here we are on the last day of January and the eve of Candlemas or Imbolc. Strange to relate, this festival day in the depths of winter celebrates light and warmth, the stirring of green things within the earth, the burgeoning of new life and the beginning of springtime. Once called "Bride's day", the day is consecrated to Brigid, she who is loved as an Irish saint, but was revered as a goddess long centuries before she was canonized. Herself is a deity of fire and creativity, wisdom, eloquence and superb craftsmanship.  She is patroness of the forge and smithy, poetry and the healing arts, particularly midwifery. Hers are the candle, the hearth and the forge, and light is her special province.

We are made of light ourselves, and that makes us Brigid's children - creatures forged from the dust of stars which once lighted the heavens and ceased to exist billions of years ago. Within the radiant particles of our being are encoded the wisdoms of the ancient earth and all its cultures, the star knowledge of unknown constellations and "The Big Bang" which created not just our own precious world, but the whole cosmic sea in which it floats.

The stardust of which we are formed is essentially recycled matter, having assembled spontaneously into diverse life forms over and over again, lived and expired, then dissolved back into the stream of existence. In our time, “we” have been many things, worn many shapes and answered to many names. In this lifetime I exist as a tatterdemalion, specific and perhaps unique collection of wandering molecules called Catherine or Cate, but in previous incarnations, I was someone or something altogether different.

Buddhist teacher and deep ecologist Joanna Macy has written that since every particle in our being goes back to the first flaring of space and time, we are as old as the universe itself, about fifteen billion years. In other words, we are the universe, and it is us.

Merry Imbolc to you and your clan, happy Candlemas and St. Brigid's Day too. May the manifold blessings of Light be yours.

Morning in Bloom

Skies are leaden, and a fine murk wraps the village.  This is one of those mornings when the village seems to be dancing (or skating) on the edge of the world and the weather and not sure where it belongs. 

Adjectives like dark and sunless are evocative, but there are better words for and about such intervals: bosky, caliginous, cloudy, crepuscular, dark, dim, drab, dusky, gloomy, murky, nebulous, obfuscous, obscure, opaque, overcast, shadowy, somber, stygian, sunless, tenebrous, twilighted, umbral, vague, wintry.

What to do? With no light to speak of, this is not a good morning for wandering about with my camera and the peripherals that go with it, so far anyway. When Beau and I went out a few minutes ago, a cold raw wind teased the backs of our necks, and the matter of a longer morning walk was put aside for now. My furry son trotted back into the bedroom and curled up on the quilt in my warm spot.

Inside the little blue house in the village, I pull out a basket of Chinese flower teas gifted by my friend Caroline last autumn, then brew up a glass pot full.  As the dried blooms take in liquid and open out, the kitchen is filled with floral perfume, and home is summery all over again.  The glass pot and the contents of my cup are almost too arty to drink, and I take picture after picture.

There is an issue of Artful Blogging to "ooh and ahh" over today, the third Brandenburg concerto on the CD player, a box of art pens in splendid Mediterranean shades to play with.  There will be currant scones this morning, and for dinner this evening something fragrant and spicy (probably curried)  that sings and dances on the tongue.  There is room at the old oak table for everyone, and there are enough mugs and cups to go around too. On days like this, one simply does whatever she can do to light things up.

Winter Streams, Briefly Flowing

Sunday, Saying Yes to the World

We are all longing to go home to some place we have never been—a place half-remembered and half-envisioned we can only catch glimpses of from time to time. Community. Somewhere, there are people to whom we can speak with passion without having the words catch in our throats. Somewhere a circle of hands will open to receive us, eyes will light up as we enter, voices will celebrate with us whenever we come into our own power. Community means strength that joins our strength to do the work that needs to be done. Arms to hold us when we falter. A circle of healing. A circle of friends. Someplace where we can be free.
Starhawk, Dreaming the Dark

Cup of Morning

Friday Ramble - Silence

This week's word comes to us through the Old English swige and Old French silence, thence the Latin silentium and silere meaning "to be still and (or) tranquil". I could happily have traced the origins of the word all the way back to Proto-Indo-European (PIE) and the beginning times, but paused at silere, curious about the word's origins, but engaged by its easy kinship with rest and repose.

As a species, we are nourished by notions of silence, stillness and tranquility. Examined in their entirety, our songs and stories are eloquent expressions of our tribal wanderings, but other things come to light when we look closely at individual words and the silent spaces between the words. They are little works of art or theater, tiny plays or compositions descriptive of a moment or feeling, a physical sensation, an encounter, a dialogue with other beings or with existence itself.  Spaces don't separate words - they join the words like lacquered spacers connecting the beads on a silken cord.

Silence and mythology are closely interwoven - the word mythology has its roots in the Greek mythos, meaning to speak or to relate something - and not just in the written or spoken sense. The etymological roots of the word mythology are shared with other words connoting silence, wordlessness and the inability to speak. In other words, what we are not hearing or saying is as important as what we are hearing or saying. Silences are as meaningful and as expressive as conversations, and often more so, the spaces between as vibrant and eloquent as the bookending words themselves can ever be.  There is a profound causal relationship between what we communicate in words and what we do not (or cannot) communicate in words.

Silences are complete within themselves, liminal and transforming.There is silence between one gust of wind and the next, between icicles and the rising sun.  There is silence in incandescent intervals at sunset when the falling light illuminates melt pools in the park, turning water and reflected trees to gold as one stands nearby, breathless and staring.  There are the sunless winter days I sometimes write about when I can hear snow falling among the trees or coming to rest on the old Buddha out on the deck.  All silences are interstitial - the eloquent distances between one bead on a mala and the next, the spaces between two words in a tale or narrative, the mindful expanse between the opening chime of the meditation bell and that which closes our fumbling meditations.

Sometimes, we need to be able to hear ourselves think—or better still, not think—just show up and BE right there. In our small intentional silences, we dwell (however briefly) in mindfulness, connection and infinite possibility. It's all good, and one of these days, I am going to put those words on a t-shirt.

Thursday Poem - The Maenads

Somewhere I read
that when they finally staggered off the mountain
into some strange town, past drunk,
hoarse, half naked, blear-eyed,
blood dried under broken nails
and across young thighs,
but still jeering and joking, still trying
to dance, lurching and yelling, but falling
dead asleep by the market stalls,
sprawled helpless, flat out, then
middle-aged women,
respectable housewives,
would come and stand nightlong in the agora
silent
together
as ewes and cows in the night fields,
guarding, watching them
as their mothers
watched over them.
And no man
dared
that fierce decorum.

Ursula Kroeber Le Guin
(from Finding My Elegy)

Ursula Le Guin was a fine poet and a Taoist scholar as well as an award winning novelist; the world is a poorer place for her passing out of it this week. As devotees of Dionysus, the Maenads would probably have been drinking red wine, and not this exquisite golden Chardonnay, but I just love the color.

Wordless Wednesday - Visitor

Black-capped chickadee (Poecile atricapillus)

For January Thawing, However Brief

The January thaw lasts for only a few days, but we are all richer for its visitation and rather foolish. We take photos with our cameras and cell phones, send messages (or texts) to friends, write seasonal haiku, gaze out the window and wax euphoric about the light, hang about with silly expressions.

Small tributaries in the eastern Ontario highlands run free for a brief interval, and they take on the color and texture of quicksilver.  On sunny days, the briefly liberated waterways are filled, one and all, with buttery light and wispy clouds and breathtaking blue sky.

This week, one can almost hear springtime breathing softly around the bend.  Alas, we (and she) have a long way to go. Storms and deep cold are already on their way, and they will be here in a day or two. If only we could keep this glorious light for a little longer.

January Thaw

Sunday - Saying Yes to the World

We need acts of restoration, not only for polluted waters and degraded lands, but also for our relationship to the world. We need to restore honor to the way we live, so that when we walk through the world we don’t have to avert our eyes with shame, so that we can hold our heads up high and receive the respectful acknowledgment of the rest of the earth’s beings.

Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants

Looking Through the Fence

Friday Ramble - January's Performing Arts

A brisk north wind cavorts across the roof and rollicks through sleeping trees in the garden, making the frozen oak branches ring like bells. The icicles embellishing the eaves behind the house are abstract glossy confections, streaked with gold and silver and filled with tiny bubbles. Madcap gusts dislodge twigs and shards of ice that skate across roof shingles, then plummet clattering over the eaves into the deep snowdrifts wrapping the house.

Advised to remain indoors until a persistent and annoying fever abates, I slip outside for a few minutes anyway and snap photos of nearby trees and icicles, chimneys and sky.  Wrapped up and looking for all the world like a yeti (or an abominable something anyway), I stand in the wonderfully pebbled snow in the garden and capture a few images, try to figure out how in the world I can describe everything, the burnished hues of the icicles, the emeralds of the evergreens, the blues and violets of the snow, the muted gold siding on my neighbor's kitchen wall, the scarlet of a male cardinal as it flies into the cedar hedge.

The icicles communicate the colors and shapes of this day perfectly without any help from me at all. They rattle, chatter and chime, sing Gilbert and Sullivany duets with the wind occasionally (mostly bits from Iolanthe), pretend they are tubular bells at other times or recite epic stanzas from the Poetic Eddas.  The Norse elements of their performance are particularly appropriate.  It has been cold enough around here in recent weeks for Ragnarök, and at times we have wondered if this is the Fimbulwinter, the walloping winter to end them all.

With all the elemental performances being given this morning, no words, or at least not very many words, are needed from this old hen. I can just stand here in a snowdrift with the camera, get out of its way (and my own way) and let it see the world without trying to impose on its thoughtful and loving journey.

Out of the blue, a thought comes as I turn to go back inside before anyone notices that I am no longer in there, but rather out here.  It is the images that are capturing me this morning, and not me capturing them.  It's a Zen thing.

Thursday Poem - January

Dusk and snow this hour
in argument have settled
nothing. Light persists,
and darkness. If a star
shines now, that shine is
swallowed and given back
doubled, grounded bright.
The timid angels flailed
by passing children lift
in a whitening wind
toward night. What plays
beyond the window plays
as water might, all parts
making cold digress.
Beneath iced bush and eave,
the small banked fires of birds
at rest lend absences
to seeming absence. Truth
is, nothing at all is missing.
Wind hisses and one shadow
sways where a window's lampglow
has added something. The rest
is dark and light together tolled
against the boundary-riven
houses. Against our lives,
the stunning wholeness of the world.

Betty Adcock from Intervale

Wordless Wednesday - Winter Light

The Sisterhood of Eye and Leaf

Little things leave you feeling restless in mid January. You ramble through stacks of gardening catalogues, plotting another heritage rose or three, new plots of herbs and heirloom veggies. You spend hours in the kitchen summoning old Helios with cilantro, fragrant olive oils and recipes straight from Tuscany. You burn candles and brew endless pots of tea, sunlight dancing in every china mug.

You play with filters, apertures and shutter speeds, entranced (and occasionally irritated) with the surprising transformations wrought by your madcap gypsy tinkerings. Camera in hand or around your neck, you haunt the woods, peering into trees and searching for a leaf somewhere, even a single bare leaf. You scan the cloudy evening skies, desperately hoping to see the moon, and you calculate the weeks remaining until the geese, the herons and the loons come home again.

It may not seem like it, but change is already on its way.  The great horned owls who reside on the Two Hundred Acre Wood are repairing their nest in an old beech tree about a mile back in the forest, and they are getting ready to raise another comely brood.  It makes me happy to think it is all happening again.

This morning, a single oak leaf was teased into brief flight by the north wind, and it came to rest in the birdbath in the garden.  A simple  thing perhaps, but the pairing of pumpkiny orange leaf and blue snow was fetching stuff indeed, and the leaf bore in its poignant wabi sabi simplicity an often and much needed reminder. This is the sisterhood of fur and feather, of snowbound earth and clouded sky, of wandering eye and dancing leaf.  Out of my small and frost rimed doings, a mindful life is made.

Ice and Morning Light

Sunday - Saying Yes to the World

How is one to live a moral and compassionate existence when one is fully aware of the blood, the horror inherent in life, when one finds darkness not only in one’s culture but within oneself? If there is a stage at which an individual life becomes truly adult, it must be when one grasps the irony in its unfolding and accepts responsibility for a life lived in the midst of such paradox. One must live in the middle of contradiction, because if all contradiction were eliminated at once, life would collapse. There are simply no answers to some of the great pressing questions. You continue to live them out, making your life a worthy expression of leaning into the light.
Barry Lopez

Winter Dreaming

Friday Ramble - Winter's Abundance

It may seem odd to be writing about abundance in the depths of winter, but here we are the middle of January, and that is just what I am doing.

This week's word appeared in the 1400s, coming to us through Middle English and Old French, thence from the Latin abundāns, all meaning "full or overflowing".  There are lovely synonyms for the noun: affluence, bounty, fortune, plenty, plethora, profusion, prosperity, riches, wealth.  As adjectives, Roget offers us the aforementioned "full and overflowing", as well as lavish, ample, plentiful, copious, exuberant, rich, teeming, profuse, bountiful and liberal.

We use abundance (or abundant) to describe circumstances of fullness, ripeness and plenty, most often in late summer and early autumn as we weed and reap and gather in, turn the earth for next year's sowing, harvest the bounty of the season for consumption when the snow flies.

Winter's eye is as ardent as summer's, but it views the world through a different camera, taking in bare branches against the clouds, light falling across old rail fences, deep blue shadows across the snow, dead leaves dancing in the wind, the thousand-and-one worlds resting easy in glossy icicles down by the creek.  When sunlight touches them, the icicles are filled with blue sky and possibility, and they seem to hold the whole world in their depths. Cloaked in snow, bales of hay left in winter fields are  the coinage of summer passed, and they are eloquent reminders too. Each and every element cries out for attention, for patient eyes and a recording lens, for recognition, remembrance and a slender scrip of words. 

The long white season is about harvest and abundance too, but the gathering is inward, the abundance quieter and dappled with questions.  Around this time of the year, I find myself questioning the shape of my journeying - the slow progress across eastern Ontario's highlands with camera and notebook in hand, the sheaves of images captured or described and carefully archived, even the eyes with which this old hen is seeing the world. There are wonders to be encountered, even when one can't move about as much as she would like.  When she must remain indoors entirely, there are whole forests of memories to revisit.

We need to remember that questions are a part of the journey, and that they are a kind of harvesting too.  There is not the slightest chance that I will ever capture even a scrap of the snowy wonder and grandeur around me, and these days on the earth are numbered, but in the warm darkness of my questions and my uncertainty, I gather everything in and rejoice.

Thursday Poem - At Sunrise

At sunrise on winter days

our trail is through newly fallen white,

  every footfall a waxing moon,

muffled footsteps rising

through snow-drowned spruces,

hearts beating along in time.

Goldenrod and milkweed,

great spruces weighted under snow,

all nod in early greeting.

Ghost choirs of summer grosbeaks
sing above our heads, icicles forming

along rooflines as we pass by.

Winter rounds the village out,

smoothing the contours of house and street,
spinning deserts out of snow.

In this morning softness, I know myself

at last—perfect, still and so complete

nothing abandoned or left behind.

Cate

Wordless Wednesday - Across the Frozen Pond

Looking for the Light

I lurch awake before sunrise and make coffee, then lean against the counter and wait for early sunlight to make its way through the kitchen window, for the sun's rays to shine through the fence on the eastern perimeter of the garden.

Sometimes there is sunlight on these chill January mornings, but much of the time, there is not. Northern days begin to stretch out languorously at the beginning of a new calendar year, but we will be into February's middling pages before real change can be seen and felt in morning's trajectory through fences, windows and snow crowned shrubbery.

Winter skies are breathtaking before dawn, their deep blue shading gloriously to pink and gold and purple near the horizon, but the weather is, for the most part, very cold here all through the month of January and well into February. Thermometer readings of -38 degrees (Celsius) are not unusual. Whatever the thermometer says, there is a fine elusive old truth resting out there in the interstices between earth and sky at dawn, in the dance of light and shadow in the winter landscape.

On woodland rambles (still brief this year by necessity), I trace sharp lines of shadow in the snow with my eyes, measure the changes in their inclination from day to day. The shadows whisper that springtime is on its way, but they also make it clear we have a very long way to go before the greening season puts in an appearance. Until it does turn up, I will look for dancing motes of light in the world and within myself, and I will remember that deep within their dreaming roots, all trees hold the light.

Just a Little Light

Sunday - Saying Yes to the World

...For the greater part of human history, and in places in the world today, common resources were the rule. But some invented a different story, a social construct in which everything is a commodity to be bought and sold. The market economy story has spread like wildfire, with uneven results for human well-being and devastation for the natural world. But it is just a story we have told ourselves and we are free to tell another, to reclaim the old one.

One of these stories sustains the living systems on which we depend. One of these stories opens the way to living in gratitude and amazement at the richness and generosity of the world. One of these stories asks us to bestow our gifts in kind, to celebrate our kinship with the world. We can choose. If all the world is a commodity, how poor we grow. When all the world is a gift in motion, how wealthy we become.

Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants

Easy Landing

Friday Ramble - First of the Year

The Winter Solstice came and went, and light is slowly returning to the world. Our days are are growing longer, but the effects of December's turning are felt in their own good time, and it will be a while before we sense real change in the length of our days, notice a difference in the landscape.

January is the most bitter month here in the north, a time of snow and penetrating icy cold. It's always tempting to remain indoors and just curl up by the fire with mugs of tea and books, but we three need to be out in the Lanark woods now and again - snowy rambles there nourish and sustain us, and so we take them even on the coldest days in winter.  I carry a walking stick for treacherous areas on the trail, some sort of camera, binoculars, a notebook and pen, a thermos of tea and Beau's biscuits. It's a fair bit of weight to tote along with a toboggan of seed for the birds and apples for the deer, but we muddle through somehow.

"Crunch, crunch, crunch" went our mukluks a few days ago as we made our way along the trail to the bird feeders.  It was surely our imagination this early in the year, but the snow seemed brighter than it was a few days ago. Sunlight sparked through the trees, and everything glittered. The light was sublime. We felt as rich as old Croesus - as if every jeweler's vault on the planet had been looted and the glittering contents spilled out at our feet.

There was flickering movement in woodland hollows, and shadows seemed to waver and flow like quicksilver as the wind moved through the trees. Shapes seemed less attenuated, deeper and more intense, more blue.  Here and there, a sprig of frozen green poked out of the snow, and the color was a hopeful thing, one that not even the biting north wind could carry away in its gelid paws.

Resolutions this year??? No resolutions scrawled on paper or etched in stone, only the same old work in progress - trying to be fully present and paying attention, cultivating an intimate connection with my native woods and fields, getting out of my own way and letting the camera see what it will see, just breathing, in and out, in and out.  In the words of Surya Das, "There's nothing to do but remain in the view".

Thanks to the last year's health issues, long rambles are still on hold, but that is quite all right. Staying passionate and engaged, being right here and able to take this amazing world in, that is a beautiful, breathtaking gift.

Thursday Poem - Burning the Old Year

Letters swallow themselves in seconds.
Notes friends tied to the doorknob,
transparent scarlet paper,
sizzle like moth wings,
marry the air.

So much of any year is flammable,
lists of vegetables, partial poems.
Orange swirling flame of days,
so little is a stone.

Where there was something and suddenly isn’t,
an absence shouts, celebrates, leaves a space.
I begin again with the smallest numbers.

Quick dance, shuffle of losses and leaves,
only the things I didn’t do
crackle after the blazing dies.

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

Wordless Wednesday - On the Edge

The Wolf Moon of January

Here we are on the first day of a new calendar year, and the first full moon of the year too. Not long ago, we leaned against the fence and photographed waves of departing geese against a rising autumn moon, and here we were again recently. The great birds were long gone of course, and their parting songs were only a faint echo on the wind.

January's moon is the coldest of the calendar year. We stoke the embers in our wood stoves and huddle by the hearth on long nights, brew endless pots of tea and stir cauldrons of soup, count sticks of firewood and kindling and hope another trip out to the woodshed is not needed, at least not for a while. We wrap ourselves up as best we can and take toboggans of nosh into the forest for the birds and the deer. On our wild jaunts, we look for the first signs that daylight hours are stretching out again, measure the incline, intensity and sharpness of the deep blue shadows falling across our trail as we crunch along. The north wind holds dominion over the Lanark highlands in winter, and it cuts like a knife.

During the last winter Olympics, an ad supporting the Canadian team proclaimed: "We are Winter” (“Nous sommes l'hiver”), and truer words were never spoken. Winter is something we do up here, and we do it very, very well.

On clear winter nights, timber wolves on our hill in Lanark raise their voices in song, and coyote clans on the other side of the Two Hundred Wood sing a magnificent harmony, the two choruses performing a descant that rises and falls in waves across the inky snow and travels for miles - it's almost Gregorian, a Kyrie eleison so gorgeous it gives us goosebumps and leaves us breathless every single time we hear it.

In only three or four weeks, great horned owls will be nesting in our woods again, and a few weeks after that, the maple syrup season will (hopefully) be starting in the highlands. Of such small and hopeful notions, our winter days are made.

We also know this January moon as the: After Yule Moon, Big Cold Moon, Buckeyes Ripe Moon, Carnation Moon, Center Moon, Ceremonial Initiate Moon, Cold Moon, Cooking Moon, Turning Moon, Earth Renewal Moon, First Moon, Frost in the Tepee Moon, Frozen Ground Moon, Great Moon, Great Spirit Moon, Greetings Maker Moon, Her Cold Moon, Hibiscus Moon, Holiday Moon, Ice Moon, Lakes Frozen Moon, Little Winter Moon, Long Moon, Man Moon, Midwinter Moon, Moon After Yule, Moon of the Bear, Moon of the Child, Moon of Darkness, Moon of Flying Ants, Moon of Life at It's Height, Moon of Strong Cold, Moon of Whirling Snow, Moon When Animals Lose Their Fat, Moon When Limbs of Trees Are Broken by Snow, Moon When Snow Drifts into Tipis, Moon When the Snow Blows like Spirits in the Wind, Moon When the Sun Has Traveled South, Moon When the Old Fellow Spreads the Brush , Moon When Wolves Run Together, Ninene Moon, No Snow in Trails Moon, Old Moon, Pine Moon, Plum Blossom Moon, Quiet Moon, Rivros Moon, Rowan Moon, Severe Moon, Snow Moon, Snow Thaws Moon, Snowdrop Moon, Snowy Path Moon, Strong Cold Moon, Sun Has Not Strength to Thaw Moon, Thumb Moon, Trail Squint Moon, Two Trails Moon, Weight Loss Moon, Whirling Wind Moon, White Waking Moon, Winter Moon, Winter's Younger Brother Moon

Always an admirer of wolves, I like the name "Wolf Moon", but I am also fond of "Great Spirit Moon" and "Earth Renewal Moon".

On the First Day of the Year

Happy New Year, may all good things come to you.

May there be light and abundance in your life,
robust health and sweet contentment.

May there be adventures and laughter,

May there be magic, all kinds of it.

May you find joy in your creations.
May all your lessons be gentle.
May fulfillment grace your life.
May there be peace on your journey.

Remember, this world is a richer place
because you are in it.