Turning Toward October

Sunday - Saying Yes to the World

Ultimately, to live an enchanted life is to pick up the pieces of our bruised and battered psyches, and to offer them the nourishment they long for. It is to be challenged, to be awakened, to be gripped and shaken to the core by the extraordinary which lies at the heart of the ordinary. Above all, to live an enchanted life is to fall in love with the world all over again. This is an active choice, a leap of faith which is necessary not just for our own sakes, but for the sake of the wide, wild Earth in whose being and becoming we are so profoundly and beautifully entangled.
Sharon Blackie, The Enchanted Life, Unlocking the Magic of the Everyday

The Light in the Beeches

Friday Ramble - Going for the Gold

It's the reds that grab our attention in September and October. When maple trees in the Lanark highlands turn, its gorges, hills and quiet coves are ablaze with color. Other trees are dazzling in their own right, but their earthier hues are always upstaged by the riotous, cavorting red maples.

There is an elemental chemistry at work in the woods. In summer, the green pigment in leaves (chlorophyll) helps converts sunlight into energy in the elegant chemical process called photosynthesis. (That word comes from the Greek  phōs meaning "light", and suntíthēmi meaning "putting together".) Trees retain the carbon dioxide extracted during photosynthesis and use it to manufacture nourishment, together with water taken in through their roots. Oxygen extracted at the same time is released back into the earth's atmosphere for us to breathe.  It's a wild and earthy magic of the very finest kind, trees and sentient beings all breathing in and out together and sharing the bounty of light. That there is magic is without question, but it always seems to me that trees are sentient beings too, not just woody things with leaves and branches and roots.

When autumn arrives, deciduous trees withdraw into themselves. Chlorophyll production slows down, allowing the anthocyanin and carotenoid pigments also in leaves to come into their own. Leaves high in anthocyanins and low in carotenoids turn scarlet, and those with high levels of both flavinoids flash bright orange.  Leaves high in carotenoids and low in anthocyanins do a sky dance in honeyed golds and yellows.  Absent both anthocyanins and carotenoids, tannins rule, giving us the burnished russets, ochres, umbers and bronzes of the great oaks, hickories and beeches.

Like most northerners, I have a passion for scarlet, claret and ruby in autumn, but it always seems to me that the golds, bronzes and russets of our other native tree species don't get the attention they so richly deserve. The oro (gold) on display here in late September and early October is anything but pallido (pale  or light). It dazzles the eye; it sings and struts and dances; it kicks up its heels. It rocks.

Poplars, ashes, elms and birches wear radiant saffron, and so do ginkgo trees in the village. Beech leaves are coppery coinage, and oak leaves turn an alluring rosy bronze. In Lanark, the aspens and tamaracks down by our beaver pond wear a delightful buttery gold. Nearby, late blooming goldenrod sways back and forth until it goes to seed and offers its fuzzy children to the wind. A few resolute yellow daisies and hawkweed bloom in protected nooks among the rocks. Everywhere, there is fine contrast from spruces, pines and cedars in the background, and blue-green evergreen fragrance fills the air.

And then there are all the smaller bright entities down on the forest floor among the fallen leaves. . . Eastern yellow fly agaric (Amanita muscaria) glows like a hundred watt bulb, and one can spot it in autumn as at no other time of the year. From the shadows, the lovely but poisonous fungus dishes out its frothy incandescence like a halogen lamp set on high beam.

Here's to the glorious golds of the fall panoply. When the long white season arrives and snow covers the countryside, it is the golds that will turn up in my dreams. Long may they delight these old eyes in dazzling array.

Thursday Poem - September Mosaic

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dolores Stewart, (from Doors to the Universe)

Wordless Wednesday - Reflection

Taking the Sky Road Home

Only in September and October do sunsets like this come along, ground mist creeping through fields and around trees, light and sky and clouds like something out of a Maxfield Parrish painting. The clouds in the first image look like a trail one could walk along, and they remind me of the title I appended to a photo a few years ago, "Taking the Sky Road Home".

Fog and ground mist are common entities at sunrise and nightfall here in autumn, clouds of condensed moisture generated by the earth's slow breathing and drifting along above the surface. Humans are cloud-breathing dragons - we generate our own mists and fogs as we take air into our lungs and expel it again; trees breathe in and out too. As above so below, sky, humans, trees and the earth all breathing in and out together, the rosy streaks in the sky above our heads kin to the nebulous veil floating below. Such are notions I always find pleasing.

We call visible murky stuff "fog" when it reduces visibility to less than 1,000 metres, and we call it "mist" when we can see further than 1,000 meters through it. One can make out farm buildings way in the distance in the second photo, so this is mist rather than fog, and a right fine mist it is.

I might be anywhere in the world, but I am leaning against a fence in the eastern Ontario highlands on a cool night in September.  The collar of my jacket is turned up against the wind, and I watch as another day fades, taking photo after photo and hoping just one or two turn out. The clouds, the setting sun, the gauzy veils of condensation floating just above the earth, all are too beautiful for words, so why am I trying to describe them?

The sun slides below the horizon, another autumn day folds up like an umbrella, and the stars come out. A brief interval this, but perfect in every way...

Happy Mabon/Fall Equinox

Sunday - Saying Yes to the World

The eyes of the future are looking back at us, and they are praying for us to see beyond our own time. They are kneeling with hands clasped that we might act with restraint, that we might leave room for the life that is destined to come. To protect what is wild is to protect what is gentle. Perhaps the wilderness we fear is the pause between our own heartbeats, the silent space that says we live only by grace. Wilderness lives by this same grace. Wild mercy is in our hands.

Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place

Painted Lady and Purple Sage

Painted Lady (Vanessa cardui) and Balkan Sage

There must have been at least thirty "ladies" dancing about in a clump of Balkan sage around a corner in the village this week. Beau and I stopped for a few minutes on the way home from our morning walk to watch them flutter exuberantly about, a perfect marriage of purple and orange, two of my favorite colors.

Alas, it was a windy morning, and most of the images we captured were fuzzy - there was  only a single acceptable capture.

Friday Ramble - Mabon

It seems as though summer has just arrived, but here we are again on the eve of the autumn equinox. Cooler mornings, light rains before sunrise, heavy dews and falling leaves after months of blistering heat and humidity, can it be?

The autumn equinox is often observed on September 21st, but the astronomical coordinate this year is next Monday (September 23rd). On whatever day we choose to observe it, the fall equinox is a pivotal cosmic hinge, and it wears many  names: Mabon, Harvest Home, Second Harvest, the Feast of Ingathering and Alban Elfed, to name just a few. Mabon is the most common name of the bunch on this side of the Atlantic, perhaps rooted in the god's status as the male fertilizing principle in Welsh mythology. Ceres, Demeter, John Barleycorn, Lugh or Persephone are other contenders for a tutelary deity presiding over autumn harvest rites, but I am fond of the "Great Son" of the Mabinogion, sometimes thought to be a companion of Arthur's Round Table.

In the old Teutonic calendar, the autumn equinox marked the beginning of the Winter Finding, a ceremonial interval lasting until Winter Night on October 15, also the date of the old Norse New Year. For moderns, the date marks the end of summer and the beginning of autumn.  In Christian tradition, the day is associated with St. Michael the Archangel—his feast takes place a few days from now on September 25 and is known (for obvious reasons) as Michaelmas. The autumn blooming Michaelmas daisy or New England aster with its purple petals and golden heart is one of my favorite wildflowers. South of the equator, seasonal cycles are reversed, and this is the eve of the vernal equinox (Ostara).

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

One holds out hopeful thoughts for the autumn equinox, that skies overhead will be brilliantly blue and full of singing geese by day, that trees and vines and creepers will be arrayed in crimson and gold, that a splendid golden moon will be visible against a blanket of stars by night. 

An autumn wreath graces our door, and a pot of bronze chrysanthemums graces the threshold.  Sometimes the pot is adorned by leaves fallen from the old oak nearby. The tree is our guardian, the wreath and "mum" a nod to the season and a tribute of sorts. Oak, fallen leaves, wreath and blooms are cheerful things, conveying a benediction on anyone who knocks at the door, treads our cobblestones or just passes by in the street. Autumn images tug at the heart, and I always sort through reams of archived images looking for just the right one for today, am never sure I have found it. Leaves, puddles, clouds, light, geese, herons??? It's always about the light, and autumn light is fabulous.

However, and whenever you choose to celebrate the occasion, a very happy Autumn Equinox, Harvest Home, or Mabon. May good things come to you.

Thursday Poem - Mabon, the Autumn Equinox

Ephemeral truce.
The dark begins
its long winning streak.
But for now
in this disheveled garden
a riot of blowsy flowers
hangs on like a chorus
of aging show girls
still with a few good kicks.
The air is ripe
with seedy perfume
and pleasant lies,
the pomegranate shared
between two mouths.
This is our second harvest,
the corn, the squash,
the reconstructed
memories of summer.
Ceres, comfort us with apples,
with grapes and the wine of grapes.
Wheaten breads are baked
in the shape of the sun.
We savor them
with honey.
It will be a long time
before this golden
moment comes again.

Dolores Stewart Riccio

Wordless Wednesday - September Ridge

For the Great Oaks

In September, every garment in my wardrobe seems to have acorns and pine cones in its pockets, offerings from trees in the Lanark highlands, and after years of rambling the hills and valleys of the Two Hundred Acre Wood, I have come to think of its towering woodland people as sisters. On sunny autumn days, I find a comfortable seat among my kin, and we have conversations, some of the most thoughtful and enlightening discussions ever. I have no leaves, and I don't bear acorns, but the great oaks welcome me nevertheless.

Pockets without acorns rattling around in their depths enfold other offerings, pine and spruce cones, walnuts, butternuts, beech nuts and shagbark hickory nuts. I adore their shapes, their colors, their textures, their fragrance, the whole season of their fruiting, and I can never resist gathering such things out in the forest. Autumn is a season of entelechy, a time of becoming, of once and future trees. In the words of poet and typographer Robert Bringhurst:

"Seeds and seed capsules, in nature, are unfailingly elegant. Form not only follows function in these structures; it chases it around, like a mouse with a moth or a cat with a mouse. Immense amounts of information and nutrition are routinely housed in spaces handsome far beyond necessity and compact beyond belief."
Robert Bringhurst, The Tree of Meaning, Language, Mind and Ecology

Turning my pockets out this week before chucking everything into the washing machine, I realized that there has been a whole forest riding around with me for several days, and it made me smile. No need to pine for my tree sisters when I am away from the woods - they are right here with me.

The Old Beech by the Trail

Sunday - Saying Yes to the World

What hope is there for individual reality or authenticity when the forces of violence and orthodoxy, the earthly powers of guns and bombs and manipulated public opinion make it impossible for us to be authentic and fulfilled human beings?

The only hope is in the creation of alternative values, alternative realities. The only hope is in daring to redream one's place in the world - a beautiful act of imagination, and a sustained act of self becoming. Which is to say that in some way or another we breach and confound the accepted frontiers of things.

Ben Okri, from A Way of Being Free

The Harvest Moon of September

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

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

In the greater scheme of things, it doesn't matter how my efforts turned out - it was just being there that mattered. I was happy to be around for another harvest moon, and I hope to be around for many more such wonders. Lady Moon climbed into the sky at the appointed hour, and we (Beau and I) were there to witness her ascent. As we packed up our stuff and headed indoors, we couldn't help thinking that such splendor deserved a gesture of some kind, a chorus, a chant or a benediction - something grander, wider and more expressive than our rickety bows and contented sighs.

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

Friday Ramble - Autumn

This week's word comes to us through the Middle English autumpne and the Old French autompne, thence the Latin autumnus, and the Latin likely hails from even older Etruscan forms.  The first part of autumnus (autu) probably originates in the Etruscan autu, related to avil, or year. The second part of autumnus (mnus) comes from menos meaning loss, minus, or passing. There we have it. At the end of our etymological adventures is the burnished but wistful thought that another year is ebbing, another circling in what I like to call simply, "the Great Round," the natural cycle of our existence.

September is about harvest and abundance, but it is about balance too. The Autumn Equinox on September 21 is one of the two times in the year when day and night are balanced in length. On that day, (also called Mabon or "Harvest Home"), the sun seems to pass over the equator on a journey southward, moving steadily away from us. Things are actually the other way around of course, and it is the earth and her unruly children who are in motion. Between the Midsummer Solstice and the Winter Solstice, our planet's northern hemisphere tilts away from the radiant star at its center, and we northerners go along for the ride.

The magnificent constellations of winter are starting to appear now, and the dome of night is a treasure trove of deep sky wonders, a gift for stargazey types like this Old Thing. Last night, a tapestry of stars covered the sky from here to there, and Jupiter and Saturn dazzled in the southern sky, borrowing light from the sun and acting for all the world as if they were stars, not planets.  The moon was not quite full, but she will be, a few minutes before midnight tonight.

This morning, Beau and I were out in the garden again before sunrise, and it was cold. The moon had already set, but Orion, our favorite autumn constellation, was up and clearly visible in the south. The red giant Aldebaran was higher and to the west. Sirius, the brightest star in the night sky, danced in the east, just above the horizon. When the sun rose, the stars vanished and every roof in the village was sewn with sequins of dew. With mornings like this, can one feel anything except rich as Croesus and jubilant in spirit?

On early walks, falling leaves drift around our ankles and make a fine rustling music.  Earthbound foliage on the trail is going transparent and turning into stained glass in splendid buttery colors.  We pause to look at all the wonders around our feet, and it's a wonder we ever get anywhere at all. When I stopped to look at a leaf in our path this morning, Beau looked up at me curiously. I started to say that I was looking for a perfect leaf, then stopped and started the sentence over again.  Every single autumn leaf is perfect, just as it is.

Wordless Wednesday - After the Rain

Leaf Boats in the Stream

Drifting Along With the Fog

On September mornings, the village can be a mysterious place, the earth often warmer than the air above, and the meeting of the two elements turning otherwise mundane landscape features into entities fey and luminous. Autumn is properly upon us, and she is comfortable in her tenure of mist, rain, wind and madcap tumbling leaves.

There is nothing like a good fog, and September dishes up some splendid atmospheric murks. Mist swirls around everything, draping the whiskery trees, smoothing hard edges and rounding the contours of house and street. The north wind scours leaves from the old trees near home, and they rustle underfoot as Beau and I go along on our early walks. If we listen carefully, we can sometimes hear Cassie and Spencer pottering along beside us, their happy feet doing a kind of scuffling dance through the fallen treasure.

Out of the pearly gray and sepia come sounds now and again. Birds converse in hedgerows and geese move unseen among the clouds, singing as they pass over our heads. Doors open and close as sleepy residents collect their morning papers. There is the soft growling of automobiles and the rumble of buses, the muffled cadence of joggers gliding through the park, children chattering on their way to school, commuters heading downtown to work. Once in a while, there is the whistle of a faraway train, usually only a faint echoing in the air. Closer to home, raindrops beat a staccato rhythm on roofs, and little rivers sing through the eaves. All together, it is symphonic.

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

Little River Singing Through

Sunday - Saying Yes to the World

When you are in a forest—think of all the levels. Down deep, where you can't see, is a whole world. Roots coil and curve in every direction . . . worms, mud, bugs and seeds among rock, and below, the molten zone.

But here on the ground is the richest realm of all, with its soil mulched by the deaths of the countless, and new life springing ever upward into brilliant flowering bulb and bush, tree and bromeliad. Birds and millions of years of animals roam, woman and man and children resonating like music with the leaves and moist air. Sunlight streaming down through the sapphire blue light—clouds drifting in perpetual journey—and above them, hundreds of thousands of galaxies, star diamonds birthing and dying.

We humans are like the forest with our root people, worm people, mud people, seed people, orchid people, short yews and towering sequoias, and a cosmos of animal people and flying bird people—above, the airy sphere of cloud people, blazing sun people, soft moon people and the innumerable star people who sparkle brilliantly in the blackest night. And all, evolving deeper and wider and higher into the unknowable Mystery.

Janine Canan,
Quoted from We'moon, 2019

Dr. Janine Canan is a gifted poet, story teller, essayist and translator, as well as a practicing psychiatrist. She can be visited online here.

First Apples of the Season

Friday Ramble - Demeter at the Gate

A single burnished leaf from the oak in the front yard floats down and comes to rest in a pot of bronzey chrysanthemums on the threshold of the little blue house in the village. Days are still warm here for the most part, but nights are starting to cool down, and it won't be long until we have to carry the pot indoors every evening as darkness falls and the wind comes out of the river.

As the oak leaf makes itself comfortable among the “mums", a long v-shaped skein of geese passes overhead, above them a floating veil of gauzy clouds. I remember a similar vista in early September last year, but with a fragile scrap of waning moon above and slightly to the right of the birds. This time around, the moon is waxing, and she will be full on September 13th, a few minutes before midnight. Here comes the Harvest Moon in all her auriferous splendor. Am I going to be out in the garden with camera and tripod that Friday evening? You bet. Please mama, no clouds that night.

Closer to the earth, the swallows of summer are packing their flight bags and making ready to depart, their places on local telephone wires to be taken by flutters of sparrows and constellations of noisy starlings who are putting on winter stars and flashy yellow beaks.

Frantic squirrels everywhere are filling their larders, and I have surrendered to the little blighters in the matter of geraniums - there does not seem to be much I can do to prevent the flowers from being unceremoniously tossed out of their pots and replaced with buried acorns, berries, crabapples and walnuts. For some reason, the squirrels leave our chrysanthemums alone.

Early Macintosh apples are starting to appear at farm markets, and several “Macs” rest flushed and rosy in a bowl on the kitchen counter.  We carried a lovely big brown paper bag of apples home from a local orchard a few days ago, along with the first cider of the season.  Most of the apples are destined for eating, but there will be applesauce and pies, perhaps a few jars of apple butter. Mugs of Yorkshire tea with pumpernickel toast and apple butter are in the cards.

Corn, squash, apples and hay, there is no doubt about it—Lady Harvest is at the gate and rattling its rusty latch with vigor. She knows the cantrip that grants her entrance to these hills, and she knows the key in which it is to be sung.

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

Wordless Wednesday - Evergreen

Early September Mornings

How splendid these early September mornings are, goldenrod and old stone walls, fog and guardian trees. Nearby, a flock of wild turkeys is grazing in the murk and gobbling contentedly as they wander around in the stubble.

The goldenrod in the foreground is festooned with spider webs, and some strands are several feet long. Every diaphanous thread is beaded with dew and glistening in the early light. There's a light breeze blowing, an astringent, dusty fragrance that only graces the air on early autumn mornings.

Really, the images don't need this old hen and her clumsy, inadequate words at all. They communicate perfectly, all on their own.

Bumble Girl in the Gold

Sunday - Saying Yes to the World

When the journey you are presently on seems to be over, remember that there is no real end. There may be new journeys ahead; there may be journeys-within-journeys.  There is always something new to learn, always another gift to be be brought out into the world. Embrace each new cycle; welcome every twist and turn. It is how we know we are alive.
Sharon Blackie, If Women Rose Rooted