Haud Hogmanay, A Guid New Year

Wishing you abundance, cheer and rude good health in the shiny new year about to begin, many a festive beaker (or a noggin or a dram) too. Be happy this evening, be warm, be safe, wherever you are.

Let us remember the bright, beloved and courageous spirits who left us this year and went on ahead. Let us give thanks for them being in our lives and send them our love when we raise our glasses.

May every cup you hold this year contain a star or two and have a little light in its depths. May there be fine adventures on the road ahead. May all good things come to you and your clan (or tribe) in 2020.

Looking Into the Light

Sunday - Saying Yes to the World

Know the ways of the ones who take care of you, that you may take care of them.
Introduce yourself. Be accountable as the one who comes asking for life.
Ask permission before taking. Abide by the answer.
Never take the first. Never take the last. Take only what you need.
Take only that which is given.
Never take more than half. Leave some for others.
Harvest in a way that minimizes harm.
Use it respectfully. Never waste what you have taken. Share.
Give thanks for what you have been given.
Give a gift, in reciprocity for what you have taken.
Sustain the ones who sustain you and the earth will last forever.

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

My Two Beautiful Guys

Friday Ramble - Last of the Year

It seems right to begin the last ramble of the calendar year with sunlight shining through a fog over the Clyde river on a December morning. Sister and kindred spirit, the river meanders through woodlands, valleys and farm fields in the eastern Ontario highlands, crafting deeper channels wherever she pleases and loving every winding turn she makes along her way. A veritable crone among waterways, she mutters, grumbles and roars as she journeys south to merge with the Mississippi river in Bathurst township. In some places the river is shallow and not much wider than a creek, but she is a wild thing, and she has serious attitude from her birthplace in Clyde Lake to the journey's end.

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

In springtime, I watched as willows on the far shore leafed out and turned silvery green, then looked on a few weeks later as the river overflowed her banks and asserted her claim to the fertile fields on both sides. In summer, I counted bales of hay and captured images of deer and wild turkeys feeding at dusk. In autumn, the sun went down over the same willows, so golden of leaf and limb that they seemed to be spun out of sunlight or stars. In the now, snow frosts every tree and branch, and the light shining through them dazzles my eyes.

This is where I came to collect my thoughts when my husband was diagnosed with cancer, then after my own cancer diagnosis some time later. It is where I came when my friend Penny passed beyond the fields we know, and when we put Spencer to sleep after osteosarcoma rampaged through his dear little metabolism like wildfire. It was the most loving thing we could do for our sweet boy, but I still cry when I think about it.

When my husband passed away a few weeks ago, this is where I came. The distraught and weeping female on the shore was surely unrecognizable to most people including herself, but the river knew me anyway, and she greeted me with open arms. When I unravel, the river is always there to knit me back together. With Spencer's little brother Beau, family, soul sisters, kindred spirits and the river on my side, I will get through this big life stuff somehow, but at the moment, mere survival is darned hard work, and I haven't a clue how I am going to do it.

Thank you for coming along on Friday rambles this year. May there be abundance and healing for all of us. May there be happier rambles in the shiny new year that is waiting for us around the bend.

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)

Merry Christmas

May the manifold blessings of light and community be yours.

Counting Winter's Bounty

Unexpected melting in the village continues, and every puddle in the park seems to be talking to the sky, sometimes clouded and grey, sometimes clear and blue, always engaging, particularly when seen in a pool of melt water.

It is mild enough for Beau and I to be outdoors for hours, and we potter along at a snail's pace, talking with the trees (especially the beech mother in the park), listening to crows conversing over our heads, counting cones on the old pines in the woods. This morning we returned home with our pockets full of fragrant seed bearers in all shapes and sizes, happier with our gathered abundance than we would have been with bags of glittering coin. My companion has no pockets of his own of course, and he makes use of mine.

Long walks cannot uproot a grief so profound, but they soothe aching hearts in some small measure. We walk for miles and miles, and the beloved one who has gone on ahead is never far from our thoughts. Wherever he journeys, we send him our love. May his trail be easy and filled with light.

A Small Melting in the Village

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, Arctic Dreams

Solstice Sun Wreath - Lighting the Center

For my departed soulmate Irv and my friend Waverly Fitzgerald.
May they journey onward in light, and may there
be brighter times ahead for all of us.
Happy Yule.

Friday Ramble - On the Eve of Yule

After a time of decay comes the turning point.The powerful light that has been banished returns. There is movement, but it is not brought about by force; thus the movement is natural, arising spontaneously. For this reason, the transformation of the old becomes easy. The idea of RETURN is based on the course of nature.The movement is cyclic, and the course completes itself. Therefore it is not necessary to hasten anything artificially. Everything comes of itself at the appointed time. This is the meaning of heaven and earth.
I Ching Hexagram 24 - Fu / Return (The Turning Point

This is the day before Yule or the Winter Solstice, and the traditional observance begins at sunset this evening. It is one of the four pivotal astronomical points in the calendar year, and the I Ching hexagram in the preceding paragraph describes the occasion more eloquently than I ever could

Yule (Midwinter or simply the Winter Solstice) is one of only two times in the calendar year (along with the summer solstice) when the sun seems to stand still for a brief interval. The word "solstice" has been around in one shape or another for many centuries, and it comes to us from the Latin noun sōlstitium, itself a blend of the noun sōl [sun] and the verb sistere [to stand still]. At the beginning of it all is the Proto-Indo-European (PIE) form *seH₂wol-, *sH₂un- meaning "sun". Of course, it is earthlings and our dear little home planet who are in motion, and not the magnificent star that lights our way.

For years, I visited the solstice pages at Theresa Ruano's Candlegrove site, and I was disappointed when her creation disappeared from the web for a few years. Now the place is up and running again, and I have been browsing happily through the wealth of solstice lore and customs there.

December days are short and dark and cold, dense clouds from horizon to horizon most of the time. Cloudless days are rare, blue and oh so beautiful, but they are the coldest days of all. The earth below our feet usually sleeps easy under a blanket of snow and glossy ice, although there isn't much snow here so far this year. Snow or no snow, there is a feeling of movement in the landscape, a clear sense that vibrant (and welcome) change is on its way.

Sunlight is a scarce quantity here in winter, and we look forward to having a few more minutes of sunlight every single blessed day after tomorrow - until next June when sunlight hours will begin to wane once more. The first few months of next year will be frigid going, but hallelujah, there will be sunlight now and again, and a few minutes more of it every blessed day.

As I build a fire in the fireplace downstairs with logs from a favorite grove in the Lanark highlands, I think of the ancestors and their seasonal rites. Huddled together for warmth in their bothies, they would have fed the flames burning on their open hearths and lighted tallow candles to drive the dark away, would have watched winter skies hopefully for signs of the sun's return.  They would have rejoiced when the earth's northern hemisphere began to tilt back toward the star that dances at the heart of our solar system.

Here we are again at winter's 'still point of the turning year'. My husband passed away a few weeks ago, and my friend Waverly Fitzgerald passed away a few days later on December 13th (Lucia's Day). I don't feel like celebrating this year, but Beau and I will take a long walk in the woods this afternoon and leave small gifts for our wild kin, parcels of grain, apples, suet and seed. Then we will return home for clementines, cider and gingerbread cookies, for candlelight and mugs of Constant Comment tea.

Tomorrow there will be a quiet Yuletide meal with friends. Tonight we will look out as night falls and give thanks for the fruitful darkness and the returning light. I think Irv will be here with us in spirit - he enjoyed celebrating the solstices and equinoxes, and he particularly enjoyed our Yule festivities.

When I awakened a few minutes ago in the wee small hours of the morning, a brilliant waning moon was rising in the southeastern sky. For a moment or two my sadness waned too, and my heart was glad. Happy Yule to you and your tribe.

Thursday Poem - At the Winter Solstice

Owl hoots three times in the far woods,
fair warning for all small creatures
scurrying to their burrows.

Are we not still and always
those crouching figures
who flee the heavenly alchemy?
Three times in the crackling air,
Owl hoots for us.

*
Wind plays the drums of snow...
staccato taps,
crescendo off the roofs,
flourish of shuddering branches.
Ice snaps its castanets,
its daggers.

Atonal music of the darkest days
needs the most fearless,
subtle listeners.

*
Those strumming flamenco
fingers of sunlight
are a long time away from now.

Now we go comforted
in dreams and ceremonies,
flaming our star-speck candles,
raising our voices against that other music,
drowning out the forever
at night’s heart.

*
Look up! The wheel is turning.
The spectacular crowd of stars,
the tangle of dimensions
jostle for our attention.
Salute the birth of everything holy.

Dolores Stewart (Riccio)

At Yule, we celebrate the triumphant return of old Helios, the ascendance of light in the fertile darkness of winter. This morning's offering was written by the late Dolores Stewart (Riccio) and published in her exquisite Doors to the Universe. It is posted here with her kind permission. She was my friend, and I miss her. Yule was one of her favorite celebrations in the whole turning year.

Wordless Wednesday - Catching the Winter Sun

Snow Day

Solstice Sun Wreath - Week 4

Sunday - Saying Yes to the World

Tonight, I walk. I am watching the sky. I think of the people who came before me and how they knew the placement of the stars in the sky, watching the moving sun long and hard enough to witness how a certain angle of light touched a stone only once a year. Without written records, they knew the gods of every night, the small, fine details of the world around them and the immensity above them.

Walking, I can almost hear the redwoods beating....It is a world of elemental attention, of all things working together, listening to what speaks in the blood. Whichever road I follow, I walk in the land of many gods, and they love and eat one another. Walking, I am listening to a deeper way. Suddenly all my ancestors are behind me. Be still, they say. Watch and listen. You are the result of the love of thousands.

Linda Hogan, Dwellings: A Spiritual History of the Living World

Field and Afternoon Light

Let There Be Light

The feeling could be the simple (but indescribable) pleasure that comes of looking at wide expanses of snow punctuated by rocks, trees and hills, nary a building in sight. It could be Zen notions of emptiness and impermanence (anicca), stirred up by the song the north wind sings as it scours the hills, etching random waves and abstract shapes as it passes. It could be an unexpressed desire for longing, for order and containment, perhaps a vague and inchoate yearning for the realms that always seem to beckon beyond summits and slopes and snowy evergreens. It could be the deep, inky shadows that lie over and around everything.

In winter, the eastern Ontario highlands reveal themselves to an intrepid wanderer as they do at no other time during the year. One can trace the rocky bones with her eyes, feel the earth's peaceful sleep and share its slow dreams, sometimes even glimpse the shape of the springtime to come (although spring seems far away on such a day as this). There is music in the wind, and there are astonishing swaths of color in the snow and shadows. Who knew that blue came in so many entrancing shades?

Whatever the feeling is, it leaves me breathless, every single time.

Thursday Poem - Chains of Fires

Each dawn, kneeling before my hearth,

Placing stick, crossing stick

On dry eucalyptus bark

Now the larger boughs, the log

(With thanks to the tree for its life)

Touching the match, waiting for creeping flame.

I know myself linked by chains of fire

To every woman who has kept a hearth.

In the resinous smoke

I smell hut and castle and cave,

Mansion and hovel.

See in the shifting flame my mother

And grandmothers out over the world

Time through, back to the Paleolithic

In rock shelters where flint struck first sparks

(Sparks aeons later alive on my hearth)

I see mothers , grandmothers back to beginnings,

Huddled beside holes in the earth

of igloo, tipi, cabin,

Guarding the magic no other being has learned,

Awed, reverent, before the sacred fire

Sharing live coals with the tribe.

For no one owns or can own fire,

it lends itself.

Every hearth-keeper has known this.

Hearth-less, lighting one candle in the dark

We know it today.

Fire lends itself,

Serving our life

Serving fire.

At Winter solstice, kindling new fire

With sparks of the old

From black coals of the old,

Seeing them glow again,

Shuddering with the mystery,

We know the terror of rebirth.

Elsa Gidlow

Wordless Wednesday - Iced

December Rain and Bokeh

Solstice Sun Wreath - Week 3

Sunday - Saying Yes to the World

The great affair, the love affair with life, is to live as variously as possible, to groom one's curiosity like a high-spirited thoroughbred, climb aboard, and gallop over the thick, sun-struck hills every day. Where there is no risk, the emotional terrain is flat and unyielding, and, despite all its dimensions, valleys, pinnacles, and detours, life will seem to have none of its magnificent geography, only a length. It began in mystery, and it will end in mystery, but what a savage and beautiful country lies in between. 

Diane Ackerman, A Natural History of the Senses

In Hampton Park

Friday Ramble - Now We Are Two

On cool fall mornings, the Clyde river valley in the Lanark highlands is like something out of a dream or a painting. For many years, Irv and I walked these hills with our canine companions, first Cassie, then Spencer, and now Beau. There was always something amazing to see on our treks: fog rolling across the hills and down the valleys, owls peering from shadowed alcoves, deer and wild turkeys at dawn, sandhill cranes dancing in farm fields at sunset. The view across the valley is breathtaking in any season. In autumn, it illustrates the lovely expression "over the hills and far away", better than anything else I can think of.

My beloved passed away a few days ago due to complications from pancreatic cancer, and now we are two. From now on, it is Beau and I who will ramble these hills together, in the flesh anyway. Cassie and Spencer traveled beyond the fields we know some time ago, but they and Irv will be here and walking right along with us. There will be five of us on the snowbound trail this winter, but three of us will not leave paw prints in the white stuff.

Grief and sadness have come to stay, and they are probably here for keeps. I will have to get used to that. For many years I was married to one of the most wonderful men who ever walked this earth, and walk we did, hand in hand and all over the place, packs on our backs and canine companions trotting along by our side. I loved Irv more than life itself, and I always will. I simply cannot imagine life without him, and flourishing without him is not in the cards. Just surviving is going to be very hard work.

I cry and and stare out windows, am restless and can't settle down. I forget things, drop things, lose things. Sleep evades me, and I have no interest in food. I stroke Beau's silky ears and take him for long walks in the woods. I keep putting one foot in front of the other and breathing in and out. I tell myself that Irv is no longer in pain, and that I will learn to live with this broken heart. I try to take comfort in knowing that in some measure, we will walk these hallowed hills together forever, and that our beloved companions will be with us. A fine untrammeled wildness dwells in our blood and bones, all of us.

Thursday Poem - Come to Dust

Spirit, rehearse the journeys of the body
that are to come, the motions
of the matter that held you.

Rise up in the smoke of palo santo.
Fall to the earth in the falling rain.
Sink in, sink down to the farthest roots.
Mount slowly in the rising sap
to the branches, the crown, the leaf-tips.
Come down to earth as leaves in autumn
to lie in the patient rot of winter.
Rise again in spring’s green fountains.
Drift in sunlight with the sacred pollen
to fall in blessing.
                                    All earth’s dust
has been life, held soul, is holy.

Ursula K. Le Guin

Wordless Wednesday - Winter Light

Frost and Morning Field

Solstice Sun Wreath - Week 2

I dedicate this solstice sun wreath and its candles to my soulmate. The love of my life, he passed beyond the fields we know last Saturday, November 30th, after battling pancreatic cancer fiercely, like the warrior he has always been. He was my best friend and my light. I do not know what I shall do without him.

Irving H. Kerr
Major (Ret'd) OStJ, CD, LLB

Peacefully in Ottawa, Ontario on Saturday, November 30 in his eighty-seventh year. Beloved husband of Catherine (Cate). Loving father of Laura Kerr (Martin) and Susan Peever.  Grandfather of Deborah Daniels (Don), Jason Lewin, Lloyd Crosby, Catherine Crosby and Brendan Peever. Great grandfather of Brooke, Katie, Olivia and River.

After retiring from distinguished service with the Royal Canadian Regiment, Irv was admitted to the bar and went on to a successful career practicing Family Law. An avid hunter and angler, he also enjoyed hiking, bird watching, forestry, geology and other areas of natural history, passing his interests on to his children and grandchildren. Irv and Cate covered much of the Lanark highlands on foot with canine companions (Cassie, Spencer and Beau), and they took great pleasure in their rural rambles together.  An officer, a gentleman and an ardent Canadian, he will be missed by his grieving family and by regiments of friends.

Donations in his memory may be made to the bursary program of the Canadian Corps of Commissionaires, the Old Forge Community Resource Centre or the Wild Bird Care Centre. They were charities close to his heart.

Sunday - Saying Yes to the World

Do you see how an act is not, as young men think, like a rock that one picks up and throws, and it hits or misses, and that's the end of it. When that rock is lifted, the earth is lighter; the hand that bears it heavier. When it is thrown, the circuits of the stars respond, and where it strikes or falls, the universe is changed. On every act the balance of the whole depends. The winds and seas, the powers of water and earth and light, all that these do, and all that the beasts and green things do, is well done, and rightly done. All these act within the Equilibrium. From the hurricane and the great whale's sounding to the fall of a dry leaf and the gnat's flight, all they do is done within the balance of the whole.

But we, insofar as we have power over the world and over one another, we must learn to do what the leaf and the whale and the wind do of their own nature. We must learn to keep the balance. Having intelligence, we must not act in ignorance. Having choice, we must not act without responsibility.

Ursula K. Le Guin, The Farthest Shore