Thursday Poem - You Can't Be Too Careful

Spring storm and hail of ice cubes

pummels my town and no other.

There was a time when townspeople

would call this fall the wrath of God

or work of witches. A lower profile

may have saved some crones

renowned for bitter herbs, odd dames

you went to in the woods for troubles.

But some would go on being busybodies

and scolds dragged out, dunked, drowned

or hung like limp, forgotten fruit

from gallows trees. Scarecrows and

cautionary tales. And truly the crows

flee from our town screaming

blue murder, scarier than a siren.

Even in these enlightened times,

some of us still go warily,

keeping secret our wild simples,

asking nothing for our quirky blessings.

Dolores Stewart Riccio, from The Nature of Things

Wordless Wednesday - Ready for Rain

Songs of Homecoming

First come jubilant skeins of of geese flying in from the south and singing their return before alighting in fields and parks, ducks splashing about in the melted alcoves of local rivers, much exuberant quacking in roadside puddles and ditches. A solitary heron perches hopefully in the reeds along the shore of the still frozen lake, and she wonders why on earth she has come home so early in the season. Trumpeter swans and loons won't return until there is more open water for them to paddle around in.

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

A goshawk is sitting in a bare tree on the hill, and a harrier describes perfect, languid circles over the western field. Both are hungry after their long journey north, and they train their fierce yellow eyes on the field below, on the lookout for a good meal.

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

Even the cold weather foretold for this day will be a friend.

Sequestered, Week 104 (CIV)

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

How Sweet It Is (II)

Friday Ramble, How Sweet It Is

It remains one of my favorite intervals in the whole turning year - the cold sunny days in late winter or early springtime when the north gears up for the maple syrup season. The Lanark woods are full of sugar bird (saw-whet owl) songs, clouds of steam rise from sugar shacks tucked in among the old trees, and the aroma of boiling maple sap fills the air.

The sylvan alchemy at work is wild and sweet, and the homely metaphor of the cauldron or pot has always resonated with me. I still have the battered Dutch oven I carried while rambling the continent many years ago, stirring soups, potions and stews by starlight and watching as sparks went spiraling into the inky sky over the rim of my old pot. The motes of light rising from its depths were stars too, perfect counterpoint to the constellations dancing over my head. I cherish that old pot and keep it well seasoned.

These days, there is also the stockpot bubbling away on my stove, a rice cooker, a bean crock and earthenware tagine, a three-legged iron incense bowl sitting on the table in my study. In March and April, there are the sugar camps of friends in the Lanark Highlands, miles of collecting hose in confetti colors strung from maple to maple, evaporators sending fragrant plumes into the air, tin sap pails fixed to trees, antique syrup cauldrons boiling over open fires to demonstrate how maple syrup was made in times past.

The word cauldron comes from the Middle English cauderon, thence the Anglo-Norman caudiere and Latin caldāria, the latter meaning “cooking pot” and rooted in the adjective calidus meaning warm or “suitable for warming”. At the end of the trail is the Proto-Indo-European (PIE) root kelə meaning simply “warm”. Words such as calendar, calorie, chafe, chiaroscuro, claim, clamor, class, clear, council, hale, haul and lee are kin.

The word caldera is also kin, a term geologists use to describe the crater formed when a volcano's magma chamber is emptied by a massive eruption or its roof collapses. Until recently, the Yellowstone Caldera/Supervolcano in northern Wyoming was considered the largest caldera on earth, but the recently discovered Apolaki Caldera in the Philippine Sea is easily twice the size of Yellowstone. It may be smaller, but the Yellowstone Caldera is not to be discounted. It is sitting above a vast volcanic hotspot, and recent measurements estimate the hotspot's magma chamber to be 80 km long and 45 km wide. The roof of the chamber is 8 km down, and the whole thing is 16 km deep with a volume of more than 4000 cubic km. That is a lot of molten rock.

The night that gifts us with stars and enfolds us gently when the sun goes down is a vast cauldron or bowl. Somewhere in the darkness up there, Cerridwen is stirring up a heady cosmic brew of knowledge, creativity and rebirth, her magical kettle simmering over a mystic cook fire. From her vessel, the bard Taliesin once partook of a single drop and awakened into wisdom and song.

We're all vessels, and one of the best motifs for this life is surely a pot or cauldron, one battered, dented and well traveled, but useful and happy to be so, bubbling and crackling away in the background (sometimes in the foreground), making happy musics and occasionally sending bright motes up into the air.

... and so it is with this old hen when her favorite wild places begin to awaken. Notions of alchemy bubble away; sparks fly upward, pots and cauldrons cosmic and domestic whirl about in her thoughts. I simply could not (and would not) be anywhere else.

Thursday Poem - Another Spring

The seasons revolve and the years change

With no assistance or supervision.

The moon, without taking thought,

Moves in its cycle, full, crescent, and full.

The white moon enters the heart of the river;

The air is drugged with azalea blossoms;

Deep in the night a pine cone falls;

Our campfire dies out in the empty mountains.

The sharp stars flicker in the tremulous branches;

The lake is black, bottomless in the crystalline night;

High in the sky the Northern Crown

Is cut in half by the dim summit of a snow peak.

O heart, heart, so singularly

Intransigent and corruptible,

Here we lie entranced by the starlit water,

And moments that should each last forever

Slide unconsciously by us like water.

Kenneth Rexroth

Wordless Wednesday, Peaceful

Homecoming

There is certainly not much for them to eat right now, but the first flocks of Canada geese (Branta canadensis) have arrived and taken up residence in soggy, windswept (and mostly still frozen) farm fields and along local waterways.

At sunset this week, the long "v" shapes of returning skeins trailed across the sky, one after another, magnificently silhouetted against the setting sun and drifting clouds. The skeins were high up and obviously coming from a great distance, but their homecoming songs could be heard clearly.

After dark, skies have been clear for the most part this week, and the moon is waning, close to full. Conditions for night flying are perfect, and the canny geese are taking advantage of the situation. The first thing Beau and I hear in the morning when we open our eyes before sunrise is joyous honking overhead, and it is music to our ears.

There is still cold weather ahead of us and many frosts, but it doesn't matter a fig or a twitter or a honk or a hoot - the great geese are coming home, and warmer, brighter times are on the way. So long to my empty nest syndrome, general grumpiness, restlessness and seasonal doldrums. The kids are back, hallelujah. Now where are my gardening catalogues? 

The image is from a few years ago, but it remains my favorite migration scene, a skein of returning geese silhouetted against clouds and setting sun. You can't hear it of course, but their song that evening was joyous, almost symphonic, and it made my heart glad. For all the hurt we do to Mother Earth, She still grants us moments like these.

Happy Ostara (Vernal Equinox)

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

Rain and Robins Returning

Skies are cloudy, and outside the windows a gentle rain is falling. Beau and I are doing tea and listening to the clumps of snow falling off the rooflines of nearby houses, raindrops hitting the peaked roof of the garden shed in a fine staccato rhythm. The precipitation motifs of two seasons are rolled into one this soggy morning.

Mr. B. does not like wet weather and getting his feet wet, and he is curled up in a corner of the sofa, grumbling. He does, however, appreciate a fine puddle, and there is a lagoon in the street deep enough and wide enough for him to swim around in circles. That will cheer him up immensely when we go out to check the mailbox for bumph.

A murmuration of starlings is hanging out in the cedar hedge, and the puckish avians are pretending they are something else entirely, cardinals, robins, house finches, song sparrows. What is wrong with just being a starling? Robins have begun to return, and they have been visiting the garden this week. One is perched high in the old ash, singing his pleasure in the morning and the wet stuff.

Time to think about a new wreath for the door, perhaps something with sprigs of pussy willow and eggs in pastel colours (fake of course). A small ritual gesture is called for.

Friday Ramble Before the Vernal Equinox (Ostara)

The day after tomorrow marks the Vernal Equinox or Ostara, one of two times in the calendar year (the other being the Autumn Equinox or Mabon) when the Earth and her unruly children hover in perfect balance for a brief interval. Humans had nothing to do with this day - it is a pivotal astronomic point ordained by the heavens, by the natural order of things in this magnificent cosmos where we live out our days, spinning like tops in the Great Round of space and time.

If I lived further south, Sunday might be a day of greening and enchantment, a day when Eostre, the old Teutonic goddess of greening and fertility, wanders wild places with her arms full of spring blooms, bestowing blessings on everything she sees. Flowers would spring up in her footsteps as she passed, and she would be attended by hares, her special animal. The air would be filled with birdsong, with homecoming geese and the heady fragrance of rich dark earth and wild springtime herbs. 

Alas, the only snowdrops blooming here at the moment are those in a jar in my study. There is still a lot of snow about, and it will be a few weeks until the delicate flowers show up in the landscape, each and every one a small miracle. It has been a long winter this time around, and Eostre can't show up too soon for me. Our winter birds feel the same. Every feathered visitor to the still sleeping garden seems to be declaring its lofty status as a messenger from the sacred, a harbinger of abundance and new life.

While I was outside yesterday morning shoveling snow, the first skein of returning Canada geese flew overhead, honking their pleasure at being home again. I put down my shovel and danced for joy, and the neighbors must have thought I was off my nut. At nightfall, Beau and I went outside into the garden for a few minutes, and as we shivered in the star spangled darkness, it seemed to us that this month's waxing moon resembles a great cosmic egg - a perfect expression of this turning of the wheel with its verdant motifs of warmth, light and new life coming into being.

There is blooming in our thoughts for sure, but it is still too cold here for outdoor celebrations. Beau and I will spend time outside in the garden on Sunday evening, and we will light a votive candle on the deck if the north wind permits it, but our festivities are indoors for the most part. There is room for everyone at our hearth and there are enough mugs, plates and comfortable chairs to go around. Welcome, and come ye in!

Beannacht (Blessing) St. Patrick's Day

On the day when
the weight deadens
on your shoulders
and you stumble,
may the clay dance
to balance you.

And when your eyes
freeze behind
the grey window
and the ghost of loss
gets in to you,
may a flock of colours,
indigo, red, green,
and azure blue
come to awaken in you
a meadow of delight.

When the canvas frays
in the currach of thought
and a stain of ocean
blackens beneath you,
may there come across the waters
a path of yellow moonlight
to bring you safely home.

May the nourishment of the earth be yours,
may the clarity of light be yours,
may the fluency of the ocean be yours,
may the protection of the ancestors be yours.
And so may a slow
wind work these words
of love around you,
an invisible cloak
to mind your life.

© John O'Donohue. All rights reserved
(from Echoes of Memory)

The Irish poet, priest and philosopher John O'Donohue passed away several years ago, but his benediction poem is perfect for St. Patrick's Day with its notions of homecoming, moonlight, calm waters and comfort.

Wordless Wednesday, Rumors of Spring

Just Passing Through

Bohemian Waxwing (Bombycilla garrulus)

Every year, flocks of Bohemian Waxwings pass through the village in October on the way south to their winter quarters, and again in mid-to-late March when they fly back to their summer breeding grounds in the boreal forests of the north. Bohemians are sociable, gregarious creatures, and one always knows when they are about.

Traveling in madcap flocks, the birds stop along their way to fill up on berries, cherries and other fruit, and their appearance here makes me smile, a fine thing this year since our winter was (or rather is) a long one this time around. They fly in daredevil circles around and through the old crabapple tree, gleefully dance from branch to branch, make crude comments to watching crows and starlings, laugh raucously at their own jokes and pelt each other with frozen crabapples. You gotta love their attitude.

I thought these rowdy visitors were Cedar Waxwings until I noticed their peachy colored faces, rufous (red) undertail coverts and white wing streaks, also their scarlet-tipped secondaries, often a little harder to see. By the time they departed, the old crabapple was bare, and there were fragments of frozen crabapple all over the front yard. Along came feathered clean up crews, and leftovers were gone in a moment or two.

Bohemians are seasonal harbingers, and their appearance in the front yard in March means (hopefully) that springtime is on its way. This year, perhaps they should have waited for a few weeks though - we still have a long way to go.

Sequestered, Week 102 (CII)

Sunday, Saying Yes to the World

I breathe in the soft, saturated exhalations of cedar trees and salmonberry bushes, fireweed and wood fern, marsh hawks and meadow voles, marten and harbor seal and blacktail deer. I breathe in the same particles of air that made songs in the throats of hermit thrushes and gave voices to humpback whales, the same particles of air that lifted the wings of bald eagles and buzzed in the flight of hummingbirds, the same particles of air that rushed over the sea in storms, whirled in high mountain snows, whistled across the poles, and whispered through lush equatorial gardens…air that has passed continually through life on earth. I breathe it in, pass it on, share it in equal measure with billions of other living things, endlessly, infinitely.

Richard Nelson, The Island Within

Return Engagement

Friday Ramble - Birch Mother in the Wind

Here we are on the cusp between winter and springtime, weary of ice and snowdrifts, craving light and warmth. It is still below freezing much of the time, an icy wind scouring the bare trees and making the branches ring like old iron bells. Perhaps that is to be expected, for springtime is a puckish wight this far north, and after appearing, she sometimes disappears for days and weeks at a time.

For all that, sunny March days have a wonderful way of quieting my thoughts and breathing rhythms, bringing me back to a still and reflective space in the heart of the living world. Far from crowded places and madding crowds, I can just hang out among the trees for a while and replenish my frayed inner directives. When there isn't a coppice or a grove nearby, the edge of a snowy field and a fence post or two will do nicely.

I sat on a log in the woods a few days ago, watching as tatterdemalion scraps and scrolls of birch bark fluttered back and forth in the north wind. The lines etched in the tree's paper were words written in a language I could almost understand when my breath slowed down and my mind became still. When the morning sun slipped out from behind the clouds, beams of sunlight passed through the blowing strands, turning them golden and translucent, making them look for all the world like elemental stained glass.

Wonderful stuff, birch bark. When I touched the old tree in greeting, my fingers came away with a dry springtime sweetness on them that lingered for hours. I tucked a thin folio of bark in the pocket of my parka and inhaled its fragrance all the way home.

Thursday Poem - Return

Through the weeks of deep snow

we walked above the ground

on fallen sky, as though we did

not come of root and leaf, as though

we had only air and weather

for our difficult home.

But now

as March warms, and the rivulets

run like birdsong on the slopes,

and the branches of light sing in the hills,

slowly we return to earth.

Wendell Berry

Wordless Wednesday - Another Snow Day

Shining a Light in the Darkness

"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

For the last several days, I have been trying to string words together to express my grief about the atrocities in Ukraine, and I have failed. Others do this better than I. This morning's offering is from Ben Okri, and Ben had it right. 

We carry on. No matter how dark and brutal things get, we light our need-fires and candles and butter lamps and rusty lanterns and carry on. We shine our little beacons into the dark corners where evil festers, and we call the beast by its true name. We summon the fiend into the light of day and expose it in all its grotesque hideousness. We dare to imagine a world where such unspeakable things do not happen.

I am a long way from the front lines in Ukraine, and my tools are simple ones, but cast iron pots, wooden spoons, vegetables and spices are magics too, and I am using them with fierce intention. As I stir my cauldron of Three Sisters soup round and round, I think of Chef José Andrés and his team at World Central Kitchen who have been on the front lines since the war started, feeding thousands of families escaping violence and Ukrainians remaining in their homeland. José and his team of volunteers are my heros.

Sequestered, Week 101 (CI)

Sunday, Saying Yes to the World

That, I think, is the power of ceremony: it marries the mundane to the sacred. The water turns to wine, the coffee to a prayer. The material and the spiritual mingle like grounds mixed with humus, transformed like steam rising from a mug into the morning mist. 

What else can you offer the earth, which has everything? What else can you give but something of yourself? A homemade ceremony, ceremony that makes a home.

Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom,

Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants

Hail From the Summit

It could be the summit of Everest (Chomolungma), K2 (Chogori), Annapurna, Denali or Fitzroy (Cerro Chaltén), but it is the top of a snow mound of impressive stature here in the village. Children on the block enjoy climbing the colossus, and they sometimes stay up there for hours, dragging their toboggans up the steep slope behind them, sliding down into the adjoining yard, then doing it all again, time after time.

The kids wave at everyone who goes by, and when they see me in my study window across the street, they yell high-spirited greetings, always a cheerful and uplifting state of affairs on days when skies are grey, I am feeling under the weather, or I am am just plain old wintered out. My little friends are happy campers (or rather climbers) when their mountain goes on to greater heights, but the rest of us, not so much. Flinging snow that high with fulcrum and shovel after a snow storm takes some doing.

Last night, I dreamed a kaleidoscope of butterflies and moths had come to visit and had alighted on the wall in my study: giant silk moths, fritillaries, swallowtails, monarchs, skippers, mourning cloaks, hairstreaks. In the dream, my departed soulmate was with me, and we marveled at them together, paw in paw as we always were in life. 

Friday Ramble - Getting Through March (Sheepishly)

March came in like a lioness, and then the lady stepped away for two whole days.  Within her brief absence, finches paired off amorously, and starlings chirped merrily from the shadows, pretending they were robins. Cardinals sang courtship songs in the cedar hedge and fed each other choice morsels from the bird feeders in the garden. For an hour or so, there was a real robin about, and it looked as though there would be an early maple syrup run. Silly me, I dared to entertain hopeful thoughts - nursery catalogs, peat pots and seed packets bloomed on every surface in the little blue house in the village.

Such days do happen sometimes in March, but I should have known better than to indulge in fanciful springtime notions. The weather here will be arctic for quite a while, and no mistake. Storms will appear out of nowhere every few days, dumping several inches of white stuff. Ice thick enough to skate on will gloss everything in sight, houses, trees, vehicles, hydro lines, fields and fences. The north wind will roar and fling heaps of snow against the door of the garden shed. It looks like I won't be getting in there for a while, but then I don't need gardening tools right now, and I won't for some time. 

The icicles at the back of the house are impressive this year, proof that the sun is actually doing something up there (when it shines), but the snowdrifts down below are deep enough to get lost in. Tumps of frozen earth and faded grasses emerge briefly out of the dunes now and then, but they vanish when another snow squall turns up out of the blue, and there is always another snow squall waiting in the wings.

On sunny mornings, I find myself listening for returning Canada geese overhead, but the great birds will be late coming home this year. There is not a single desiccated corn stalk to be seen anywhere. Everything is buried, and it will be several weeks until the snow recedes enough for geese to find food in the stubble of local farm fields.

What to do at such times?  I drink black coffee strong enough to require a fork, make endless pots of tea, stir soup and and pummel bread dough. When sleep defeats me, I plot new beds of vegetables and herbs to be dug (hopefully) next month, research heirloom roses, lay out the design for another quilt. I cultivate forbearance and try to be cheerful when snow falls again and ice turns the threshold into a skating rink. I hope ardently that Lady March will get her act together and morph into a fluffy wee lamb.

At the end of winter, one becomes a tad maudlin.  When a friend in the Lanark Highlands told me this week that spring lambs are about to be born in her magnificent old log barn, I could have cried. Poor wee beasties, coming into the world in such circumstances.

Night skies have been fabulous this winter, flaming sunsets and lustrous moons one can almost reach up and touch, planets dancing in the southern sky at dusk, stars strewn by generous handfuls from the vast cosmic cauldron overhead. It is absolutely freezing standing out in the garden and looking up after dark, but I do it anyway. 

Thought for the day: Why are there so few words for snow in the English language? Goddess knows, we get enough of it up here. 

Thursday Poem - Wage Peace

Wage peace with your breath.
Breathe in firemen and rubble,
breathe out whole buildings
and flocks of redwing blackbirds.

Breathe in terrorists and breathe out sleeping children
and freshly mown fields.
Breathe in confusion and breathe out maple trees.
Breathe in the fallen
and breathe out lifelong friendships intact.

Wage peace with your listening:
hearing sirens, pray loud.
Remember your tools:
flower seeds, clothes pins, clean rivers.

Make soup.
Play music, learn the word for thank you in three languages.
Learn to knit, and make a hat.
Think of chaos as dancing raspberries,
imagine grief as the outbreath of beauty
or the gesture of fish.
Swim for the other side.
Wage peace.

Never has the world seemed so fresh and precious.
have a cup of tea and rejoice.
Act as if armistice has already arrived.
Celebrate today.

Judyth Hill

Wordless Wednesday - Rakish

Stirrings, Wistful and Agitated

This is the first day of March, and a deep and icy cold persists here. In the eastern Ontario highlands, we are a long way from springtime, and the maple syrup season that is usually underway now is only a dream of remembered sweetness and fragrance. I can't help thinking wistfully of evaporators burbling away in sugar shacks and cauldrons of maple sap boiling over open fires out in the Lanark highlands. 

What on earth am I doing up in the wee hours of the morning? If the truth be told, I am restless and agitated and having trouble sleeping at the moment. Perhaps that is not surprising, given two years of staying home and complying with COVID protocols, but the situation was not helped by the recent so-called Freedom Convoy blockade here in the city. During the mayhem, local residents were terrorized, downtown businesses were shuttered, buildings were vandalized (or set on fire) and public monuments were desecrated. The protesters were removed several days ago, but they cooked up a smelly poo load of misinformation during their unruly sojourn, and it continues to rocket around in cyber space. The stuff piously spouted as truth is sheer fantasy, and it beggars belief. Demonstrating peacefully? Standing up for freedom? Huh.

This has nothing to do with freedom or democracy. The memorandum of understanding published by the convoy leadership openly stated their objective of overthrowing the elected government and replacing it with themselves, unelected members of the senate and an unspecified bunch of right wing politicians and certifiable nutters.

The present war in Ukraine breaks my heart. Wherever I am and whatever I am doing at the moment, the Ukrainian people are never far from my thoughts. The Russian people are in my thoughts too, the legions of brave souls who are gathering in cities across Russia to denounce what their leader is doing. They are being arrested by the thousands, and yet they continue to show up and make their feelings known, peacefully. That is real courage. That is what peaceful demonstrations actually look like. 

What to do? Far from the war, I pick up my culinary tools and head for the kitchen to stir up small magics: loaves of bread, molasses cookies, scones, casseroles and cauldrons of soup. As I move my wooden spoons about, I whisper protective cantrips for those in peril across the ocean. Please somebody, keep them safe and stop this madness.

One thing is for sure. I am going to grow a LOT of sunflowers this year, and I also plan to carry sunflower seeds in my pockets. I will scatter them wherever I go.

Sorry, I just had to say something this morning. Enough is enough already.