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

Maple Does Her Thing

Friday Ramble Before Beltane (May Day)

Sunday is the eve of Beltane (or May Day) in the northern hemisphere, the eve of Samhain in lands below the equator. As we in northern realms drift from winter into springtime, our kin below the equator are moving from summer into autumn. 

It has been a long winter here in the eastern Ontario highlands, and it will be another week until colonies of bloodroot are up and blooming in our forest, but early specimens lift their gold and white heads in protected nooks here and there in the woods.  In other years, wild yellow orchids were in bloom right about now, but it will be a while before they put in an appearance, along with trout lilies, columbines and hepatica.

Bloodroot blooms are breathtaking, and the shy white blooms with their golden centers are dear to my heart, something of a seasonal marker. Discovering this one glowing softly in its flickering, stone-warmed alcove, I felt like kneeling and kissing the good dark earth where the flower made its home. Ignoring my protesting knees, down I went in the dead leaves and stayed there for a while, nose to nose with the little wonder and as happy as one elderly clam can be. Getting up again was quite an undertaking.

The interval was one of the wild epiphanies I love so much, especially in springtime when the north woods are just coming to life.  Call it a moment of kensho, one of those fleeting intervals of quiet knowing and connection that I like to call "aha" moments. Forget the fancy stuff - this is the ground of my being. As long as I can spend time with trees and rocks and springtime wildflowers, I can handle the big health "stuff", most of the time anyway. Add lakes, loons, cormorants, herons, full moons and sunsets to the equation, please. Also geese, trumpeter swans and sandhill cranes.

May there be light and blooming in your own precious life this Beltane, and may there be warmth in your corner of the great wide world. May all good things come to you at this turning in the Great Round of space and time.

Thursday Poem - An April Night

The moon comes up o'er the deeps of the woods,
And the long, low dingles that hide in the hills,
Where the ancient beeches are moist with buds
Over the pools and the whimpering rills;

And with her the mists, like dryads that creep
From their oaks, or the spirits of pine-hid springs,
Who hold, while the eyes of the world are asleep,
With the wind on the hills their gay revellings.

Down on the marshlands with flicker and glow
Wanders Will-o'-the-Wisp through the night,
Seeking for witch-gold lost long ago
By the glimmer of goblin lantern-light.

The night is a sorceress, dusk-eyed and dear,
Akin to all eerie and elfin things,
Who weaves about us in meadow and mere
The spell of a hundred vanished Springs.

Lucy Maud Montgomery

Wordless Wednesday - Budding

Early Rambles

And so they continue... routines of staying home and doing homely things like garden preparation, general yard work and baking, of taking long rambles with Beau in early morning before our favorite haunts are tenanted by aggressive (unleashed) dogs and their thoughtless owners, by sleepy walkers, bemused gawkers and weekend warriors. Today is Beau's seventh birthday, and we are taking a long walk, rain or no.

Nights are still cool here, but early mornings are perfect for wandering, and we seldom encounter anyone else on our outings. In the overstory, grosbeaks sing a benediction to the rising sun, and woodpeckers drum along on nearby trees. Ducks paddle up and down the creek, slurping up tasty bits from the bottom and waggling their tail feathers. As we go along, Canada geese fly overhead between the river and local farm fields, now and then, a solitary heron or a Great Northern Diver (loon) in graceful flight. 

This morning, a Double-crested Cormorant flew over our heads on its way north. As I looked up at it, I remembered that the word cormorant is actually a shortened version of the Latin corvus marinus meaning "sea raven". For centuries, the cormorant was thought to be a member of the corvid family, and sea raven was the only name by which it was known. With its glossy dark plumage, brilliant aquamarine eyes, orange throat pouch and bright blue mouth, it is one of the Old Wild Mother's most beautiful water birds. 

The early flickering sunlight in the woods is grand “stuff”, and it has a buttery, caressing quality. Greenery is coming up everywhere through the tattered remnants of last autumn's finery, delicate ferns down near the creek, the leaves of trilliums, hepatica, trout lilies, woodland violets, wild columbines and tiny hyacinths on higher ground.

Whenever we pass through her grove, I stop to greet the Beech Mother and pat her gently. I would love to give her a hug, but she is an old tree and my arms are not long enough to go around her magnificent circumference.

Sequestered, Week 157 (CLVII)

Bloodroot (Sanguinaria canadensis)

Sunday, Saying Yes to the World

Turn off the lights. Go outside. Close the door behind you.

Maybe rain has fallen all evening, and the moon, when it emerges between the clouds, glows on the flooded streets and silhouettes leafless maple trees lining the curb. Maybe the tide is low under the docks and warehouses, and the air is briny with kelp. Maybe cold air is sinking off the mountain, following the river wall into town, bringing smells of snow and damp pines. Starlings roost in a row on the rim of the supermarket, their wet backs blinking red and yellow as neon lights flash behind them. In the gutter, the same lights redden small pressure waves that build and break against crescents of fallen leaves.

Let the reliable rhythms of the moon and tides reassure you. Let the smells return memories of other streets and times. Let the reflecting light magnify your perception. Let the rhythm of rushing water flood your spirit. Walk and walk until your heart is full.

Then you will remember why you try so hard to protect this beloved world, and why you must.

Kathleen Dean Moore, from Moral Ground: Ethical Action for a Planet in Peril

For Earth Day

The world is its own magic.

Shunryu Suzuki

Friday Ramble - Radical

This week's word is radical, a natural choice for this madcap season when greenery is popping up all over the place. It comes to us through the Late Latin rādīcālis meaning having roots, and the Old English wrotan meaning to root, gnaw or dig up, both entities originating in the Proto-Indo-European (PIE) wrad meaning branch or root. 

Synonyms for this week's word include: fundamental, basic, basal, bottom, cardinal, constitutional, deep-seated, essential, foundational, inherent, innate, intrinsic, native, natural, organic, original, primal, primary, primitive, profound, thoroughgoing, underlying, vital. They also include pejorative words such as anarchistic, chaotic, excessive, extremist, fanatical, far-out, freethinking, iconoclastic, immoderate, insubordinate, insurgent, insurrectionary, intransigent, lawless, left wing, militant, mutinous, nihilistic, rabid, rebellious, recalcitrant, recusant, refractory, restive, revolutionary, riotous, seditious, severe, sweeping, uncompromising and violent.

Those who live by different beliefs are often called "radical". Ditto those who live outside the mainstream or "off the grid", who don't follow accepted social standards and tend to do their own thing rather than placidly following the herd along sheepishly. The word has been used in that context since the sixties, and being called "radical" might have been a compliment then, but these days it is often pejorative.

I am always taken by the way Nature's fertile progeny manage to put down roots and come up in all sorts of unlikely places. One expects to find seedlings in garden plots, lawns, village greens and fields. In stumps, fence rails, sidewalks, concrete walls and busy highways, not so much, but there they are. Their roots go deep into the earth, their tender shoots reach for the light, and the youngsters are not the slightest bit befuddled by the darkness in which they begin their journey. They always get it right. 

How odd that a word used to describe the independent, unconventional, mildly eccentric and downright peculiar actually means something as lovely, organic and simple as "rooted". Do I consider myself radical? Anyone who writes, paints, sketches, takes heaps of bad photos, rambles in the woods in all sorts of weather, sits on logs looking at the sky for hours and talks with trees is a tad peculiar, so I suppose I am.

This week's word simply means being rooted, connected or "in tune", and it is one of my favorites in the English language. It signifies (for me anyway) a bone deep kinship with everything that matters, with the good dark earth under my feet, the sky, the sun and the moon, the stars over my head - with timeless notions of rebirth, transformation, belonging and non-duality. Roots down, branches up and away we go...

Thursday Poem - Swiftly

Swiftly the years, beyond recall,

Solemn the stillness of this fair morning.

I will clothe myself in spring clothing,

And visit the slopes of the Eastern Hill.

By the mountain stream a mist hovers,

Hovers a moment, then scatters.

There comes a wind blowing from the south

That brushes the fields of new corn.

Tao Ch'ien (translation by Arthur Waley)

Reginald H. Blyth thought T'ao Ch'ien's creation was the finest poem ever written. We are still several weeks away from seeing new corn, but for me, the eight lines are the essence of April and springtime.

Wordless Wednesday - Pot of Gold

Coming Up Purple

Sequestered, Week 156 (CLVI)

Sunday, Saying Yes to the World

By telling the holy, we acknowledge that life is a gift. In fact, the whole universe is a gift. From where or what, and why, we cannot know. All we do know is that it issues forth, moment by moment, eon by eon, ever fresh, astounding in its richness and beauty. None of this is to gainsay the pain, the suffering, the eventual death that awaits all created things. But we measure that pain and suffering, we mourn that death against the sheer exuberant flow of things.

Scott Russell Sanders

Small Beginnings

Friday Rambles - Bloom

Sunlight, blue skies and fluffy clouds overhead, birdsong in the overstory, avian courtship rites and nest building everywhere - the village is opening out and greening up before our eyes as Beau and I potter about and peer into hedgerows.

Spring does not make a quiet entrance this far north - she comes over the hill with an exuberant bound, reaches out with a twiggy hand, and everything bursts into bloom. When we went off to the park a few mornings ago, the first narcissus of the season were blooming in a sheltered, sunny alcove, and we both did a little dance. These were the Poet's daffodil (Narcissus poeticus), often identified as the narcissus of ancient times and one of my favorite spring bloomers. 

How can this week's word be anything except bloom? The modern word comes to us through the Middle English blo or blome, and Old English blowan meaning to open up and flower lavishly, to glow with health and well-being, to be as dewy and flushed with sunlight as a garden tulip or an early blooming orchid in a wild and wooded place. It all begins with the Proto-Indo-European (PIE) roots bhel-, bhol-, bhlē- bhlō-. In that ancient tongue which is the reconstructed common ancestor of all modern European languages, they mean to grow, swell or unfold, to leaf out or come into flower, to flourish and thrive.

Perhaps a better word for this week would be sex, because that is what springtime's lush colors, alluring fragrances, velvet textures and warbling ballads are about - the Old Wild Mother's madcap dance of exuberance, fertility and fruitfulness. Every species on the planet seems focused on perpetuating its own heady genetic brew, and their collective pleasure in being alive is almost tangible.

Forsaking appointed chores, we poke around in the garden, lurch about in village thickets, peer into trees and contemplate the blue sky for long intervals. It's simply a matter of blooming wherever one happens to be planted. Beau is already a master of that splendid Zen art, and his silly old mum is working on it.

Thursday Poem - The Greatest Splendor

Some say it’s in the reptilian dance 

of the purple-tongued sand goanna,

for there the magnificent translation

of tenacity into bone and grace occurs.

And some declare it to be an expansive

desert—solid rust-orange rock

like dusk captured on earth in stone

simply for the perfect contrast it provides

to the blue-grey ridge of rain

in the distant hills.

Some claim the harmonics of shifting

electron rings to be most rare and some

the complex motion of seven sandpipers

bisecting the arcs and pitches

of come and retreat over the mounting

hayfield.

Others, for grandeur, choose the terror

of lightning peals on prairies or the tall

collapsing cathedrals of stormy seas,

because there they feel dwarfed

and appropriately helpless; others select

the serenity of that ceiling/cellar

of stars they see at night on placid lakes,

because there they feel assured

and universally magnanimous.

But it is the dark emptiness contained

in every next moment that seems to me

the most singularly glorious gift,

that void which one is free to fill

with processions of men bearing burning

cedar knots or with parades of blue horses,

belled and ribboned and stepping sideways,

with tumbling white-faced mimes or companies

of black-robed choristers; to fill simply

with hammered silver teapots or kiln-dried

crockery, tangerine and almond custards,

polonaises, polkas, whittling sticks, wailing

walls; that space large enough to hold all

invented blasphemies and pieties, 10,000

definitions of god and more, never fully

filled, never.

Pattiann Rogers, from Firekeepers

Wordless Wednesday - Puddle and Light

Reaching for the Light

Wood squill (Scilla siberica)

One day, there are piles of snow in the yard at least three feet deep, and I cannot get anywhere near the garden shed for white stuff and sneaky patches of ice. The next day, the snow is receding into the good dark earth, and tiny flowers are springing up everywhere, reaching for the light over their nodding, fragile heads. 

Grasses thrust themselves out of puddles in the park, and a few ducks paddle up and down the little creek among the trees. Everywhere, there is birdsong, each and every feathered singer in the overstory declaring its delight in the season.

It has been a long cold winter, and we thought it would never end. Now, we can hardly believe our good fortune, and every sunbeam, new leaf and tiny bloom is a gift. If I stopped to look at every one I encountered, I would never get anywhere at all.

At last, it is warming up here, and within a day or two, I may be able to get the shed door open and pull out my gardening tools. Can't wait to get my hands in the dirt again.

Sequestered, Week 155 (CLV)

Happy Easter

Small Wonders

Friday Ramble - Patience

This week's offering has its roots in the Middle English pacient, the Middle French patient and the Latin word pati, all having to do with getting through or putting up with something and doing it with grace and dignity - no whining, screaming or going completely off one's nut. It's a fine old word for someone who aspires to authenticity and enlightenment, but it's not a word for wimps and sissies. True patience is anything but limp, indecisive or docile. At times, it requires bags of forbearance and not a little cussing.

By now, winter snows should have disappeared from the Lanark highlands, and the Two Hundred Acre Wood should be carpeted with northern wildflowers. Alas, recent storms brought subzero temperatures, snow and bitterly cold winds. There will be no wildflowers for several weeks, and there are times when I think springtime will never come.

What is one to do??? I pick up a camera or notebook, brew a pot of tea, pummel bread, stir up a fire-breathing curry, go walkabout with Beau, curl up in my favorite chair with a good book. I just breathe, in and out, in and out, in and out.

When it comes to music, the elegant keyboard sonatas of Domenico Scarlatti (Mikhail Pletnev), the Bach preludes (Glenn Gould) and cello suites (Yo-yo Ma) tuck everything back into place, and so do Mozart's Eine kleine Nachtmusik (A Little Night Music) and Die Zauberflöte (The Magic Flute). Anything by Antonio Vivaldi (The Four Seasons) works wonders, and Respighi does it for me every time.

We watch the sun rising every morning, the moon conversing with the stars at night. When weather permits, we shiver on the bank of our favorite river and listen to frozen cattails rattling their bones in the wind - the same wind blusters though the bare trees nearby. We lean on the old rail fence and watch last year's leaves whirl through the air like confetti. We cling to the fragile hope that springtime will show up any day now.

Patience is a wild and fierce emotion, and being patient with one's own self is the hardest thing of all. I may get there one of these lifetimes, but I have a very long way to go.

Thursday Poem - Sometimes I Am Startled Out of Myself

like this morning, when the wild geese came squawking,
flapping their rusty hinges, and something about their trek
across the sky made me think about my life, the places
of brokenness, the places of sorrow, the places where grief
has strung me out to dry. And then the geese come calling,
the leader falling back when tired, another taking her place.
Hope is borne on wings. Look at the trees. They turn to gold
for a brief while, then lose it all each November.
Through the cold months, they stand, take the worst
weather has to offer. And still, they put out shy green leaves
come April, come May. The geese glide over the cornfields,
land on the pond with its sedges and reeds.
You do not have to be wise. Even a goose knows how to find
shelter, where the corn still lies in the stubble and dried stalks.
All we do is pass through here, the best way we can.
They stitch up the sky, and it is whole again.

Barbara Crooker, from Radiance

Wordless Wednesday - Treasure Within

April Return

Many local farm fields are still covered in snow, and there is not much for returning birds to eat here, but Canada geese (Branta canadensis) have arrived and taken up residence in soggy, windswept fields and along open waterways.

At sunset this week, the long "v" shapes of returning skeins trailed across the sky, one after another, the birds silhouetted against the setting sun and drifting clouds. Their homecoming songs could be heard for quite a distance. For the most part, skies here have been clear after dark, and the moon is only a day or two away from full so conditions for night flying have been perfect. As I drift off to sleep, I can hear geese passing over the house, and when I open my eyes in the morning before dawn, the first thing I hear is exuberant honking. The songs gladden my heart.

I am just so darned glad the birds are back. It is rather cold here, and there is still a lot of snow about, but it doesn't matter a fig or a twitter or a honk or a hoot. The great geese are home, and warmer, brighter times are on their way.

Sequestered, Week 154 (CLIV)

Sunday, Saying Yes to the World

I am a child of the Milky Way. The night is my mother. I am made of the dust of stars. Every atom in my body was forged in a star. When the universe exploded into being, already the bird longed for the wood and the fish for the pool. When the first galaxies fell into luminous clumps, already matter was struggling toward consciousness.

The star clouds of Sagittarius are a burning bush. If there is a voice in Sagittarius, I’d be a fool not to listen. If God’s voice in the night is a scrawny cry, then I’ll prick up my ears. If night’s faint lights fail to knock me off my feet, then I’ll sit back on a dark hillside and wait and watch. A hint here and a trait there. Listening and watching. Waiting, always waiting, for the tingle in the spine.

Chet Raymo, The Soul of the Night: An Astronomical Pilgrimage

All Together Now, Winter and Spring

Happy April! Rabbit, rabbit, rabbit.