Friday Ramble - For Imbolc (Candlemas)

Here we are on the last day of January, and the eve of Candlemas or Imbolc. Strange to relate, this observance in the depths of winter celebrates light and warmth, the stirring of new life in the earth and the advent of springtime.

In many French speaking countries, February 2nd is also La Chandeleur, a Christian feast commemorating the presentation of the infant Jesus Christ in the temple and the purification of his mother, forty days after she had given birth. The occasion is marked by the blessing of candles, also by dining on crepes which represent the sun and the return of the light to the northern hemisphere.  

For those of us of Celtic lineage, the day is called Imbolc or Candlemas, sometimes the Féile Bride (Festival of St. Brigid) or "Bride's Day". It is consecrated to Brigid, honored as an Irish saint in modern times, but hallowed as a Tuatha Dé Danann goddess many centuries before the coming of Christianity. Brigid is a deity of fire and creativity, wisdom, eloquence and craftsmanship, patroness of the forge and the smithy, poetry, fertility and the healing arts, especially midwifery. Light is her special province. Hers are the candle, the hearth and the blacksmith's forge.

Made of light ourselves, we are Brigid's unruly  children. We were forged from the dust of stars which lighted the heavens billions of years ago, went super nova at the end of their time and dissolved back into the cosmos. Within the radiant motes of our being are encoded the wisdoms of the ancient earth and all its cultures, the star knowledge of unknown constellations and "The Big Bang" which created not just our own precious world, but the whole cosmic sea in which it floats..

We are recycled matter, our dancing particles having assembled into diverse life forms over and over again, lived and expired as those life forms, then vanished into the stream of existence to emerge as something else.  The universe never wastes a thing, and we could learn a lot from her.  In our time, “we” have been many things, worn many shapes and answered to many names. In this lifetime I exist as a tatterdemalion, specific and perhaps unique collection of wandering particles called Catherine or Cate, but in previous incarnations, I was someone or something altogether different.

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

I cherish my small festival observances. Food is made with ingredients associated with sunlight and abundance: eggs, butter, saffron and honey, sweet potatoes, a little greenery to invoke springtime. Such things often feature in my culinary efforts anyway, so there may be a ritual element in my kitchen doings all year long. I like to think so. There will be lunch with a dear friend today, and small gifts will be exchanged. I will light a candle at nightfall and nest it in a snowdrift in the garden. Wading into the white stuff with a candle and matches will be good fun.

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

Thursday Poem - The Road

Here is the road: the light

comes and goes then returns again.

Be gentle with your fellow travelers as they

move through the world of stone and stars

whirling with you yet every one alone.

The road waits.

Do not ask questions but when it invites you

to dance at daybreak, say yes.

Each step is the journey; a single note the song.

Arlene Gay Levine

(from Bless the Day: Prayers and Poems to Nurture Your Soul)

Wordless Wednesday - The Visitor

In My Cups

It is still dark outside, and through the window comes the clatter of the wind across the roof, the susurrus of snow falling in the engulfed garden. Here in the kitchen, there is the burble and hiss of the De'Longhi espresso machine, the rattle and hum of the refrigerator in the corner. 

By rights, there should be the sound of a toaster too, but it will be an hour or so before I can even think about toast. I have awakened with a migraine - thought about doing prescription meds when I opened my eyes but opted for a beaker of industrial strength espresso instead. The stuff in my cup approaches the consistency of solid propellant rocket fuel and could be dispatched with a fork. Steam rises in arty curls from the surface, and a splendid darker froth rings its shores. The fragrance of freshly ground Cafe Union espresso beans from their roastery in Montreal is ambrosial. Think I will draw pictures in the foam. Yup, I can do this.

Why is it my thoughts always turn to Paris when the weather is like this? With badass beaker in hand, I am looking through my rainy day "stash" of Cavallini rubber stamps, vintage postcards and notebooks - the little ones with maps of France, old French postage stamps or the Eiffel tower gracing their covers. Then there is a recent (bargain) addition to my cookbook collection, François-Régis Gaudry's loving tribute to the culinary treasures of his hometown, "Let's Eat Paris". His creation is worth it for the Leeks Vinaigrette and Béarnaise recipes alone. 

When the migraine has expired in my espresso sea, I will curl up in a corner and read something in French, perhaps the latest Fred Vargas.

Sequestered, Week 249 (CCXLVIX)

Sunday, Saying Yes to the World

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

Starhawk, Dreaming the Dark

From the Edge on a Winter Morning

Friday Ramble - Seeing Red

Beyond the window is an ocean of white that goes on forever and ever. Weary of ice and snow, I have been longing to have my morning cuppa out on the deck, but I will not be doing that for quite a while. The best I can do is stand inside the doors with my mug and look out wistfully. At the rate we are going, we may not even see the garden before the end of April, and there won't be any greenery showing until the long weekend in May. A little bright color is a fine thing right about now, and it is welcomed with open arms when it turns up out of the blue.

While pottering in a local market a few weeks ago, a tin bucket of tulips caught my eye, and I scooped up a bunch in assorted colors, carrying them home as tenderly as if they were fledgling birds. The whites, pinks, purples, oranges and yellows were fine stuff, but the scarlets were nothing short of amazing - attention grabbers of the first order. My find was a bucket full of gladness and then some.

In an old cut glass vase (a flea market find), the velvety petals and bright green leaves didn't merely light up the day - they lighted up everything else around here too. One tulip would have been enough, but a whole bouquet was almost indecently sumptuous, a way to invoke spring, even if the only blooming was indoors and in my thoughts. My tulips were a small magic that conjured gladness and made the gnarly bringer of blooms (me) feel like doing the tango with a tulip in her teeth. 

From now until spring, there has to be a pot, a crock, a bucket, a vase or a tankard of something flowering near the south facing window. I think about how beautiful a single garden rose will look there when summer comes, and it seems to me that such thoughts are not just about a vase of tulips or a single rose, but about all the boundless gardens of the earth coming into riotous, intoxicating bloom.

Thursday Poem - Straight Talk From Fox

Listen says fox it is music to run

over the hills to lick

dew from the leaves to nose along

the edges of the ponds to smell the fat

ducks in their bright feathers but

far out, safe in their rafts of

sleep. It is like

music to visit the orchard, to find

the vole sucking the sweet of the apple, or the

rabbit with his fast-beating heart. Death itself

is a music. Nobody has ever come close to

writing it down, awake or in a dream. It cannot

be told. It is flesh and bones

changing shape and with good cause, mercy

is a little child beside such an invention. It is

music to wander the black back roads

outside of town no one awake or wondering

if anything miraculous is ever going to

happen, totally dumb to the fact of every

moment's miracle. Don't think I haven't

peeked into windows. I see you in all your

seasons making love, arguing, talking about

God as if he were an idea instead of the grass,

instead of the stars, the rabbit caught

in one good teeth-whacking hit and brought

home to the den. What I am, and I know it, is

responsible, joyful, thankful. I would not

give my life for a thousand of yours.

Mary Oliver, from Redbird

Wordless Wednesday - Coming to Light

Espresso, Icicles, Words Gone Walkabout

I awaken before sunrise and brew a lovely espresso in the De'Longhi, then stumble into the study to write a blog post, trying not to drop the dear little beaker clutched in my arthritic paws. The crema on this morning's effort is to die for, and so is the sumptuous fragrance. Pleasing curls of steam rise from the surface. Yum.

One or two recent photos are OK, but I can't for the life of me figure out what to say about them. The words simply will not come. For someone who spends so much time with her nose in a book or thinking about the provenance of words, their reluctance to show up and pirouette into place is a distressing state of affairs. 

Perhaps the biting cold has something to do with it. When Beau and I ventured out into the sleeping garden this morning, dark clouds obscured the sky, and the thermometer out on the deck registered a temperature way below zero.  It is sunny now, and the skies overhead are brilliantly blue, but oh, the antarctic contours of the day...

During the present cold snap, older houses in the village have grown some fabulous icicles. When sunlight shines through them, they shimmer and dazzle, and they seem to hold the whole universe within their glossiness. One can almost forget what a gelid and windy undertaking it is, the restless enterprise of trying to capture them with a camera. The best place to take photos of icicles is often right underneath them, and doing such a thing is reckless, but sometimes I do it anyway. Beau (of course) sits several feet away and is safe from falling ice.

Sequestered, Week 248 (CCXLVIII)

When all else fails, toss cinnamon, bits of fruit and anise stars into a mug of something or other hot, a few cloves too. Stir it deosil (sunwise or clockwise) and mutter a few words over it. Such exercises are small magics invoking sunlight, warmth and gentle breezes at a time when summer is still months away. More fun than laundry and dusting and doing dishes for sure. Meh.

Looking into my fragrant cup, I can almost forget the darkness, icy temperatures and biting wind beyond the windows, a fine and comforting thing on an arctic January morning. Where is my book? Where are my shawl and spectacles?

Sunday, Saying Yes to the World

The universe is still and complete. Everything that ever was, is; everything that ever will be, is - and so on, in all possible combinations. Though in perceiving it we imagine that it is in motion, and unfinished, it is quite finished and quite astonishingly beautiful.

In the end, or rather, as things really are, any event, no matter how small, is intimately and sensibly tied to all others. All rivers run full to the sea; those who are apart are brought together; the lost ones are redeemed; the dead come back to life; the perfectly blue days that have begun and ended in golden dimness continue, immobile and accessible; and, when all is perceived in such a way as to obviate time, justice becomes apparent not as something that will be, but something that is.

Mark Helprin, Winter's Tale 

(One of the most beautiful books ever written)

On the Edge

Friday Ramble - Little Blue

Weary of deep snow and icy cold, we (Beau and I) are a little tired of the color blue at times too, no matter how intensely blue the sky, shadows, snowdrifts,spruce trees or the cast iron crane standing out on the deck. Its migratory kin have been gone for months now, but our splendid metal bird is frozen in place, and it is well and truly stuck out there until springtime rolls around again. We like seeing it when we pull the draperies open in the morning.

There are some lovely words for blue in the English language: azure, beryl, cerulean, cobalt, indigo, lapis lazuli, royal, sapphire, turquoise, ultramarine, to name just a few. I recite them like a litany under my breath as I look out at our sleeping garden with mug in hand or break a trail into the woods.

Just when one is all wintered out and decides not to sketch another icicle or frame another photo of such things, another eloquent winter composition presents itself to the eye. Something curved or fragile or delicately robed in snow shows up and begs rapt and focused attention. Glossy bubbles dance in the icicles above a frozen creek in the Lanark highlands. Snow crystals adorn the evergreens overhead and make them blaze like diamonds. As Beau and I wander along, the last faded and tattered oak leaves from last autumn flutter down to lie on the trail at our feet. Pine and spruce cones cast vivid blue shadows in pools of early morning sunlight. Is there anything on the planet as fine as the scent of snowy spruce boughs in late January? Look closely, and every needle is wearing stars.

Small and perfect, complete within itself, each entity conveys an elemental serenity and equilibrium, lowers the blood pressure and stills the breathing, returns eyes and focus to simplicity and grace and just plain old being here. Beau looks up at me, grinning and wagging his tail, and for a minute or two, my doldrums take a step backward. These scraps of time on the edge of the woods will have to be enough, and they are. They are more than enough.

There are worlds great and small everywhere, worlds within and worlds without. Each and every one is a wonder to behold, to remember with my eyes and patient recording lens. Surely, I can do this for a little while longer.

Thursday Poem - The Moment

The moment when, after many years

of hard work and a long voyage

you stand in the centre of your room,

house, half-acre, square mile, island, country,

knowing at last how you got there,

and say, I own this,

is the same moment when the trees unloose

their soft arms from around you,

the birds take back their language,

the cliffs fissure and collapse,

the air moves back from you like a wave

and you can't breathe.

No, they whisper. You own nothing.

You were a visitor, time after time

climbing the hill, planting the flag, proclaiming.

We never belonged to you.

You never found us.

It was always the other way round.

Margaret Atwood,

from Morning in the Burned House

Wordless Wednesday - On the Fence

The Measure of Our Winter Days

Beau and I are out and about early on winter mornings, but salt and icy pavement are not kind to his toes so we keep our ramblings brief. After our first outing, we return home and fill bird feeders in the garden. Then we put a little something out for the squirrels who are having a difficult time too. When I pull draperies open in the morning, the first thing I see is their delicate footprints in the snow on the deck.

Indoors, heaps of reading material, candles, potions, puckish pursuits and small eccentricities are the measure of our winter days. Ditto sketchbooks, baking, baskets of mending, researching oddities like building igloos and straw houses, pottery, spinning, making authentic French pâtés and pasta. The soup cauldron has a place of honour on the stove in winter, and there is always a pot of something or other bubbling away on it. Then there is the old "what else can I do with this eggplant" exercise. Failing anything else, I plot another garden bed, pummel bread or make scones. Out of my midwinter restlessness, good and comforting things occasionally come.

If the weather was a little warmer, we would be checking out local bookshops and shopping for art supplies like sketchbooks and watercolor pens, but that is unlikely to happen for a while. Thankfully, shelves in the study contain a lovely stash of yarn, scraps of fabric (the powsels and thrums of Alan Garner's incandescent memoir), ribbon, paper, paint, and sticky stuff to keep us out of trouble. First and foremost (of course), there are books. There are never too many about, and passing a tottering heap of friends as yet unknown is always a happy thing. 

It is tempting to embrace the notion that life becomes smaller in winter, but that is simply not so. Like our magnificent universe, like this dear little blue world, like the Great Round of time and the seasons in which we spend our allotted days, life continues to expand - we are simply reaching outward in different ways.

Sequestered, Week 247 (CCXLVII)

It has been cold here in recent days, and icicles in the village grow longer and longer, impressive and a little scary. They chime like tubular bells when the north wind blows through them, and there is quite a performance going on. Does anyone remember that fabulous recording by Mike Oldfield?

Occasionally, ice stalactites shatter and plummet into the snowdrifts below, depositing what appear to be shards of glass. A noisy business, their journey to earth drowns out everything else around here: vehicles in the street, the wind blowing along the fence, hungry birds clamoring for food, squirrels chattering in the hedge.

Our roof is well insulated and does not produce many icicles, but it sports a few. The roistering wind dislodges them occasionally, and down they go, clanging and clattering. A little later this morning, I will wrap up warmly and go out to collect the shards before they impale themselves in Beau's paws. The fallen bits are wickedly sharp, and they are a hazard for canine toes. I will also use a broom to prune the icicles dangling over the back door, the deck and our path down to the sleeping garden. Me lurching about and brandishing a broom skyward - now there is a picture. 

This is a fine day for reading, thinking, drinking tea and just looking out the window. Why is that noble exercise called woolgathering? The only woolly stuff festooning this elderly person is a tattered (and much loved) old red shawl, and it has already been well and truly gathered. Everything else is cotton, layer upon layer of it.

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, a ceremony that makes a home.

Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom,

Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants

Across the Frozen Pond

Friday Ramble - A Colder Abundance

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

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

We use the word abundance (or the adjective, abundant) in late summer and early autumn as we weed and reap and gather in, turn the earth for next year's sowing, harvest the bounty of the season and store it for consumption when the snow flies. Winter lies at the end of our labors but we try not to think of it at all.

Winter's eyes are as ardent as those of spring, summer and autumn, but they view the world differently, taking in frosted evergreens against the clouds, the light falling across old rail fences, deep blue shadows on snow, bleached and tattered leaves dancing in the wind, the thousand-and-one worlds resting easy in glossy icicles down by the creek. When sunlight touches them, the icicles are filled with blue sky and possibility, and they seem to hold the whole world in their depths. Cloaked in white, the round bales of hay abandoned in winter fields are the currency of summer, not simply photo opportunities but eloquent reminders of seasons passed. Each element cries out for attention, for patient eyes and a recording lens, for recognition, remembrance and a slender scrip of words, for connection, perhaps for love.

The long white season is about harvest and abundance too, but the gathering is inward, the abundance quieter and sprinkled with questions. Around this time of year, I always seem to find myself querying the shape of my journeying, the slow passage across the eastern Ontario highlands with camera and notebook in hand, the sheaves of images captured and carefully archived, even the eyes with which this old hen is seeing the world. The bright spirit with whom I did my wandering for so many years is no longer beside me. Beau and I hold him in our thoughts, and we go on.

Big life stuff, emotional ups and downs, questions and more questions—all are a kind of harvesting too. There is not the slightest chance that I will ever capture even a scrap of the snowy wonder and grandeur around me, and these days on the good dark earth are numbered, but in the warm darkness of my questions and my uncertainty, I gather everything in and rejoice.

Abundance is tea and cookies with an old friend. It's a ramble in the woods on snowshoes, a good book or three (or better still a towering stack) on the library table. It's a cauldron of soup simmering on the back of the stove, a bowl of clove studded clementines on the sideboard, Mozart's Die Zauberflöte (The Magic Flute) on the sound system. Small things perhaps and not exciting, but they are good and comforting things in a time when greed, cruelty, sorrow and disease are ravaging the world.

May there be light and abundance in your own precious lives this year. May there be peace. May there be kindness.

Thursday Poem - Snowy Night

Last night, an owl

in the blue dark

tossed

an indeterminate number

of carefully shaped sounds into

the world, in which, 

a quarter of a mile away, I happened

to be standing.

I couldn't tell'

which one it was

the barred or the great-horned

ship of the air - 

it was that distant, but anyway

aren’t there moments

that are better than knowing something,

and sweeter? Snow was falling,

so much like stars

filling the dark trees

that one could easily imagine

its reason for being was nothing more

than prettiness. I suppose

if this were someone else’s story

they would have insisted on knowing

whatever is knowable – would have hurried

over the fields

to name it – the owl, I mean.

But it’s mine, this poem of the night,

and I just stood there, listening and 

holding out my hands to the soft glitter

falling through the air. I love this world,

but not for its answers.

And I wish good luck to the owl,

whatever its name –

and I wish great welcome to the snow,

whatever its severe and comfortless

and beautiful meaning.

Mary Oliver 

Thursday Poem - The Snowman

One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;

And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter

Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,

Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place

For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

Wallace Stevens, from Harmonium

Wordless Wednesday - Morning Light

Wandering Eye and Dancing Leaf

Little things leave me feeling restless in January. I meander through stacks of gardening catalogues, plotting another heritage rose or three, new plots of herbs and heirloom veggies. Hours are spent in the kitchen summoning old Helios with cilantro, fragrant olive oils and recipes straight from Tuscany. Candles are lit, and endless pots of tea are brewed, sunlight dancing in every earthenware mug.

When playing with with filters, apertures and shutter speeds, I am entranced (and sometimes irritated) by the surprising transformations brought about by my madcap gypsy tinkerings. Beau and I haunt the woods, peering into trees and searching for a leaf somewhere, even a single bare leaf. We scan evening skies, desperately hoping to see the moon, and we calculate the weeks remaining until the geese, the great herons and the loons come home again.

It may not seem like it, but change is already on its way. The great horned owls who make their homes on the Two Hundred Acre Wood are refurbishing their nest in an old tree about a mile back in the forest, and they are getting ready to raise another comely brood. The female is the larger of the two owls, but her voice is higher, and when she and her mate call to each other in the woods, we know who is where. It delights me to think that it is all happening again. 

While Beau and I were out this morning, a single oak leaf was teased into flight by the north wind and came to rest in a corner of the garden. The pairing of golden leaf and bluesy snow was fetching stuff indeed. The leaf bore in its poignant simplicity an often and much needed reminder. This is the sisterhood of fur and feather, of snowbound earth and clouded sky, of wandering eye and dancing leaf. 

Sequestered, Week 246 (CCXLVI)

On a cold morning in January, there is something comforting about a favorite mug of tea with half moons of orange, anise stars, and nubbins of clove floating in it. A few cinnamon sticks, and the picture would be perfect. No, it is perfect as it is.

Looking at the fragrant pond in my beaker, I can almost forget the north wind howling in the eaves, the snow and antarctic cold beyond the kitchen windows. Such is the magic of a potion thoughtfully brewed, then sipped slowly and appreciatively. A scented candle is burning, and there is a a lovely stack of reading materials on the library table. They too are happy things on a glacial morning like this. 

The plan today is making a pot of roasted vegetable soup, a fine undertaking for a frigid January morning. The veggies are roasted in the oven then run through the Vitamix with coconut milk and aromatic spices like curry, cumin and paprika, to name just a few. A bowl of the ambrosial stirrings will be served for dinner, and the rest will go into the freezer for other times. Lovely stuff it is, sunshine in a bowl.

Out of such small and mundane rites, a meaningful life is made.

Sunday, Saying Yes to the World

Do not be dismayed by the brokenness of the world.

All things break, and all things can be mended.

Not with time, as they say, but with intention. So go.

Love intentionally, extravagantly, unconditionally.

The broken world waits in darkness for the light that is you.

L.R. Knost

Dancing With the North Wind

Beau and I paused in the lee of a big old rock (a glacier dropstone) in the woods yesterday in an effort to get out of the bitter north wind for a while, but our strategy was an exercise in futility. There was no shelter to be found.

Boreas (god of the north wind, winter and snowstorms) howled through the whiskery trees, gulleys and wooded alcoves, crept under our woolly hats, up our sleeves, down our collars and gusted into our eyes. The way the old guy was blowing, it is a wonder any snow was left on the ground, but snow there was and plenty of it.

We were chilled to the bone and soaking wet when we arrived home, but cheerful after a ramble in the woods and the fresh, frosty air. Chattering teeth? Oh, yes.

Friday Ramble, First of the Year

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

In January, it is tempting to remain indoors and curl up in the warm with a mug of tea and a book, but Beau and I need to be out in the woods now and again, however short our stay on cold days. Rambles nourish and sustain us, and there is always something to see when we are out and about.

"Crunch, crunch, crunch" went our booted feet yesterday as we made our way along the trail. It was surely our imagination this early in the year, but the woods seemed brighter than they were a few days ago. Sunlight sparked through the trees, and everything glittered. The light was sublime. We felt as if every jeweler's vault on the planet had been looted and the glittering contents spilled out at our feet.

There was flickering movement in woodland alcoves and hollows; shadows rippled and flowed like water as squalls gusted through the whiskery trees. The shadows seemed deeper and more intense, more blue. Here and there, a leaf or a tiny sprig of frozen evergreen poked out of the light snow, and the color was a hopeful thing, one that not even the biting north wind could carry away in its gelid paws. I always wonder why there are not more words in the English language for such blustery air currents.

Resolutions this year??? With so much suffering, turbulence and uncertainty in the world, my heart is not in making resolutions. There are no lofty aspirations scrawled on paper or etched in stone, just the same old work in progress. Beau and I are lurching onward together, breathing in and out, in and out, in and out.

As we go along, we will keep the words of Zen master and lay teacher Osaka Koryu in mind. When we breathe in, we will breathe in the whole universe. When we breathe out, we will breathe out the whole universe. We will go along together, paw in paw, and we will simply keep putting one foot in front of the other. As always, we will talk with the great trees and look for the light.

Thursday Poem - January

Dusk and snow this hour

in argument have settled

nothing. Light persists,

and darkness. If a star

shines now, that shine is

swallowed and given back

doubled, grounded bright.

The timid angels flailed

by passing children lift

in a whitening wind

toward night. What plays

beyond the window plays

as water might, all parts

making cold digress.

Beneath iced bush and eave,

the small banked fires of birds

at rest lend absences

to seeming absence. Truth

is, nothing at all is missing.

Wind hisses and one shadow

sways where a window's lampglow

has added something. The rest

is dark and light together tolled

against the boundary-riven

houses. Against our lives,

the stunning wholeness of the world.

Betty Adcock from Intervale

On the First Morning of the Year

May there be light and abundance in your life,

robust health and sweet contentment.

May there be adventures and laughter,

May there be magic, all kinds of it.

May you find joy in your creations.

May all your lessons be gentle.

May fulfillment grace your life.

May there be peace on your journey.

Remember, this world is a richer

place because you are in it.