The Music of a Summer Night

I lean against the railing on the deck with an iced coffee in hand and watch fireflies frolicking through the shrubbery in the garden.

Midsummer has passed, and Lammas is only a few days away, but I am thinking of a watercolour (1908) by Robert Edward Hughes called Midsummer Eve. Hughes was acquainted with members of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, and their influence on his work shows. In his painting, a young woman stands in a forest clearing surrounded by a ring of fairies who are holding softly glowing lanterns. It is night, and the woods behind her are alight with fireflies. There is magic in the air.

In our darkened garden, there are the last cicada raspings of the day and a few crickets are doing their thing. Classical guitar (Rodrigo) wafts from the speakers on my neighbor's veranda, and a hound around the corner is singing soulfully to the waxing moon. A light wind blows through the old trees, and there is an occasional crackle from the lantern burning on the deck. By rights, a Pan flute or a harp should be playing too. Perhaps something by the Breton harper, Alain Stivell?

On nights like this, I feel ancient and young at the same time, and I know beyond a doubt that there is a wild, elemental magic at work in the great wide world. I can almost reach out and touch it, and that is comforting.

Sequestered, Week 305 (CCCV)

Sunday, Saying Yes to the World

You really don't have to lose everything and travel to a remote valley to discover that the world is always rushing forward to teach us, and that the greatest thing we can do is stand there, open and available, and be taught by it. There is no limit to what this cracked and broken and achingly beautiful world can offer, and there is equally no limit to our ability to meet it.

Each day, the sun rises and we get out of bed. Another day has begun and bravely, almost recklessly, we stagger into it not knowing what it will bring to us. How will we meet this unpredictable, untamable human life? How will we answer its many questions and challenges and delights? What will we do when we find ourselves, stumble over ourselves, encounter ourselves, once again, in the kitchen?

Dana Velden, Finding Yourself in the Kitchen:

Kitchen Meditations and Inspired Recipes

from a Mindful Cook

Dark Swallowtail in the Garden

Eastern Tiger Swallowtail on Bergamot

Female, Dark Morph (Papilio glaucus)

The commoner yellow form of the Eastern Tiger Swallowtail is a frequent visitor to the garden at this time of the year. I always enjoy seeing them, but the appearance of this dark morph female in the bergamot a few days ago was something to crow about. 

All dark morphs of the species are female. They are examples of Batesian mimicry, a phenomenon in which members of a harmless species evolve to resemble another species which is toxic or unpalatable. The lady mimics the poisonous Pipevine Swallowtail butterfly, thus gaining a measure of protection from predators. 

Friday Ramble - Sticky

Sticky is a fine word for this summer's puckish "toing and froing" between sunshine and rain, steamy heat and (occasionally) pleasantly cool temperatures, weather moderate and weather extreme. This summer is turning out to be a particularly unpredictable state of affairs, and it is a glue pot or "sticky wicket" at the best of times.

This week’s mucilaginous word offering hails from the Old English stic meaning “to adhere, be embedded, stay fixed or be fastened”. Then there are the Proto-Germanic stik, Old Saxon stekan, Dutch stecken, Old High German stehhan and German stechen all meaning much the same thing. Most of this week's word kin are rooted in the Proto-Indo-European (PIE) form steig meaning "to affix, point or be pointed". 

Recent mornings have been lovely times for walks or hanging out in the garden, but by ten, Beau and I are are happy to be indoors and looking out, rather than actually being out in the heat and humidity. At twilight, off we go again, and we potter around the village, peering into trees for walnuts, little green acorns, ripening plums, and flowers blooming unseen in nearby leafy depths like late summer jewels.

On early walks, hedgerows are festooned with spider webs, and the strands of silk are strung with beads of pearly dew, looking for all the world like fabulous neck ornaments. Summer webs here are, for the most part, the work of the orb weaver known as the writing spider, corn spider or common garden spider (Argiope aurantia). Artfully spun from twig to twig, the spider's creations are sublime. No two are the same, and they are often several feet from one edge to the other.

As I peered at a web in the hedgerow one morning this week, I thought about a friend (now moved away) who used to "do" web walks with me and occasionally rang the doorbell at sunrise when she discovered a real whopper and just had to share it. I visited a few of her early finds still wearing pajamas and slippers.

I thought too of the metaphor of Indra's jeweled web and how we are all connected in the greater scheme of things. Emaho! Sticky or not, it's all good.

Thursday Poem - At Dawn

At dawn this morning, a waning moon

floating high in the cloudless blue,

graces a perfect summer day, one

that will never come again in all its

sweetness and its fey perfume.

Slow walkers in the early hours, we go along

together, paw and paw, through fragrant

yieldings of chicory, clover and daisies,

attended on our rambles by rhyming crickets,

by humming bees and dancing leaves.

While around us, unseen but deeply felt

and loved, the world is breathing softly

in and out, many voices falling together

into seamless light and tune and time.

Cate (me)

Wordless Wednesday - Mermaid in the Green

Royalty in the Garden

Monarch butterfly (Danaus plexippus)

One would have to go a long way to top the brilliant colors of the palette on display this morning. Red, purple, orange and gold go perfectly together at any time of the year, but especially late in shaggy, flowering July. Is it just me, or is this rainforest summer moving along way too fast?

When a newborn Monarch alighted on the crown of a purple coneflower in the garden a few days ago, it was cause for celebration, for singing, cavorting in the greenery and general silliness. Come to think of it, the "Susies" in the background are sometimes called coneflowers too, although they are another species altogether.

How on earth can one describe something so vibrant, so breathtakingly perfect? Butterfly, blooms and summer garden say it all, and no words are needed from this old hen. The images will linger in memory long after northern days grow very short, and the south corner of the garden is buried in snow.

After a slow start, cicadas are back and singing their hearts out (or rather vibrating their tummies musically). Hallelujah, my favorite summer symphony!

Sequestered, Week 304 (CCCIV)

Male American Goldfinch at the Birdbath

(Spinus tristis)

Sunday, Saying Yes to the World

Our strategy should be not only to confront empire, but to lay siege to it. To deprive it of oxygen. To shame it. To mock it. With our art, our music, our literature, our stubbornness, our joy, our brilliance, our sheer relentlessness – and our ability to tell our own stories. Stories that are different from the ones we’re being brainwashed to believe.

The corporate revolution will collapse if we refuse to buy what they are selling – their ideas, their version of history, their wars, their weapons, their notion of inevitability. Remember this: We be many and they be few. They need us more than we need them.

Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. Maybe many of us won’t be here to greet her, but on a quiet day, if I listen very carefully, I can hear her breathing.

Arundhati Roy, from War Talk

Bumble Girl in the Bergamot

Friday Ramble - Little Singers in the Trees

An annual cicada's song is the quintessential music of August, a sonorous vocal offering from little jeweled beings who emerge from the ground, shed their nymph skins, climb high into the light-filled trees and sing for a handful of days before expiring and returning to earth. It's a joyful, ecstatic and poignant element in the slow, irrevocable turning of one northern season into another.

Only male cicadas sing, but oh how they do, vibrating the complex abdominal membranes called tymbals over and over again to generate a raspy tune that will attract a mate. I have much to learn about identifying cicadas, but I think this one is the bigger Linne's cicada, rather than a Dog-day cicada. Whichever one it was, my little visitor was absolutely gorgeous. 

In ancient Greece and Rome, the cicada symbolized resurrection, immortality, and  spiritual ecstasy. The Greeks associated it with the sun god (Apollo), and with Dionysian rituals of ecstasy and madness. For the Romans, its emergence from the earth was a powerful symbol of transformation and rebirth.

In some Hispanic cultures, particularly those with strong Mesoamerican traditions, the cicada is associated with life, death and metamorphosis. It represents resilience, defiance, enduring hardship and surviving against the odds.  

In the southern French province of Provence, the cicada is viewed affectionately as a kindred spirit, a creature that loves the sun and makes music for the sheer joy of it. It is considered a lucky charm, and it is a popular motif in local art and crafts. 

We (Beau and I) often find abandoned cicada shells on trees at this time of the year but always feel fortunate when we encounter a newborn in all its pastel green splendor, sometimes still clinging to its discarded exoskeleton. Imagos (adults) darken as their new skins harden and their wings expand, but there is some variation in coloration, and many will retain greenish wings all the days of their lives.

For the last few days, we have been rescuing cicadas from sidewalks, driveways and roadways and moving them to safe perches where they will not be trampled by pedestrians or moving cars. On early walks, Beau and I always encounter at least two or three before we arrive home again. Evenings, I take my mug of tea out to the garden and listen to cicada serenades before the sun goes down, and I shall be sad when I go outside one night, and there are no cicada songs to be heard.

Call it "cicada mind" and cherish the notion. Our task is one of cultivating just this kind of patience, acceptance, rapt attention and unfettered Zen sensibility, of embracing our allotted days fully and singing wherever we happen to be, then dissolving effortlessly back into the fabric of the world when the time comes.

Thursday Poem - How the Trees on Summer Nights

How the trees on summer nights turn into

a dark river, how you can never reach it,
no matter how hard you try, walking as fast
as you can, but getting nowhere, arms and
legs pumping, sweat drizzling in rivulets;
each year, a little slower, more creaks
and aches, less breath. Ah, but these soft
nights, air like a warm bath, the dusky wings
of bats careening crazily overhead, and
you’d think the road goes on forever.
Apollinaire wrote, “What isn’t given to love
is so much wasted,” and I wonder what
I haven’t given yet. A thin comma moon
rises orange, a skinny slice of melon, so
delicious I could drown in its sweetness.
Or eat the whole thing, down to the rind.
Always, this hunger for more.

Barbara Crooker, (from More)

Wordless Wednesday - Summer's Golden Coin

Catching the Sun

They capture and hold the sun within, these buttery yellow gerbera blooms. Kin to dahlias, daisies, marigolds, calendulas, coneflowers, chrysanthemums, zinnias, and the great towering sunflowers, they drink in morning light and store it within the frilly tutus of their lavish petals. Like sunflowers, their capitulum appears to be a single flower, but each is a community made up of hundreds of tiny individual blooms.

The blooms are little earthbound suns on stems, and they dish out light as if it is warm honey. All the other garden flowers around them are uplifted by their frothy golden magnificence, by their almost imperceptible swaying, by the soft, sighing music of their duet with the wind. Bumbles and bees adore them.

Now and then, I falter as all living creatures do from time to time. On dreary days, I mourn the paucity of light in the world, and I think about the injustice and suffering and deliberate cruelty rampant everywhere. Then I remember how my garden loves the light in summer, and I resolve do a little inward blooming of my own, to breathe in light and send joy and comfort back out into the great wide world.

If I could take in light as flowers do in season, I would do that, but I haven't a clue how to go about it. Perhaps all that is required is to stand in the garden with my face to the sun. I could become a garden myself. Now there's a thought.

Sequestered, Week 303 (CCCIII)

Sunday, Saying Yes to the World

Our efforts to honor human differences cannot succeed apart from our effort to honor the buzzing, blooming, bewildering variety of life of earth. All life rises from the same source, and so does all fellow feeling, whether the fellow moves on two legs or four, on scaly bellies or feathered wings. If we care only for human needs, we betray the land; if we care only for the earth and its wild offspring, we betray our own kind. The profusion of creatures and cultures is the most remarkable fact about our planet, and the study and stewardship of that profusion seems to me our fundamental task.

Scott Russell Sanders

Nuts in the Overstory

 Black walnut (Juglans nigra)

Friday Ramble - Summer's Ticking Clock

Somewhere in the dusty recesses of my noggin, the passage of these sultry summer days is being marked, and ever so wistfully. The clock of the seasons is ticking away in the background, and hearing it, I find myself pondering the lessons held out by this golden interval that is passing away all too swiftly.

The other three seasons of a northern calendar year are splendid of course, and there are surely other fine summers ahead, but this summer's days are numbered. We are sliding gently down the hill toward autumn, days growing shorter, nights growing longer. It seems as though summer just got here, but here we go again,

Thoughts of coming and going are ever inscribed on summer's middling pages, and they're unsettling notions, making for restlessness and vague discontent, a gentle melancholy about the nature of time, a wistful appreciation of what is falling away and the transience of all earthly things.

An awareness of suchness (or tathata) is a middle-of-the-summer thing. For the most part, one goes gently along with the flow of the season, breathing in and out, trying to rest in the moment and do the things around home and garden that need doing.

Roses are a perfect metaphor for the season. Many old roses bloom once in a calendar year, but what a show they put on when they do. Their unruly tangles of wickedly thorny canes and blue-green leaves wear delicate pink (for the most part) blooms with crinkled petals and golden hearts. Each rose is unique, and each is exquisite from budding until its faded petals flutter to earth like snowflakes.

For several weeks after Midsummer, ambrosial fragrance lingers in every corner of the garden, and I find myself falling in love with old roses all over again.  It is nothing short of a miracle that creatures so beautiful and fragile thrive this far north. 

I pour over Taylor's Guide to Roses and drool over varieties that would never survive in my part of the world: Blush Noisette, Souvenir de Malmaison, Alba Maxima, Fantin Latour, Tuscany Superb, Rosa Mundi, Variegata de Bologna, Belle Amour and Ispahan. My copy of Taylor is falling apart, and it is probably time to replace it, but the little volume is an old friend and I cherish it.

Once in a while, I catch a glimpse of the Great Mystery while I am hanging out in the garden, and that is surely what this old life is all about. There are times when I wish I was better at remembering that and keeping everything in perspective, but forgetting now and then is quite all right - I have the garden to remind me.

Thursday Poem - Become Becoming

Wait for evening.

Then you'll be alone.

Wait for the playground to empty.

Then call out those companions from childhood:

The one who closed his eyes

and pretended to be invisible.

The one to whom you told every secret.

The one who made a world of any hiding place.

And don't forget the one who listened in silence

while you wondered out loud:

Is the universe an empty mirror? A flowering tree?

Is the universe the sleep of a woman?

Wait for the sky's last blue

(the color of your homesickness).

Then you'll know the answer.

Wait for the air's first gold (that color of Amen).

Then you'll spy the wind's barefoot steps.

Then you'll recall that story beginning

with a child who strays in the woods.

The search for him goes on in the growing

shadow of the clock.

And the face behind the clock's face

is not his father's face.

And the hands behind the clock's hands

are not his mother's hands.

All of Time began when you first answered

to the names your mother and father gave you.

Soon, those names will travel with the leaves.

Then, you can trade places with the wind.

Then you'll remember your life

as a book of candles,

each page read by the light of its own burning.

Li-Young Lee

(from Behind My Eyes)

Wordless Wednesday - Sweet

Perfect Rose, Thorns and All

The English rose in the garden plot under my bedroom window is exquisite, and it is wonderfully fragrant. Nothing I can say here is up to expressing even a tiny scrap of its perfection. Each and every bloom leaves me breathless.

My rose is called "Heritage", and it was one of David Austin's first roses. To create it, he crossed an unknown seedling with a white floribunda (Iceberg) and his own pink shrub rose (Wife of Bath). Through the latter, my rose has other illustrious forebears including a legendary hybrid tea rose called Madame Caroline Testout, an exquisite floribunda called Ma Perkins, and Austin's own magnificent Constance Spry.

Living as far north as I do, my rose requires a lot of coddling. Every few years it expires and has to be replaced, but my late soulmate adored it, and I plant another specimen for him. Ideally, there would be heirloom and David Austin roses in every corner of the garden, but that is not going to happen. On long winter nights, I pull out my rose references and dream, but the reality is that summers are too short here, and much of the year is too cold for many of the roses I long to cultivate.

How grand it would be to look out my window on a summer morning and see a whole garden of roses with literary names: Maid Marian, The Lady of Shalott, Emily Bronte, Sceptered Isle and Sweet Juliet, to name a few. Just imagine! To have one, I would have to move further south though, and that is not going to happen. 

Sequestered, Week 302 (CCCII)

Sunday, Saying Yes to the World

Literature exists at every level of experience. It is inclusive, not exclusive. It embraces; it does not reduce, however simply it is expressed. The purpose of the storyteller is to relate the truth in a manner that is simple: to integrate without reduction; for it is rarely possible to declare the truth as it is, because the universe presents itself as a Mystery. We have to find parables; we have to tell stories to unriddle the world.

Alan Garner

What Falls Away

Friday Ramble - The Measure of Our Days

In early July, the trees on the Two Hundred Acre Wood are gloriously leafed out, and vast swaths of woodland are as dark as night - the shadowed alcoves are several degrees cooler than the sunlit fields skirting them. Winding strands of wild clematis wrap around the old cedar rail fence by the main gate, and the silvery posts and rails give off a fine dry perfume.

The fields are wonders: orange and yellow hawkweeds, buttercups and clovers, daisies, tall rosy grasses and ripening milkweed, several species of goldenrod, trefoils and prickly violet bugloss - everything is set in motion by the arid summer wind and swaying in place. The open areas of waving greenery have an oceanic aspect, and I wouldn't be surprised to see the masts of tall ships poking up here and there.

And then there are the birds, red-tailed hawks circling overhead, swallows and kingfishers above the river, bluebirds on the fence, grosbeaks dancing from branch to branch in the overstory and caroling their pleasure in the day and the season. I can't see them for the trees, but mourning doves are cooing somewhere nearby.

Fritillaries and swallowtails flutter among the cottonwoods, never pausing in their exuberant flight or coming down to have their pictures taken. Dragonflies (mostly skimmers, clubtails and darners) spiral and swoop through the air, a few corporals among them for good measure. These walks are filled with wonders.

I began this morning's post with the words "It is high summer". Then I remembered that the summer solstice has passed, and I went back and started again. And so it goes in the great round of time and the seasons. Many golden days are still to come, but we have stepped into the the languid waters that flow downhill to autumn.

Autumn with its burnished light, its grains and apples and gourds on the vine... The season feels like coming home to this old hen.

Thursday Poem - Epiphany

Lynn Schmidt says

        she saw You once as prairie grass,

        Nebraska prairie grass,

she climbed out of her car on a hot highway,

leaned her butt on the nose of her car,

looked out over one great flowing field,

stretching beyond her sight until the horizon came:

vastness, she says,

responsive to the slightest shift of wind,

        full of infinite change,

        all One.

She says when she can't pray

She calls up Prairie Grass.

Pem Kremer

Wordless Wednesday - Sweet

Happy Canada Day

Happy Canada Day, happy July!

Sequestered, Week 301 (CCCI)