Friday Ramble - August Musics

Here I am, trying to describe something in the great wide world that is quite beyond description. I know it is so, but I carry on anyway, and I make a complete shambles of the exercise. To be clear, this morning's sumptuous sky has no need of a old hen with camera and notebook, but I have to say something. To let such a dazzling moment pass without saying anything or writing a word about it would be shameful.

Northern skies on middle-to-late August mornings are intense happenings, early sunlight burnishing clouds into brilliance and lighting up contrails against skies that often as not have a touch of violet in them. Sometimes, everything up there looks like stained glass. There are high fluffy streaks from horizon to horizon, strands of light touching everything with copper and oro pallido, the pale lustrous gold that only visits the world at the beginning of day (although Tuscan skies sometimes held such wonders in late afternoon when I was a student there many years ago).

One needs a large brush to paint such sweeping confetti colored expanses, lenses that can take in the great wide world from here to there. My camera carrying exercises are brief at the moment because of the heat and humidity (mostly the humidity)  but I am already thinking of acquiring another lens or two, of visiting my local art supply shop and purchasing more tubes of scarlet, gold and indigo for my paint box.

What a show the cosmos puts on when Beau and I go out to greet these August mornings together. Barefoot, I sip my tea and try to capture a few images. My companion looks up at the sky and all around, his eyes round in wonder and his expressive tail waving like a metronome.

At dawn, flocks of Canada geese fly up from their night on the river and out into farm fields to feed. There is wave upon wave of happy honking as they pass over our heads. Their joyous, almost symphonic presence is a clear indication that summer is waning. For all that, there is magic everywhere, and there is music.

Late summer mornings are full of light and texture and color and sound. This is the traditional music of August, "the music of what happens" as the season draws to a slow and honeyed close. How amazing it all is, how poignant and how fleeting. My image and little net of words are shamefully lacking, but they will have to do.

Smaller Worlds Within

On a fine morning in August's middling pages, a weathered stump along the trail wears a carpet of haircap moss (Polytrichum commune). The delicate wonders emerging from the thatch are dancing sporophytes, fragile strands topped by seed capsules wearing raindrops and filaments of spider silk. Beyond the right edge of the photo, a crab spider is waiting for something tasty to appear and is poised for ambush.

How often does one wander along a trail and not notice such wonders? I suspect the answer is, most of the time, for this old hen anyway.

My moss colony in the woods is a tiny jeweled world, complete within itself, and its swaying raindrops hold the whole sunlit forest in their depths, upside down of course. For the life of me, I can't come up with the right words to describe it. A tiny cosmos, teeming with life. Its own history. Its own traditions. Its own stories. It's own fey music. Astonishing. Breathtaking. Radiant. Perfect.

Hanging out with the fabulous forest mosses is a soggy business, and getting back on my feet is not as easy as it used to be, but oh, the colors, and the light.

In the Great Blue Bowl of Morning

We awaken to skies that would make an impressionist painter feel like dancing, to Canada geese singing in unison as they fly up from the river and out into farm fields to feed. This year's progeny sing loudest up there in the great blue bowl of morning. Their pleasure in being alive and aloft mirrors my own as I watch them with a mug of tea, eyes shielded from the rising sun with a sleepy hand.

Unseen below the sweeping strokes of vibrant color painted across the eastern sky are trees, hydro poles, rooflines and village streets, trucks and cars in rumbling motion, early runners in the park, commuters with lunch bags, bento boxes and briefcases heading downtown to another day at their desks.

On our morning walk, we (Beau and I) paused by a neighbor's fish pond to watch the white and scarlet koi finning their way around in circles. While there, we noticed that the first fallen maple leaves of the season had already drifted into the pool, making eddies and swirls and perfect round spirals on the glossy surface. No need to panic, it's not an early autumn, just summer heat setting a few leaf people free to ramble.

I would be a happy camper if I could paint skies like these, but I can't and the camera will have to do. What my lens "sees" is absolutely sumptuous though, and I am contented with my morning opus. Sky blue, rose, gold, violet and scarlet lodge in my wandering thoughts, and on the way home, I find myself thinking about throwing a bunch of clay bowls and glazing them in perfect sunrise colors. Such exercises are beyond my old fingers these days, but the thought lingers.

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 come and gone, and Lammas is only a few days away, but I think 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 circle of fairies holding softly glowing lanterns. It is night, and the forest behind her is alight with fireflies. There is magic in the air.

In our darkening garden, there are the last cicada raspings of the day and a few crickets are doing their thing - I say "our garden" because it is Beau's garden too, and he loves it. Classical guitar wafts from the speakers on my neighbor's veranda, and a hound around the corner is singing soulfully to the waxing moon. Bats describe perfect circles over our heads, and a light wind blows through the old trees. There is an occasional crackle from the lantern burning on the deck. By rights, a Pan flute or harp should be playing. Perhaps something by the Breton harper, Alain Stivell?

On nights like this, I feel ancient and young at the same time, and I know right down to my blood and bones that there is wild, elemental magic at work in the great wide world. I can almost reach out and touch it, and it gladdens this wild old heart.

Friday Ramble - Following the Sun

In summer, young sunflowers follow the sun around the sky all day long. When they grow up, they face the rising sun, and they no longer move in what is, to me anyway, summer's most engaging dance. When I drove by a field of sunflowers recently and saw they had turned their backs and were all facing east, I tried not to take it personally, but I was wistful. The kids were all grown up and ready to leave home.

It's all a matter of circadian rhythms (or the circadian clock), the internal 24 hour cycle that regulates our gnarly metabolisms and keeps us tune with the natural world according to the hours of daylight and darkness in our environment. The word circadian comes from the Latin circa (about) plus diem (a day), and most living things have circadian clocks of some kind. Circadian protocols tell us when we should sleep, and when we should awaken. They prompt bears, bats and squirrels to go into hibernation, advise trees to lose their leaves and withdraw into themselves for the winter, let birds and butterflies know it is time to migrate. The science of circadian rhythms is called chronobiology, and it is lovely stuff indeed.

Young sunflowers drink the sun's warmth to fuel their journey to maturity, and they turn their heads to follow it. As they mature, they take in more light, heating up early in the day and releasing a heady fragrance that attracts legions of pollinating insects like butterflies and bees and ensures future generations of sunflowers. Grownup sunflowers have fulfilled their prime motivation (dynamic purpose), and they have attained their highest and most complete expression. They have done what they were put here on earth to do, and they no longer need to follow the sun.

Members of the helianthus family are amazing. What seems at first glance to be a single sunflower is actually a whole community of flowers, thousands of tiny florets arranged in a perfect spiraling sequence. Each floret is inclined toward the next floret by approximately 137.5°, a measurement known in mathematics as the golden angle. The arrangement creates an elegant series of interconnecting spirals in which the number of left oriented spirals and the number of right oriented spirals are successive Fibonacci numbers. It's arty, scientific and just plain beautiful, stunning in fact.

A lifelong admirer of spirals, golden angles and Fibonacci sequences whenever and wherever they turn up, I'm always delighted to come across another one in my rambles. Finding a few sunflowers in someone's garden is a happy thing, and discovering a whole flowering field along a quiet country road is dazzling. I adore them, and it boggles my mind to think of such glorious creatures blooming without anyone around to admire them.

In autumn, faded sunflowers are wondrous in their imposing stature, earthy coloration, spikiness and sculptural complexity. Determined to engender legions of progeny and perpetuate their particular genetic brew, they birth thousands of seeds every autumn, mothering whole dynasties of towering stalks, fuzzy leaves and beaming golden faces that will appear when summer rolls around next time. In the depths of winter I try to remember that somewhere, legions of tiny, unborn sunflowers are sleeping and dreaming under Himalayan heaps of snow.

In "Enriching the Earth", Wendell Berry describes the earth's cycling as "slowly falling into the fund of things", and I am fond of the notion. Going to seed is a good thing, a fine thing, a natural and necessary thing. Every coin in nature's wild unruly banking is kin, whatever its size, shape or denomination.

Thursday Poem - Remember

Remember the sky that you were born under,
know each of the star’s stories.
Remember the moon, know who she is.
Remember the sun’s birth at dawn, that is the
strongest point of time. Remember sundown
and the giving away to night.
Remember your birth, how your mother struggled
to give you form and breath. You are evidence of
her life, and her mother’s, and hers.
Remember your father. He is your life, also.
Remember the earth whose skin you are:
red earth, black earth, yellow earth, white earth
brown earth, we are earth.
Remember the plants, trees, animal life who all have their
tribes, their families, their histories, too. Talk to them,
listen to them. They are alive poems.
Remember the wind. Remember her voice. She knows the
origin of this universe.
Remember you are all people and all people
are you.
Remember you are this universe and this

universe is you.

Remember all is in motion, is growing, is you.
Remember language comes from this.
Remember the dance language is, that life is.
Remember.

Joy Harjo 

How the Trees Love Summer Light

Morning light and trees, smoke from the wildfires burning out west and up north.

Breathing is difficult in such conditions, and visibility in any direction is limited. We are all going about with dry coughs, headaches, watery eyes and sniffles. When we are outside, there is the taste of embers and charred wood in the back of our throats, and sometimes, there is also the acrid taste of burning rubber.

Several northern communities have been rendered homeless by fires this summer. Vast numbers of wildlife have died, and three million hectares of magnificent forest have already been wiped out. There are heavy rains in the forecast for the next few days, and we cling to the hope they will quench the fires and end the destruction. 

There were ash particles on the deck and floating in the birdbaths when we went out to the garden a few minutes ago. One of the day's appointed activities will be checking the receptacles regularly and replacing the tainted water in them with fresh stuff for the bird people to drink and splash about in. 

For all that, the great trees in the park seem to be reaching for the light.

On the River Tay

Not the Scottish Tay, but a lovely winding  river that flows through the Lanark highlands of eastern Ontario, Canada. The views here are of (and from) a bridge over the river in the beautiful town of Perth. 

The lands of the Tay watershed are the ancestral home of the Algonquin First Nation who hunted on them for many centuries, traveled its waterways in canoes and harvested wild rice on its lakes. When European settlers arrived, the area was controlled by the Mississauga First Nation (Ojibwe), but the name by which the river was known to either indigenous group is unknown. In the early nineteenth century, homesick Scottish settlers renamed it for their beloved River Tay in Scotland.

Like the St. Lawrence river, Lake Champlain, the Lake of Two Mountains on the lower Ottawa River and the lower Saguenay river, our Tay was once part of the ancient Champlain Sea created by melting ice sheets during the last glacial cycle. The river came into being when the Champlain retreated at the end of the Ice Age. In the now, the Tay makes its way to the Ottawa river via the Rideau, and its waters merge with the mighty Saint Lawrence at the end of their journey.

The bridge was a perfect place to hang out on hot summer afternoons with a waffle cone from a local ice cream factory. I have no idea how many hours were spent there over the years or how many cones Irv and I consumed while leaning over the railing and just watching the world go by. The tart cranberry ice cream was a particular favourite, and we always got a scoop of something frozen for our dogs. 

I have a thing about rivers. When I am near the Tay, I think of poet/priest Father John O'Donohue's wish that he might live his life as a river flows, carried by the surprise of its own unfolding. What a wonderful way to go along.

Happy Midsummer/Litha

Happy Litha/Midsummer! This is the longest day of the year. After today, sunlight hours will wane until Yule (also called Midwinter or the Winter Solstice) in late December.

Cherish this golden day in the heart of the year! Be outside at sunrise and watch the sun come up - capture the moment with your camera or cell phone. Sip a mug of sunchoke tea in your garden as the sun rises and drink in the rising light.

Make a sun wheel or sun mandala out of flowers. Arrange sunflowers in a vase and place it in a prominent place your home. Put a pot of something sunny and golden on your threshold. Mums? Marigolds?

Float a wreath of wildflowers on a pond or river and watch the current carry your offering away. Build a fire on your favorite beach after darkness falls and and toast sweet "stuff" in the dancing flames.

May all good things come to you on this longest day of the year!

Thursday Poem - Directions (Excerpt)

The best time is late afternoon
when the sun strobes through
the columns of trees as you are hiking up,
and when you find an agreeable rock
to sit on, you will be able to see
the light pouring down into the woods
and breaking into the shapes and tones
of things and you will hear nothing
but a sprig of birdsong or the leafy
falling of a cone or nut through the trees,
and if this is your day you might even
spot a hare or feel the wing-beats of geese
driving overhead toward some destination.

But it is hard to speak of these things
how the voices of light enter the body
and begin to recite their stories
how the earth holds us painfully against
its breast made of humus and brambles
how we who will soon be gone regard
the entities that continue to return
greener than ever, spring water flowing
through a meadow and the shadows of clouds
passing over the hills and the ground
where we stand in the tremble of thought
taking the vast outside into ourselves.

Billy Collins, 

(from The Art of Drowning)

Lupins and Early Light

I never walk past a stand of lupins without thinking of a sketch in the thirty-seventh episode of Monty Python's Flying Circus. A bumbling highwayman named Dennis Moore (played by John Cleese) steals lupins from the rich ("Your lupins or your life!") and tries to give them to the local peasantry. The peasants tire of lupins and start demanding other things like money, Titian paintings, Venetian silver and art glass.

This morning's lupins live in the hedgerow along a hydro corridor in the village. They are descendants of those that once lived in the garden of a a small brick bungalow owned by my friend Sadie. Her house was surrounded by fences and high hedges, and its enclosures were filled with fruit trees, old roses and heirloom perennials. Although she and her garden are long gone, Beau and I remember them every time we pass the lupin children on our morning walk. 

Friday Ramble - Sweet

And so it goes . . . One day, the old crabapple is bare and forlorn, the next day it wears a multitude of tiny leaves. Almost overnight, the tree is covered with blooms and buzzing with throngs of ecstatic, blissed-out bumbles, bees and wasps.

Along comes a restless breeze, and the crabapple symphony is over, petals drifting through the air like confetti, coming to rest on lawns and hedges and gardens, on fences and birdbaths and pergolas and fountains. The fallen bits of pink float merrily on puddles in the street and flutter across cobblestones in the village like tiny, airborne scraps of vibrantly hued carnival paper. Their presence conveys a festive aspect to the day, and seeing them on our morning walks makes us smile.

Our word traces its roots all the way back to the Proto-Indo-European (PIE) root form *swād- meaning sweet or pleasant, also the likely source of Old English, Germanic, Sanskrit, Greek and Latin words meaning more or less the same thing.

Lilacs in the village are blooming this week, and when I stepped outside with Beau last evening around ten, the night air was full of their heady fragrance. For a few minutes, we leaned against the railing on the veranda and breathed in the glorious perfume. Then we were driven indoors by clouds of ravenous mosquitoes. The little blighters were out for blood and no mistake.

Standing out in the darkness, I remembered a garden I planted years ago with purple heliotrope. The color of the blooms was gorgeous, and their sweet, cherry-like scent pulled in hummingbirds, butterflies, bumbles and bees from miles around. The stuff was almost indecently sumptuous, and I shall have to plant it again.

How sweet this season is, how fleeting and poignant, just a little sad too. I sometimes wish that summer lasted a little longer this far north, but if it did, spring and autumn would be truncated slightly. No to that!

Thursday Poem - To Be Held

To be held
by the light
was what I wanted,
to be a tree drinking the rain,
no longer parched in this hot land.
To be roots in a tunnel growing
but also to be sheltering the inborn leaves
and the green slide of mineral
down the immense distances
into infinite comfort
and the land here, only clay,
still contains and consumes
the thirsty need
the way a tree always shelters the unborn life
waiting for the healing
after the storm
which has been our life.

Linda Hogan

Wordless Wednesday - This Perfect Light

Friday Ramble - Swimming in Light

For a day or two this week, we awakened to gray skies and rain beating a staccato rhythm that shunned meter and metronome. Puckish breezes cavorted in the eaves and ruffled tiny leaves in the garden like decks of playing cards. A thousand and one little waterfalls appeared out of nowhere, and impromptu streams danced their way through village gutters carrying twigs, oak leaves, pine needles and catkins.

Here and there were precious islands of stillness. Sheltered by overhanging trees, the ornamental pond in a friend's garden was like glass, white and scarlet koi hovering almost motionless in the early light, their open mouths like tiny perfect "o"s. Sometimes, they seemed to be swimming in sky.

There was water in the garage now and then, a shallow lagoon until the wet stuff gurgled its way down through frantically working drains. When the tide receded, I scraped rust into glass jars and tucked them away - iron oxides produce lovely ochre hues, and my gleanings will be used in projects somewhere up the trail, possibly on other rainy days. I don't know when my fingers will be up to handling a paintbrush again, but that doesn't stop me from thinking up neat "stuff" to try out.

As I scraped away, I remembered that humans have been using iron oxides in artistic undertakings as far back as the prehistoric caves of Lascaux - I would be a happy camper indeed if I ever managed to produce something a scrap as vibrant as the magnificent Chinese horse. There I was in my wellies, splashing about and playing with basic elements of life - a heady brew of rust (iron oxides), carbon dioxide and water is where all sentient life began. The Japanese word for rust is sabi (錆), and it forms part of wabi sabi (侘寂), a name for the enfolding aesthetic or world view centered on notions of transience, simplicity and naturalness or imperfection. 

Clouds and rain, then sunshine and blue sky, then back to clouds and rain again, who knows what spring days will hold? We go rambling when good weather prevails, and I lurch up the trail a few hundred feet, a long way from the miles of rugged terrain I was once able to cover, but there is gratitude in every step.

On wet days, we listen to a little Bach or Rameau on the sound system, read and drink tea. We watch raindrops dappling the windows, the painterly way in which trees, roof lines, shingles and old wood fences are beaded with moisture and glistening in the grey. Each and every raindrop is a minuscule world teeming with exuberant life, whole universes looking up at us, great and bumbling creatures that we are. Rain or shine, up and down, in and out, them and us, it's all good.

Spring in a Jar

It will be a week or two until the "daffies" in the park are up and blooming, but I could not resist bringing home a gorgeous bouquet of heirloom specimens from a tin pail near the entrance of a village market a few days ago.

Everyone nearing the place stopped to look at the narcissi on display, most of us heading home with a generous bunch clutched in our paws along with our coffee beans, artisanal cheese and freshly baked croissants. Gotta love weekends!

Daffodils are the essence of springtime, and my blooms have a delicate, sweet fragrance with just a hint of spice. Lovingly arranged in a jar in the dining room, their velvety white petals and glowing centers make my heart glad. 

Reaching for the Light

Thursday Poem - The Greatest Spendor

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

Reaching for the Light

Wood squill (Scilla siberica)

One day, there were piles of snow in the yard at least three feet deep, and I could not get anywhere near the garden shed for white stuff and sneaky patches of ice. The next day, the snow was receding into the good dark earth, and tiny flowers were 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 paddled up and down the little creek among the trees. Everywhere, there was birdsong, each and every feathered singer in the overstory declaring its delight in the season.

We could hardly believe our good fortune, and every sunbeam, new leaf and tiny bloom was a gift. If we had stopped to look at everything we encountered, we would never have gotten anywhere at all. I was able to get the shed door open and greet my gardening tools. Was spring here at last? If so, not for long.

If I had not written this idiotically cheerful post, we probably would not have gotten snow overnight, and now it is snowing again. I never learn, or rather unlearn.

Rumors of Spring

Now and then, there are balmy, brilliant blue days in March, but mostly, we lurch along between winter and spring, blue skies and grey skies, scudding clouds and no clouds at all. Temperatures are up, down and all over the place, and we (Beau and I) are never sure what to wear when we set out in the morning for our first walk, a light, waterproof jacket one day, a warm parka the next. Two days ago, we went about in light jackets, and this morning we are back to parkas and boots.

Wonder of wonders, a gnarly old willow down by the creek was putting up lovely furry catkins a few days ago and the icicles suspended below cradled tiny branches and fragile scraps of green. The little stream at my feet was running free and singing, its waters dark and glossy and filled with possibility. Willow, song and flow are still percolating in my thoughts this morning, a day or two later.

A hodgepodge of seasonal images and motifs perhaps, but not unusual for my favorite corner in the great wide world, and I am quite all right with it. There is light in dwindling icicles, in thawing streams and fuzzy little willow buds, and perhaps springtime is not far off. Hardy northerners that we are, we cling to the thought and turn our collars up against the icy wind.

On we go, paw in paw, light flickering through the trees, little scraps of green in the landscape around us, soon (hopefully), flocks of returning geese in the sky above. There are balmy days and cold days; sometimes there is rain, and other times there is snow. The slowly awakening world is a symphony written in sound and light, and even our footsteps have a part to play in the performance.

 Happy Saint Patrick's Day!