Small Wonders

On a fine morning in late August, a weathered cedar stump along the trail into the deep woods sports a colony of haircap moss (Polytrichum commune), also called common haircap, golden maidenhair and great goldilocks.

The delicate wonders emerging from the thatch are dancing sporophytes, fragile strands topped by seed capsules wearing raindrops and filaments of spider silk. Just beyond the right edge of the photo, a crab spider waits for a fly or other insect to put in an appearance, one fraught with peril.

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 is a miniature jeweled world, complete within itself, its glistening raindrops holding 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 in the sunny woods, teeming with life. Its own history. Its own mythology. Its own stories. Astonishing. Breathtaking. Radiant. Perfect.

Morning in the Park

Friday Ramble - 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 hot stuff, eyes shielded from the rising sun with a sleepy hand.

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, newspapers and briefcases headed downtown to another day at their desks.

In a few weeks, the early runners and commuters will be joined by village children on their way to school, and nearby streets will be filled with happy chatter again. Beau and I have missed seeing the neighborhood kids on our summer rambles, and we are looking forward to hearing about their adventures on vacation.

On a recent morning walk, we paused by a neighbor's fish pond to watch the white and scarlet koi finning their way around in circles, and we noticed that the first fallen 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 the blistering heat of August setting the leaf people free to ramble.

I would be a happy camper if I could paint skies like the one above, but I can't, and the camera's efforts will have to do. What my lens "sees" is absolutely sumptuous though, and I am content with the morning opus. Sky blue, rose, gold, violet and scarlet lodge in my wandering thoughts, and on the way home, I think about throwing a whole bunch of clay pots and glazing them in sunrise colors. 

Wordless Wednesday - Sunrise Field

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.

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.

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)

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)

Wordless Wednesday - Shining Through

Friday Ramble - Aestival

In the science of zoology, aestival refers to the tendency of all living creatures to be sleepy and slow moving in the heat of summer, and botanists also use the word to describe the arrangement of organs or components in a flower bud.

This week's word comes to us from the Late Latin aestīvālis and earlier Latin aestās, both meaning summer or heat. Both forms are cognate with the Sanskrit इन्द्धे (inddhé) meaning to light or set on fire. Way back in our wordy explorations is the Proto-Indo-European (PIE) root form h₂eydʰ- meaning heat, fire or to burn. The adjective probably came into use during the Middle Ages, some time around 386. 

Proto-Indo-European (PIE) is the reconstructed common ancestor of nearly all Indo-European languages and its elements have been assembled from languages known today. There is no record that it ever existed, but if so, it would have been in use from the Late Neolithic to the Early Bronze Age. The prehistoric Proto-Indo-Europeans were most likely nomadic tribes from the steppes of eastern Europe and central Asia, and they were a footloose and fancy free lot. There is evidence that they wandered as far as the Aegean, northern Europe, Central Asia and Siberia, leaving their language, pastoral culture, patriarchal religious beliefs and customs wherever they went.

I once thought that the word siesta (referring to a leisurely nap after lunch) was related, but I discovered a year or two ago that its roots are in the Latin sexta meaning the sixth hour of the day (midday). The two words sound similar, but as far as I know, they are not related.

This week's word is my favorite adjective for the (all too brief) greening season at the heart of the calendar year. Summery is a fine word too, but it doesn't hold a candle or even a tiny wooden match to the frothy perfumed magnificence of the golden season that reigns so gloriously and so briefly here in the sub-Arctic climes of Canada. Aestival says it all, and I love the shape of the word on my tongue.

I say "aestival" and its sibilance summons up images of alfresco celebrations and farmers' markets, shaggy gardens of scarlet poppies and towering purple lupins, trees filled with singing birds, bees in the orchard, roses sweeter than any vineyard potion, perfect sunsets across the lake shared with herons and loons. The season is filled with light, and every moment should be savoured.

Wordless Wednesday - Lupins and Early Light

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 an early summer 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 the same thing.

Lilacs in the village are blooming, 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 long ago garden I planted 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!

Friday Ramble - Swimming in Light

We awakened to gray skies yesterday, to rain reveling in its own refrain and beating a staccato rhythm on the roof that shunned meter and metronome. Puckish breezes cavorted in the eaves and ruffled tiny leaves in the garden like tangy 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, its little school of 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 light.

On our morning walk, we (Beau and I) took note of a rusty puddle under the corroded wheelbarrow in a neighbor's driveway, and I remembered that humans have been using rust (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.

I also remembered that a heady brew of iron oxides, carbon dioxide and water is probably where all sentient life began. The Japanese word for rust is sabi and together with wabi, another Japanese word meaning fresh or simple, it forms the expression wabi-sabi, an enfolding aesthetic or worldview centered on notions of transience, simplicity and naturalness or imperfection. Rust is fine stuff, be it in aesthetics, Asian philosophy, cave art, wet driveways or old wheelbarrows.

Clouds and rain, then sunshine and blue sky, then back to clouds and rain again, who knows what mid-May days will hold? When good weather prevails, Beau and I go into the woods, and we lurch along for an hour or two, a long way from the miles of rugged terrain we were 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, rooflines and old wood fences are beaded with moisture and shining 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.

Early Potterings

And so they continue... routines of staying home and doing things like gardening, yard work and baking, of taking long rambles with Beau in early morning before our favorite haunts are tenanted by unleashed dogs and their thoughtless owners, by sleepy walkers, bemused gawkers and weekend warriors. 

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 serenade the rising sun. Below them, woodpeckers act as a rhythm section and put on a fine performance. Adding harmony to the work in progress, puddle ducks paddle up and down the creek under the trees, slurping up tasty morsels from the bottom and waggling their tail feathers. Geese fly back and forth between fields and the river. Now and then, a heron or a Great Northern Diver (loon) passes overhead. 

This morning, a cormorant flew over our heads on its way north.  As I watched it go, I remembered that the word cormorant is actually a shortened version of the Latin corvus marinus meaning "sea raven". For centuries, cormorants were considered members of the corvid family, and were commonly known as sea ravens. With its glossy dark plumage, aquamarine eyes, orange throat pouch and bright blue mouth, the bird is surely one of the Old Wild Mother's most exquisite creations.

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

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

If this morning's post sounds a bit like a litany, I suppose that is exactly what it is. Winter has packed its bags and is departing. We are happy to see it go. 

And there in the woods...

Siberian squill (Scilla siberica)

  

One day, there are deep snow drifts everywhere. The next day, the snow has vanished, and little green shoots and delicate wildflowers are poking their heads out of the sun warmed earth on the edge of the woods.

Flowers are springing up everywhere, reaching for the light over their fragile heads. Grasses thrust themselves out of puddles in the park, and a few ducks paddle up and down the little stream among the trees. Everywhere, there is birdsong, every feathered singer in the overstory declaring its delight in the season.

On morning walks, we (Beau and I) look for sprouting bloodroot, trout lilies and daffodils in the woods, and we rejoice whenever we see a tiny green leaf lifting its head from the moist, crumbly soil and desiccated leaves.

It will be a week or two before there is full blown flowering in our favourite haunts, but a few purple squill are already blooming in last autumn's tattered residue on the forest floor, and we were happy to discover them on a recent ramble.

There were times when we thought this winter would never end. There are days now and then when we still think so, but for the most part, we can hardly believe our good fortune. Every dancing sunbeam and tremulous wee fleur is a gift.

Into the Light

White Crocus (Ice Queen)

Sequestered, Week 289(CCLIX)

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

The Waning Moon in Her Journey

Thursday Poem - Return

Through the weeks of deep snow
we walked above the ground
on fallen sky, as though we did
not come of root and leaf, as though
we had only air and weather
for our difficult home.
But now
as March warms, and the rivulets
run like birdsong on the slopes,
and the branches of light sing in the hills,
slowly we return to earth.

Wendell Berry