Thursday Poem - Everything is waiting for You

Your great mistake is to act the drama

as if you were alone. As if life

were a progressive and cunning crime

with no witness to the tiny hidden

transgressions. To feel abandoned is to deny

the intimacy of your surroundings. Surely,

even you, at times, have felt the grand array;

the swelling presence, and the chorus, crowding

out your solo voice. You must note

the way the soap dish enables you,

or the window latch grants you freedom.

Alertness is the hidden discipline of familiarity.

The stairs are your mentor of things

to come, the doors have always been there

to frighten you and invite you,

and the tiny speaker in the phone

is your dream-ladder to divinity.

Put down the weight of your aloneness and ease into

the conversation. The kettle is singing

even as it pours you a drink, the cooking pots

have left their arrogant aloofness and

seen the good in you at last. All the birds

and creatures of the world are unutterably

themselves. Everything is waiting for you.

David Whyte, from

River Flow: New and Collected Poems

Sunday, Saying Yes to the World

The earth offers gift after gift—life and the living of it, light and the return of it, the growing things, the roaring things, fire and nightmares, falling water and the wisdom of friends, forgiveness. My god, the forgiveness, time, and the scouring tides. How does one accept gifts as great as these and hold them in the mind?

Failing to notice a gift dishonors it, and deflects the love of the giver. That's what's wrong with living a careless life, storing up sorrow, waking up regretful, walking unaware. But to turn the gift in your hand, to say, this is wonderful and beautiful, this is a great gift—this honors the gift and the giver of it. Maybe this is what [my friend] Hank has been trying to make me understand: Notice the gift. Be astonished at it. Be glad for it, care about it. Keep it in mind. This is the greatest gift a person can give in return.

Kathleen Dean Moore, Wild Comfort: The Solace of Nature

Sunday - Saying Yes to the World

The earth offers gift after gift—life and the living of it, light and the return of it, the growing things, the roaring things, fire and nightmares, falling water and the wisdom of friends, forgiveness. My god, the forgiveness, time, and the scouring tides. How does one accept gifts as great as these and hold them in the mind?

Failing to notice a gift dishonors it, and deflects the love of the giver. That's what's wrong with living a careless life, storing up sorrow, waking up regretful, walking unaware. But to turn the gift in your hand, to say, this is wonderful and beautiful, this is a great gift—this honors the gift and the giver of it. Maybe this is what [my friend] Hank has been trying to make me understand: Notice the gift. Be astonished at it. Be glad for it, care about it. Keep it in mind. This is the greatest gift a person can give in return.

Kathleen Dean Moore

Friday Ramble - Embracing Winter Mind

Ice is everywhere on the trailing edges of a calendar year, and eyes and camera linger lovingly on it. We are spending much of our time indoors at the moment, but it is astonishing what can be seen right from a window, any old window, on a chilly winter morning.

Ice glosses trees in the village and sparkles on window panes. Here and there, it forms cornices, dangling artlessly from eaves, roofs and wind bells. Glossy as hard candy, it sheathes roads and cobblestones at first light.  When the winter sun touches it, the strata reveal themselves as lacy blankets draped over streets, sleeping hills and fields, as crystalline fronds of grass and glassy ferns poking out of autumn's detritus. Lovely stuff, in an urban setting or glittering on branches in the snow-drowned countryside.

Whole worlds cavort and hum within icicles, and there is graceful symmetry in their shapes, their transparent suspension. I wake up and get the message once in a while, but not often enough. The few seconds between me "seeing" something and the click of the camera shutter are a particle of kensho, a tiny window in which the mundane world falls away, leaving elegant bones, radiant stillness and breathtaking beauty. It's an interval out of time, no "me", no lens, no frosted leaf or icicle - we are all one entity, breathing in and out together. Such moments are everywhere if we have the eyes to see them and the wits to pay attention. Sometimes, they are lifesavers.

Everything has a story to tell. Tales from the trailing edges, liminal intervals and seasonal turnings of our lives help us to learn and grow, to exercise the wonder and connection that is our birthright. All this simply from contemplating a few icicles dangling outside the kitchen window? I am adrift in winter mind, and it always seems to happen around this time of the year.

Winter's fruitful darkness is a doorway through which we pass to ready ourselves for an exuberant blooming somewhere up the trail. Beyond these dark turnings at the postern of the old calendar year, light, warmth and wonder await us.

Friday Ramble - Between Here and There

Here we are on the cusp between autumn and winter. There is an element of impatience in the voices of Canada geese as they fly over the house, and the other migratory beings who are still here seem agitated and anxious to be off on their adventures.

I'm restless too, and words alone don't quite "do it" for me; nor do images, at least most of the time. Morning after morning, I scribble a few words and regard them with mild disdain. I prowl through old photos, looking for an image that adequately describes the dark foggy daybreak beyond the windows, the frosted garden grasses and wilting shrubbery, the bare and eloquent trees. Archive prowling at the break of day is a perilous undertaking through volume after volume of photo archives and disk after disk of stored images, all leaving something to be desired. At times, I consider tossing everything out, flogging the cameras to a pawn shop and taking up soap operas or macrame.

What I need at such times is sunlight and clear skies, a fine crunchy frost and an hour or two of wandering around the woods, camera around my neck, vest pockets crammed with filters, lenses and other photographic trappings, seed for the birds and Beau's homemade doggy biscuits. For various reasons, my ramblings are brief this fall, but I often journey into the eastern Ontario highlands in my thoughts. There are years of autumn rambles to revisit when I can't get out to the woods, and every step I take is a step through treasure.

Sometimes, what we need is already here and has simply been waiting for us to acknowledge it. When we wake up and notice, we are stopped right in our tracks, so taken by the breathtaking wonders before us that we can hardly draw in air. Old barns and whiskery trees, towering crags and limpid streams, sandhill cranes serenading each other and slow dancing in frosted farm fields at sunrise, herons and loons calling goodbye as they rise from their summer haunts and head south. Timeless, enchanted and liminal, all of it, and if we are lucky, from time to time, elemental magics rub off on us as we wander about in wild places.

Out of the north wind, there's fine blue stillness and pools of articulate silence, long resonant conversations with dreaming trees and old stones. Camus wrote that in the depths of winter, he discovered within himself an invincible summer. I suspect that for this old hen, what lies invincible within is an early highland winter in all its grace and grandeur. The last year's health issues notwithstanding, frosted leaves underfoot, geese overhead and treed hills with morning light shining through them still catch me by the throat and leave me breathless, every single time.  I just wish I could find a way to say it as it ought to be said.

Sunday - Saying Yes to the World

Ten times a day something happens to me like this - some strengthening throb of amazement - some good empathic ping and swell.

This is the first, the wildest and wisest thing I know: that the soul exists and is built entirely out of attentiveness.

Mary Oliver

Rites of Spring (I)

Siberian Squill (Scilla siberica)

On an overcast morning in late April, she is bending over a cluster of blooming squill in a corner of the garden when the thought comes to her for the nth time, the nth springtime, the nth calendar year.

The wildflowers coming up in the wooded alcoves of the Lanark highlands and this shaded corner of her garden are perfect, just as they are, and so are her recording lens and camera. Herself, not so much...

She has to cultivate the eyes and attention to see things in all their natural wabi sabi suchness, the patience to wait for the wind to pause in its madcap dance and then click her shutter. Sometimes it works out, and sometimes she is rewarded only by a vivid blue blur on her memory card. Life and the seasons are works in endless progress—they are a boundless blooming, and it's all good.