Morning in Bloom

Skies are leaden, and a fine murk wraps the village, rounding shapes and blurring the edges of houses, cars, trees and streets. This is one of those mornings when the village seems to be dancing (or skating) on the edge of the world and the weather and is not quite sure where it belongs. Late autumn, early winter? Where are we?

Adjectives like dark and sunless are evocative, but there are better words for such intervals: bosky, caliginous, cloudy, crepuscular, dark, dim, drab, dusky, gloomy, murky, nebulous, obfuscous, obscure, opaque, overcast, shadowy, somber, stygian, sunless, tenebrous, twilighted, umbral, vague, wintry.

With no light to speak of, this is not a morning for wandering about with camera and peripherals, so far anyway. When Beau and I went out a few minutes ago, an icy wind teased the backs of our necks, and the matter of a longer morning walk was put aside for now. My furry son trotted back into the bedroom and curled up in my warm spot. A single eye peered mournfully at me from behind the patchwork when I entered the room to console him with a tummy rub.

What to do? Upright, but not quite awake, I pull a canister of Chinese flower tea out of the pantry and brew up a pot. As the dried blooms take in liquid and open out, the kitchen is filled with perfume, and home is summery all over again.

Vessel, beaker and contents are almost too arty to drink, and I take image after image, posing them on the kitchen counter, on the old oak table in the dining room, on a wooden platter, a bamboo mat, a brightly coloured napkin. The teapot and cup pose cheerfully, sending up little clouds of fragrant steam and giving breathy sighs now and then. Small wonders amuse small minds on a grey morning in November.

There is a stack of art books to prowl through, and there is a little Mozart on the CD player (Die Zauberflöte). There is a folio of lovely creamy paper and a box of art pens in splendid Mediterranean shades to play with. For dinner this evening, there will be something fragrant and spicy that sings and dances on the tongue. There is room at the table for everyone, and there are enough mugs and cups to go around, mismatched of course. On days like this, one does whatever she can do to light things up. The more kindred spirits around her hearth and table, the better.

Earth and Sky and Lake Together

The water is still, and trees along the far shore are cloaked in drifting fog that billows and swirls as though stirred by a vast, benign and blessing hand. Earth and water are warmer than the air, and the meeting of the three elements spins a pearly veil over everything in sight. Sunlight or autumn rain - either will disperse the fog, but there is rain in the cards for today, and clouds are already moving in. It will most likely be rain that lifts the veil.

Thanks to cold nights, ground frost and the scouring north wind, the countryside is morphing into its early winter configuration. There is still a wealth of color in the eastern Ontario highlands, but here and there, trees are bare on their slopes, and fallen leaves are ankle deep in the woods. Just out of sight in this photo, an old hawthorn has lost its leaves entirely and wears only a few frosted berries.

Also unseen is the scribe in wellies and warm jacket, carrying her blackthorn walking stick, a camera, lenses, pen and field notebook. Her collar is turned up against the wind, and she is wearing gloves. In one of her pockets is a flask of Darjeeling tea, and in another, biscuits for her companion, Beau. She can't wander as far as she used to, but wander she does by golly, every chance she gets.

Caught up in the fey ambiance of the scene before her, she thinks it would be even more magical with sunlight filtering through the lacy golden tamaracks on the other side of the lake and radiating through the fog to create voluminous shadows on the water. For all that, she is at peace and contented with what she sees. She was feeling rather lost when she got here, and in truth, she is still feeling a little lost, but paradoxically, she is also feeling at home.

Alight From Within

The world is pearly grey, and there is rain in the forecast, but rumors of snowfall rather than rainfall persist. We watch skies, listen to local news broadcasts and monitor online networks for updates on the weather fronts heading our way from places further west and north. Rain would be a blessing, but it was rather a dry winter, so precipitation of any kind would be a fine thing, and that includes snow.

In the kitchen, coffee is in progress and the fragrance of freshly ground espresso beans tickles my freckled nose.  The sound of Mozart's opera The Magic Flute fills the air, and as I lurch about and froth milk for the morning cuppa, I find myself thinking of bird catchers, enchanted flutes, silver bells, and the Queen of the Night.

Mozart's opera is grand stuff, but something more is needed this morning, something that invokes springtime and summons sunlight into this (so far) dreary day. A pot of tulips in red and creamy yellow is the perfect response to such weather. Alight from within, the velvety blooms are jeweled lanterns in the window, and they glow.

The Way We Were

Sunday, Saying Yes to the World

Ultimately, to live an enchanted life is to pick up the pieces of our bruised and battered psyches, and to offer them the nourishment they long for. It is to be challenged, to be awakened, to be gripped and shaken to the core by the extraordinary which lies at the heart of the ordinary. Above all, to live an enchanted life is to fall in love with the world all over again. This is an active choice, a leap of faith which is necessary not just for our own sakes, but for the sake of the wide, wild Earth in whose being and becoming we are so profoundly and beautifully entangled.

Sharon Blackie, The Enchanted Life, Unlocking the Magic of the Everyday

Sunday, Saying Yes to the World

Ultimately, to live an enchanted life is to pick up the pieces of our bruised and battered psyches, and to offer them the nourishment they long for. It is to be challenged, to be awakened, to be gripped and shaken to the core by the extraordinary which lies at the heart of the ordinary. Above all, to live an enchanted life is to fall in love with the world all over again. This is an active choice, a leap of faith which is necessary not just for our own sakes, but for the sake of the wide, wild Earth in whose being and becoming we are so profoundly and beautifully entangled.

Sharon Blackie, The Enchanted Life, Unlocking the Magic of the Everyday

Thursday Poem - An April Night

The moon comes up o'er the deeps of the woods,
And the long, low dingles that hide in the hills,
Where the ancient beeches are moist with buds
Over the pools and the whimpering rills;

And with her the mists, like dryads that creep
From their oaks, or the spirits of pine-hid springs,
Who hold, while the eyes of the world are asleep,
With the wind on the hills their gay revellings.

Down on the marshlands with flicker and glow
Wanders Will-o'-the-Wisp through the night,
Seeking for witch-gold lost long ago
By the glimmer of goblin lantern-light.

The night is a sorceress, dusk-eyed and dear,
Akin to all eerie and elfin things,
Who weaves about us in meadow and mere
The spell of a hundred vanished Springs.

Lucy Maud Montgomery

Thursday Poem - Why We Tell Stories

For Linda Foster

1
Because we used to have leaves
and on damp days
our muscles feel a tug,
painful now, from when roots
pulled us into the ground

and because our children believe
they can fly, an instinct retained
from when the bones in our arms
were shaped like zithers and broke
neatly under their feathers

and because before we had lungs
we knew how far it was to the bottom
as we floated open-eyed
like painted scarves through the scenery
of dreams, and because we awakened

and learned to speak

2
We sat by the fire in our caves,
and because we were poor, we made up a tale
about a treasure mountain
that would open only for us

and because we were always defeated,
we invented impossible riddles
only we could solve,
monsters only we could kill,
women who could love no one else
and because we had survived
sisters and brothers, daughters and sons,
we discovered bones that rose
from the dark earth and sang
as white birds in the trees

3
Because the story of our life
becomes our life

Because each of us tells
the same story
but tells it differently

and none of us tells it
the same way twice

Because grandmothers looking like spiders
want to enchant the children
and grandfathers need to convince us
what happened happened because of them

and though we listen only
haphazardly, with one ear,
we will begin our story
with the word and

Lisel Mueller, from Alive Together

Thursday Poem - An April Night

The moon comes up o'er the deeps of the woods,
And the long, low dingles that hide in the hills,
Where the ancient beeches are moist with buds
Over the pools and the whimpering rills;

And with her the mists, like dryads that creep
From their oaks, or the spirits of pine-hid springs,
Who hold, while the eyes of the world are asleep,
With the wind on the hills their gay revellings.

Down on the marshlands with flicker and glow
Wanders Will-o'-the-Wisp through the night,
Seeking for witch-gold lost long ago
By the glimmer of goblin lantern-light.

The night is a sorceress, dusk-eyed and dear,
Akin to all eerie and elfin things,
Who weaves about us in meadow and mere
The spell of a hundred vanished Springs.

Lucy Maud Montgomery

Morning in Bloom

Skies are leaden, and a fine murk wraps the village.  Snow fell overnight and everything is shrouded in white, houses, cars, trees and streets. This is one of those mornings when the village seems to be dancing (or skating) on the edge of the world and the weather and not quite sure where it belongs. 

Adjectives like dark and sunless are evocative, but there are better words for such intervals: bosky, caliginous, cloudy, crepuscular, dark, dim, drab, dusky, gloomy, murky, nebulous, obfuscous, obscure, opaque, overcast, shadowy, somber, stygian, sunless, tenebrous, twilighted, umbral, vague, wintry.

With no light to speak of, this is not a morning for wandering about with camera and peripherals, so far anyway. When Beau and I went out a few minutes ago, an icy wind teased the backs of our necks, and the matter of a longer morning walk was put aside for now. My furry son trotted back into the bedroom and curled up in my warm spot. A single eye peered mournfully at me from behind the patchwork when I entered the room to console him with a tummy rub.

What to do? Upright, but not quite awake, I pulled a canister of Chinese flower tea  out of the pantry and brewed up a pot. As the dried blooms took in liquid and opened out, the kitchen filled with perfume, and home was summery all over again. Vessel, beaker and contents were almost too arty to drink, and I took image after image, posing them on the kitchen counter, on the old oak table in the dining room, on a wooden platter, a bamboo mat. The teapot and cup posed cheerfully, sending up little clouds of fragrant steam and giving breathy sighs now and then. Small wonders amuse small minds on a snowy morning in November.

There is a stack of art books to prowl through, and there is a little Mozart on the CD player (Die Zauberflöte). There is a folio of lovely creamy paper and a box of art pens in splendid Mediterranean shades to play with.  There will be scones this morning, and for dinner this evening, there will be something fragrant and spicy that sings and dances on the tongue. There is room at the table for everyone, and there are enough mugs and cups to go around too, mismatched of course. On days like this, one does whatever she can do to light things up.

Sunday - Saying Yes to the World

Surely something wonderful is sheltered inside you. I say this with all confidence, because I happen to believe we are all walking repositories of buried treasure. I believe this is one of the oldest and most generous tricks the universe plays on us human beings, both for its own amusement and for ours: The universe buries strange jewels deep within us all, and then stands back to see if we can find them.

The hunt to uncover those jewels — that’s creative living.

The courage to go on that hunt in the first place — that’s what separates a mundane existence from a more enchanted one.

Elizabeth Gilbert, Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear

Friday Ramble - Atomy

Atomy comes to us from the Middle English attome, the Latin atomus and the Greek atomos: a- (not) plus -tomos (divided), tomos hailing from the Indo-European temnein meaning to cut. Kindred words (of course) are atom, atomism and atomic, epitome and (not so obviously), tome which now refers to a book or a volume of reading material but once meant simply something cut or carved from a larger entity.  Synonyms include corpuscle, mote, particle, speck, molecule and grain, as in "a grain of sand" or "a grain of sugar".

An atomy is a tiny part of something, a minute particle. Atoms were once held by science to be the smallest possible units of the known physical universe: dense, central, positively charged nuclei circled by electrons whirling around in ecstatic orbit. Complete within themselves, they were thought to be irreducible and indivisible except for constrained processes of removal or transfer or the exchange of component electrons.

Physicists now think the much smaller quark may be the fundamental element of creation.  Named after a nonsense word coined by James Joyce in his novel Finnegan's Wake, quarks come in six eccentric flavors: up, down, charm, strange, bottom and top. Up and down quarks bond together to form composite particles called hadrons, the most stable being the protons and neutrons resting in the heart of atoms. Other quark pairs (charm/strange, top/bottom) have no function in our universe as we know it, but they had an important role to play as it was coming into being. Wonder of wonders, everything is in constant motion, these other quark pairs becoming up and down quarks as they decay and taking their rightful place within atoms.

Atomies come to mind when I awaken to gray skies, to rain on the roof beating staccato time without reference to meter or metronome, to a puckish wind capering in the eaves and ruffling tiny green leaves in the garden like tangy decks of playing cards, to drifting fog wrapping the old trees, rooflines and chimneys in the village.

Each and every drop beyond my windows is an atomy,  a minute, complete world teeming with vibrant life, a whole magical universe looking up and smiling at this ungainly creature bent over in wonder with a camera in her hand.  I don't think I will ever get a handle on using my macro lens to its full potential, but it is teaching me how to look at the world in new ways, and that is a fine old thing.

Sunday - Saying Yes to the World

Ultimately, to live an enchanted life is to pick up the pieces of our bruised and battered psyches, and to offer them the nourishment they long for. It is to be challenged, to be awakened, to be gripped and shaken to the core by the extraordinary which lies at the heart of the ordinary. Above all, to live an enchanted life is to fall in love with the world all over again. This is an active choice, a leap of faith which is necessary not just for our own sakes, but for the sake of the wide, wild Earth in whose being and becoming we are so profoundly and beautifully entangled.
Sharon Blackie, The Enchanted Life, Unlocking the Magic of the Everyday

The Way We Were

... and long to be again, some magical day soon.

Out of the Snow, a Reminder

For all the white stuff deposited here this winter, the endless shoveling and heaving, our weariness of the season and all its trappings, it gifts us with surprises now and then, sometimes like this morning's image.

Pleasing bits of gnarly magic poke their heads out of the snow, and they are always wonderful to see. Desiccated remnants of last summer that they are, they are powerful reminders of its warmth and light, its glorious coloration and fragrance, and they awaken something within.

The dried fronds, wands and seed heads coming back into the light of day have curving, sinuous shapes and just a hint of the vibrant hues they once wore, and they are signs that winter is "getting old". We perch in towering snowdrifts, bear witness to the long white season's passing, think about springtime and nesting owls, about maple syrup gathering, about snowdrops and songbirds. We (season and humans) rattle and creak and go on.

Perceptions totter, wither, fade and take on strange shapes in late winter, and we need reminders of the earth's own wonder, magic and infinite change, in this case a strand of last summer's common tansy with flowing arty curves against a background of deep blue snow.

Sunday - Saying Yes to the World

We are all walking repositories of buried treasure. I believe this is one of the oldest and most generous tricks the universe plays on us human beings, both for its own amusement and for ours: The universe buries strange jewels deep within us all, and then stands back to see if we can find them.

The hunt to uncover those jewels—that’s creative living. The courage to go on that hunt in the first place—that’s what separates a mundane existence from a more enchanted one.

Elizabeth GIlbert

Earth and Sky and Lake Together

The water is still, and trees along the far shore cloaked in drifting fog that billows and swirls as though stirred by a vast, benign and blessing hand. Earth and water are warmer than the air, and the meeting of the three elements spins a pearly veil over everything in sight. Sunlight or autumn rain - either will disperse the fog, but there is rain in the cards for today, and clouds are already moving in. It will most likely be rain that lifts the veil.

Thanks to cold nights, frost and the scouring north wind, the countryside is morphing into its early winter configuration. There is still a wealth of color in the eastern Ontario highlands, but here and there, trees are bare on their slopes, and fallen leaves lie ankle deep in the woods. Just out of sight in this photo, an old hawthorn has lost its leaves entirely and wears only a few frosted berries.

Also unseen is the scribe in wellies and warm jacket, carrying her blackthorn walking stick, a camera, lenses, pen and field notebook. Her collar is turned up against the wind, and she is wearing gloves. In one of her pockets is a flask of Darjeeling tea, and in another, biscuits for her companion, Beau. She can't wander as far as she used to, but wander she does, every chance she gets.

Caught up in the fey ambiance of the scene before her, she thinks it would be even more magical with sunlight filtering through the lacy golden tamaracks on the other side of the lake and radiating through the fog to create voluminous shadows on the water. For all that, she is at peace and contented with what she sees. She was feeling rather lost when she got here, and in truth, she is still feeling a little lost, but paradoxically, she is also feeling at home.

Sunday - Saying Yes to the World

Ultimately, to live an enchanted life is to pick up the pieces of our bruised and battered psyches, and to offer them the nourishment they long for. It is to be challenged, to be awakened, to be gripped and shaken to the core by the extraordinary which lies at the heart of the ordinary. Above all, to live an enchanted life is to fall in love with the world all over again. This is an active choice, a leap of faith which is necessary not just for our own sakes, but for the sake of the wide, wild Earth in whose being and becoming we are so profoundly and beautifully entangled.
Sharon Blackie, The Enchanted Life, Unlocking the Magic of the Everyday

Sunday - Saying Yes to the World

One human life is deeper than the ocean. Strange fishes and sea-monsters and mighty plants live in the rock-bed of our spirits. The whole of human history is an undiscovered continent deep in our souls. There are dolphins, plants that dream, magic birds inside us. The sky is inside us. The earth is in us.
Ben Okri, The Famished Road

Drifting Along in the Fog

On September mornings, the village can be a mysterious place, the earth often warmer than the air above, and the meeting of the two elements turning otherwise mundane landscape features into entities fey and luminous. Autumn is properly upon us, and she is comfortable in her tenure of mist, rain, wind and madcap tumbling leaves.

There is nothing like a good fog, and September dishes up some splendid atmospheric murks. Mist swirls around everything, draping the whiskery trees, smoothing hard edges and rounding the contours of house and street. The north wind scours leaves from the old trees near home, and they rustle underfoot as Beau and I go along on our early walks. If we listen carefully, we can sometimes hear Cassie and Spencer pottering along beside us, their happy feet doing a kind of scuffling dance through the fallen treasure.

Out of the pearly gray and sepia come sounds now and again. Birds converse in hedgerows and geese move unseen among the clouds, singing as they pass over our heads. Doors open and close as sleepy residents collect their morning papers. There is the soft growling of automobiles and the rumble of buses, the muffled cadence of joggers gliding through the park, children chattering on their way to school, commuters heading downtown to work. Once in a while, we hear the whistle of a faraway train, usually only a faint echoing in the air. Close to home this morning, raindrops beat a staccato rhythm on our roof, and little rivers are singing through the eaves. All together, it is symphonic.

On such mornings, the world seems boundless, brimming with luminous floating Zen possibility, soil and trees and sky and mist giving tongue in a language that is wild and compelling.  Part of me is curled up and engaged in a slow breathing meditation, counting my breaths, in and out, in and out. Other parts are out there drifting along with the fog and happy to be doing it.  Emaho!