Friday Rambles, Demeter At the Gate

A single burnished leaf from the oak in the front yard floats down and comes to rest in a pot of bronzey chrysanthemums on the threshold. The deep scarlet in the center of the "mums" matches the vibrant color of the front door, a cheerful thing and very welcoming. Days are still very warm here for the most part, but nights are starting to cool down, and it won't be long until we have to carry pots indoors every evening as darkness falls and the wind comes out of the river.

As the oak leaf makes itself comfortable among the blooms, a long v-shaped skein of geese passes overhead, joyously honking on its way out to farm fields to feed. The great Canadas will return at sunset and spend the night on the river.

Closer to the earth, the swallows of summer are packing their flight bags and making ready to depart, their places on telephone wires to be taken by flutters of sparrows and constellations of noisy starlings who are putting on winter stars and flashy yellow beaks. Monarch butterflies will be leaving around the same time.

Frantic squirrels everywhere are filling their larders, and I have surrendered to the little blighters in the matter of geraniums - there does not seem to be much I can do to prevent the flowers from being unceremoniously tossed out of their pots and replaced with buried acorns, berries, crabapples and walnuts. For some reason, the squirrels leave chrysanthemums alone. The scent perhaps?

When I awakened this morning before sunrise, Jupiter was just above the eastern horizon and the constellation Orion was rising in the southeast quadrant, his club held high and sword belt twinkling. The appearance of the giant is one of my seasonal markers, and his appearance in the predawn sky is a sign fall is on its way.

Above us, autumn stars twinkle in the darkness. Here on earth, apples, corn, pumpkins and hay are ripening and being gathered in. There is no doubt about it—Demeter is at the gate, and she is rattling its rusty latch with enthusiasm. The lady knows the ancient cantrip that grants her entrance to these smoky northern hills, and she knows the key in which it is to be sung. This is my favorite time of the year.

Friday Ramble - Consider

This week's word is one of my favorite words in the whole English lexicon, in part because of the notions of careful thought, deliberation and balance enfolded in it, but mostly because of its splendid celestial origins.

Think Vincent Van Gogh and his gorgeous "Starry Starry Night". Consider hails from around 1350 CE, tracing its origins through the Middle English consideren and the Latin considerare, both meaning "in the company of the stars", thence the Latin sidus/sideris meaning a star or cluster of stars. At the beginning of it all is the Proto-Indo-European (PIE) root form *sweid meaning to shine. Other English words like constellation and sidereal are kin, the first describing a group of stars, and the latter meaning simply "starry" and by extension, celestial or heavenly.

Small wonder that we are given to considering, at least in the original sense of the word. Forged from the dust of ancient stars, we are probably never more true to ourselves or more in tune with our fundamental natures and inner light than when we are engaging in the liminal act of considering something. In doing so, we move away from the mundane and profane and intuitively toward our bone deep connection with the cosmos. Hallelujah, we are the universe expressing itself, and the stars over our heads are our kin. Dancing motes in the eye of the infinite are we.

It's one thing to consider my origins on a cold clear night when I can almost reach up and touch the moon and stars. It's another thing entirely to do so in late summer or early autumn when the sky is filled with clouds from here to there, and I can hardly see hand or lens, let alone sunlight, moonlight or stars. Who doesn't love a good haze or fog though, and days and nights on the cusp of the seasons dish up some splendid, atmospheric murks. Even when we can't see them, our starry kin are right up there over our heads and shining down on us. As Clarissa Pinkola Estes wrote:

"We find lingering evidence of archetype in the images and symbols found in stories, literature, poetry, painting, and religion. It would appear that its glow, its voice, and its fragrance are meant to cause us to be raised up from contemplating the shit on our tails to occasionally traveling in the company of the stars."

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.

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.

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.

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 wistfully. The clock of the seasons is ticking away in the background, and 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 other fine summers ahead, but this summer is waning, and its days are numbered. The summer solstice has come and gone, and we are sliding gently down the hill toward autumn, shorter days and longer nights.

Thoughts of coming and going are inevitably inscribed on summer's middling pages, and they're unsettling notions, making for restlessness and vague discontent, a gentle melancholy concerning the nature of time, what is falling away and the transience of all earthly things. A heightened awareness of suchness (or tathata) is a middle-of-the-summer thing for sure. For the most part, one goes gently along with the flow, breathing in and out, trying to rest in the moment and just do the garden things that need doing. Oher times, pensive feelings take over. 

Old garden roses are a perfect metaphor for the season. Most 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, fragrance lingers in every corner of the garden, and every year I fall 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.

Once in a while, I catch a glimpse of the Great Mystery while I am wobbling about in the garden, and that is surely what this old life is all about. I wish I did a better job of remembering that and keeping everything in perspective, but forgetting now and then is quite all right - the roses remind me.

Friday Ramble - On the Edge of an Inland Sea

The lake is a wild and elemental place at sunset, mist floating on the water and draping the shoreline, the call of loons across the water, the susurrus of a heron striding the reedy shallows, the languid ripple of pike or perch rising to the surface and then falling back into the depths in slow motion. A fabulous place, time out of time, wonders beyond mere words. Apprentices of wonder are we, and it is good to be here at this time of day.

Old boats, bridges and wooden jetties, rafts, pylons and buoys—they are all human creations, and most of the time, they are anything but mysterious. At the end of day though, they are transformed by the fey trappings that always seem to cling to the entities along an inland sea as the sun goes down. Magical? Oh, yes. If the stuff could be bottled, it would retail for a small fortune. Such things, however, cannot be captured, consigned to arty little glass bottles, purchased or sold. 

When Beau and I arrive home, we are still dazzled by our sojourn on the shore, and we are, ourselves, a bit fey. Sundown dances behind our eyelids, and the light is votive in its shimmering intensity. The sound of the waves lapping the shore lingers in my thoughts, and the sound is as peaceful as a bell calling the faithful to church or temple or zendo. What Beau hears I am not sure, but his expression is thoughtful.

How long have we been coming here at this hour of the day? It's a transcendent experience, each and every time. Everything we need, almost everything in the world that matters, is right here on the shore of our inland sea, and we return whenever we can. In the words of Ursula K. Le Guin, we are always coming home.

Friday Ramble - Abundance

I awaken early and trot out to the garden wearing a faded cotton caftan, straw hat and sandals, and carrying a mug of Earl Grey. It's already wickedly hot out there, and the sky is obscured by a high gossamer heat haze.

The only sentient beings happy about this July heat are the blissfully foraging bees, flowering herbs and the ripening vegetables in village veggie patches: beans, peppers, tomatoes, garlic, chards and emerging gourds. Most vegetables show a little restraint, but the zucchini vines (as always) are on the march and threatening to take over entire gardens, if not the whole wide world. Are veggies sentient, and do they have Buddha nature? You bet they do, and I suspect they have long mindful conversations when we are not listening.

Villagers are an eccentric bunch when it comes to gardening. One neighbor is growing squash on her veranda, and another has planted cabbages and corn in her flower beds. A guy around the corner is cultivating every known variety of hot pepper in reclaimed plastic storage bins. The tubs are lined up along the sidewalk and driveway in front of his house, and the place looks like a jungle. (His back yard is too shady for a veggie garden.) He is not growing anything but hot peppers, and his enthusiasm for them is admirable; he plans to pickle each and every one.

Tomatoes are a marvel when they ripen. Scarlet or gold, occasionally purpled or striped, they come in all sizes and some surprising shapes. The first juicy heirloom "toms" of the season are the essence of feasting and celebration as they rest on the sideboard: fresh-from-the-garden jewels, rosy and flushed and beaded with early morning dew. A wedge of Brie or Camembert, gluten-free crackers, a sprinkling of sea salt and a few fresh basil leaves from the garden are all that is needed.

Oh honey sweet and hazy summer abundance . . . That luscious word made its first appearance in the fourteenth century, making its way down to us through the years through Middle English and Old French from the Latin abundāns, meaning overflowing. The adjective form is abundant, and synonyms for it include: ample, generous, lavish, plentiful; copious; plenteous; exuberant; overflowing; rich; teeming; profuse; prolific, replete, teeming, bountiful and liberal.

Abundant is the exactly the right word for these days of ripeness and plenty, as we weed and water and gather in, chuck things in jars, pickle up a storm and store summer's bounty to consume somewhere way up the road. Like bees and squirrels, we scurry about, preserving the contents of our gardens to nourish body and soul when temperatures fall and nights grow long. For all the sweetness and abundance held out in offering, there is a subtle ache to such times with their dews and hazes and ripening vegetables. These days are all too fleeting.

Friday Ramble - The Measure of Our Days

Nearing the end of June, 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 fences by the gate, and the silvery posts and rails give off a fine dry perfume.

There are orange and yellow hawkweeds, buttercups and clovers, daisies, tall rosy grasses and fragrant milkweed, several species of goldenrod, trefoils and prickly violet bugloss - all are moved by the arid summer wind and swaying in place. 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.

Birds are everywhere, red-tailed hawks circling overhead, swallows and kingfishers over 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.

Summer is short in this part of the great wide world, and there is much to do in June. It feels as though we have just arrived in this glorious season of light and flowering and birdsong, but daylight hours are already waning, and we are sliding gently toward longer nights and darker times. How can this be?

Weeding, watering, pruning and general garden work fill our days, and we are tired and happy when night falls. The first harvest is not far away now, and notions of gathering, storing and putting things by fill our thoughts as we potter about with watering cans, secateurs and hoes.

I began this morning with the words "It is high summer". Then I remembered that the solstice has just 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 yet to come, but we have stepped into the languid waters that flow downhill to autumn.

Friday Ramble - Kingfisher Days

It goes without saying that I spend many of my summer hours wandering around and taking photos of things. The eastern Ontario highlands are a treasure trove in all seasons, and I feel fortunate to be there and taking it all in, especially in summer when the world is green and gold and full of wild music. It would be rude not to pay attention and say thanks to the Old Wild Mother once in a while.

There are wonders everywhere: dragonflies, butterflies and moths, bumbles and wasps, birds, puddles, trees, orchids and wildflowers, fields of waving grain, meandering rivers, poppies, lilies and lupins gone wild and doing their own untrammeled thing in roadside ditches.

I spend hours crawling about in the woods on all fours with a macro lens on the camera, “doing” ferns, mosses, lichens, bugs, salamanders and little green frogs. Every tump, stump, leafy alcove and stone has wonders to share. Is it difficult to get back to a standing position afterward? Oh yes, but I do it anyway. 

Other hours are spent at the lake capturing loons floating on the water at sunset, herons motionless in the shallows, kingfishers hunting the last small meal of the day. Once in a while, an otter turns up and watches me from the water for a while,  occasionally displaying the bright red inside of its mouth and a set of wicked teeth. Curious critters, otters. The ones at the lake are all called Portly.

Birds, otters and fabulous sunsets, there is always something to see. These are kingfisher days, times out of time, full of magic and an elusive something I am always reaching toward and can't quite find a word or image for. When I arrive home, dusty, sweaty and speckled with leaf dust, I look at everything, but the images make me groan, so I archive them on a DVD and think no more of it.

Years later, when I am searching for an image for something or other, I pull out a DVD of long ago captures and discover to my astonishment that it holds treasures. Wonder of wonders, some of the images are not too bad at all. I remember when they were taken, my soulmate and Beau (or Cassie or Spencer) and I together out in the woods or on the shore at the lake, royally chewed by bugs and happy as clams.

My apologies to Susan Coyne for borrowing the title of her memoir (Kingfisher Days) for this morning's post. Her creation is a gem, and I am reading it again.

Friday Ramble - Golden

Greater Yellow Lady Slipper

(Cypripedium parviflorum var pubescens)

I sometimes sign on here in the morning, survey my efforts, utter a silent "meh" and decide to say (or write) as little as possible. That seems to be happening more often than it used to. When I plunk myself down in front of the computer and skim the early news, I cringe. How can we be doing this to each other? I can't find words for what is going on, or at least not the right words. Lately, I can go several days at a clip without surfing digital newspapers.

This week, I thought of my wild orchids. In the eastern Ontario highlands, lady slippers are blooming as they have for time out of mind. In their flickering, sunlit alcoves, they sway and sing a capella, a testament to wildness and belonging and community. Whole hillsides of wild golden grace express the indwelling incandescent spirit of the living earth without any help at all from This Old Thing. Wild orchids are a balm to this world weary spirit.

My departed soulmate and I watched over our wild orchid colony for many years, protecting them from being eaten by deer and trampled by bears. Every year, I stretched out in the grass nearby and marveled at their perfection, had long conversations with them and captured them with my lens every chance I got. In the midst of global disease and rampant human brutality, here they are again in all their golden perfection.

Events on the world stage are breaking us wide open, and they compel us to confront aspects of our humanity that we would rather not acknowledge, let alone address. The orchids are a powerful reminder of what it means to be a sentient being on this dear little planet, and I am grateful for their counsel. Time for us to get to work.

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!

Friday Ramble - Aestival

This week's word is one of my favorites, hailing from Middle English, Middle and Old French, thence the Late Latin aestīvālis and earlier Latin aestās meaning summer or summery. Both forms are cognate with the Sanskrit इन्द्धे (inddhé) meaning to light or set on fire. At the beginning of our wordy explorations is the Proto-Indo-European (PIE) form h₂eydʰ- meaning heat, fire or to burn.

In the science of zoology, aestival refers to the tendency of all living creatures to be rather sleepy and slow moving in the heat of summer. Botanists use the word to describe the arrangement of organs or components in a flower bud. I used to think that the word siesta (a leisurely nap after lunch) was related, but I discovered some time 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.

June is only two weeks away, and this week's word is one of my favorites for the brief greening season at the heart of the northern calendar year. Summer is a fine word too, but it doesn't hold a candle to the frothy perfumed magnificence of the golden season that reigns 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.

After an unusually long, cold winter, things are beginning to warm up. There are not many nectar gathering insects about yet, but ornamental trees in the village (almond, cherry, crabapple, magnolia and mock orange) are starting to bloom, and soon the air will be full of fluttering petals and sweet fragrance. Beau and I stop to look at every tree. One of these fine mornings, the objects of our rapt attention will be chock full of ecstatic bees and blissed out bumbles.

I say "aestival" and its sibilance summons up images of outdoor festivals and al fresco celebrations, 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. It's all golden, and it's all good. Here comes June in all her glory, and we are ready.

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.

Friday Ramble - Just a Little Green

Zen teacher and chef Dana Veldon thinks a simple bowl of lemons can offer us the world, and she always keeps one on the counter in her kitchen. Since I read her book (Finding Yourself in the Kitchen: Kitchen Meditations and Inspired Recipes from a Mindful Cook) years ago, I have been doing it too. She is right - the little dears are life-changing. I love the look of them when light coming through the kitchen window falls across them, their colour and shape, their texture and fragrance. They lift my spirits, and their citrusy goodness makes me smile.

Having a pot of parsley in one's kitchen is also a fine way of invoking the right stuff before spring and summer really get going, and I do that too. The smell of the stuff is uplifting, refreshing and bright and just a little grassy. When I discovered a bin in my green grocer's shop a few days ago, I grabbed a splendid bunch and merrily tossed it into my cart. The cherry tomatoes purchased on the same expedition were not too shabby either. Both went into the wok with odds and ends from the fridge, and the results were served on leftover rice for dinner that night. A banquet. Yum.

No doubt about it, lemons and parsley light up a kitchen, and as sure as the Old Wild Mother made little green apples, they cheer me up on a bleak morning. They turn my impromptu stirrings into happy magics, and that is what life is all about.

Friday Ramble - Bloom

Foliage popping out everywhere, avian courtship rites and nests cobbled together in every tree - the village is greening up before our eyes as Beau and I potter about and peer into gardens and hedgerows. Spring does not make a quiet entrance this far north - she comes over the hill with an exuberant bound, reaches out with a twiggy hand, and everything bursts into bloom. On a recent morning walk, the first crocus of the season was blooming in a protected alcove, and we both did a little dance. We were drenched by a squall on the way home and didn't mind at all.

How can this week's word be anything except bloom? The word originates in the Middle English blo or blome, meaning to open up and flower lavishly, to glow with health and well-being, to be as sleek and glossy as an otter, as dewy and flushed with sunlight as a garden tulip or an early blooming orchid in a wild and wooded place. There are probable connections (or roots) between bloom and bhel in Proto-Indo-European, the hypothetical common ancestor of all modern European languages, In that ancient, oral and unscribed tongue, bhel means to unfold, to leaf out or come into flower.

Perhaps a better word for this week would be sex, because that is what springtime's lush colors, alluring fragrances, velvet textures and warbling ballads are about - the Old Wild Mother's madcap dance of exuberance, fertility and fruitfulness. Every species on the planet seems focused on perpetuating its own heady genetic brew, and the collective pleasure in being alive is almost tangible.

Forsaking appointed chores, we poke around in the garden, lurch about in village thickets, peer into trees and contemplate the blue sky for long intervals. It's simply a matter of blooming wherever one happens to be planted. Beau is already a master of that splendid Zen art, and his silly old mum is working on it.

Friday Ramble - Radical

This week's word is radical, a natural choice for this madcap season when greenery is popping up all over the place, and we are thinking about planting flowers, veggies and herbs in our gardens. It comes to us through the late Latin rādīcālis meaning "originating in the ground", and the Old English wrotan meaning to root, gnaw or dig up. Both spring from the Proto-Indo-European (PIE) wrad meaning branch or root. Having said all that, it will not be safe to seed, plant or root anything this far north until the end of May. We had snow earlier this week, lucky us.

Synonyms include: fundamental, basic, basal, bottom, cardinal, constitutional, deep-seated, essential, foundational, inherent, innate, intrinsic, native, natural, organic, original, primal, primary, primitive, profound, thoroughgoing, underlying, vital. They also include pejorative words such as anarchistic, chaotic, extremist, fanatical, lawless, militant, rabid, rebellious, revolutionary, and seditious.

Those of us who live a little differently are sometimes called "radical". Ditto those who live outside the mainstream or "off the grid", who don't follow accepted social standards and tend to do their own thing rather than just placidly following the herd like a bunch of sheep. In the sixties, being called "radical" was mostly a compliment, but these days it is often pejorative.

How odd that a word used to describe the unconventional, independent, mildly eccentric and downright peculiar actually means something as lovely, organic and simple as "rooted". Do I consider myself radical? Anyone who writes, sketches, takes heaps of bad photos, rambles in the woods in all sorts of weather and talks to trees is a tad peculiar, so I suppose I am.

Our word signifies a bone deep kinship with everything that matters in this dear little blue world. It's about the good dark earth under our feet and the sky over our heads, the sun and the moon and the stars. It's about rebirth, belonging, community and non-duality. Roots down, branches up and away we go...

Friday Ramble - Atomy

This week's word 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. Scientists once thought atoms were the smallest 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 is the fundamental element of creation. Named after a word coined by James Joyce in Finnegan's Wake, quarks come in six eccentric flavors: up, down, charm, strange, bottom and top. Up and down quarks are the most common, coming together to form composite particles like the protons and neutrons in the heart of atoms. Surprise, surprise, everything happens in threes, and three is my favourite number. A proton is composed of two up quarks and one down quark, a neutron one up quark and two down quarks. Other quarks (charm/strange, top/bottom) have no function in the universe as we know it, but they played an important role as it was coming into being. These other quarks become up and down quarks as they decay and take their rightful place within atoms.

Atomies come to mind when I awaken, as I have this morning, to leaden skies and 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 and buds in the garden like tangy decks of playing cards, to drifting fog wrapping the old trees, rooflines and chimneys in the village.

Every raindrop (or dewdrop) out in the garden this morning is an atomy, a minute complete world teeming with vibrant life. Within each is a whole magical universe looking up and smiling at this ungainly creature bent over in wonder with a camera in her hand. Either that or the little dears are recoiling in dismay. I won't ever get a handle on using my macro lens to its full potential, but its loving eye is teaching me how to look at the world in new ways, and that is a fine thing to be sure.

Friday Ramble - Homecoming

First come jubilant skeins of of geese flying in from the south and singing their return, then ducks splashing about in the melted alcoves of local rivers and streams. There is a whole lot of happy quacking in roadside ditches and puddles.

A single heron perches on the frozen shore of Dalhousie Lake and wonders why on earth she has come home so early in the season. Trumpeter swans and loons will not return for weeks, until there is more open water.

On the Two Hundred Acre Wood, there are larks and killdeer, beaky snipe and woodcock, a handful of plucky robins, the graceful "v" shapes (dihedrals) of turkey vultures soaring majestically over the trees and rocks and rocking effortlessly back and forth in their flight. From below, the light catches their silvery flight feathers and dark wing linings, and the great birds are as magnificent as any eagle.

A solitary goshawk perches in a bare tree on the hill, and a male harrier describes perfect, languid circles over the western field. Both birds are hungry after their long journey north, and they train their fierce yellow eyes on the artfully frosted field below, always on the lookout for a good meal.

This morning, a male cardinal is singing his heart out in the ash tree in the garden, and an unidentified warbler lifts its voice somewhere in the darkness.

Even the weather foretold for this day will be a friend.

Friday Ramble for Ostara

Today marks the Vernal Equinox or Ostara, one of two times in the calendar year (the other being the Autumn Equinox or Mabon) when the Earth and her unruly children hover in perfect balance for a brief interval. Humans had nothing to do with this day - it's a pivotal astronomic point ordained by the natural order of things in the astonishingly beautiful cosmos where we live out our days, spinning like tops in the Great Round of space and time.

Today,  day and night are perfectly balanced in length. After a long hard winter that persists in hanging about and making our lives an endless snow removal exercise, that is something to crow about. No matter what the weather is like today (and it is nothing to write home about), brighter, warmer times are on their way.

If I lived further south, this might be a time of greening and enchantment, a day when Eostre, the old Teutonic goddess of greening and fertility, wanders wild places with her arms full of spring blooms. Flowers would spring up in her footsteps as she passed, and she would be attended by hares, her special animal. The air would be filled with birdsong, the heady fragrance of rich dark earth and wild springtime herbs.

Alas, the only snowdrops blooming here at the moment are in a glass jar in my study. It will be several weeks until Lady Spring makes an appearance, but rumors of her imminent presence and the arrival of the greening season persist. We are hopeful. It has been a long winter this time around, and Eostre can't show up too soon for me. The birds in the garden feel the same and are proclaiming their craving for warmth and light. Every feathered visitor seems to be declaring its lofty status as a messenger from the sacred, a harbinger of abundance, fertility and new life.

Early this morning, Beau and I went outside into the garden for a few minutes, and a cold going it was. As we shivered in the star spangled darkness and looked up, it seemed to us that March's full moon (now only a thin waxing crescent a day or two past new) always bears more than a passing resemblance to a great cosmic egg. Its egginess is a perfect expression of this turning of the wheel with its verdant motifs of warmth, light and new life coming into being.

There is, most assuredly, blooming in our thoughts, but the weather is too cold for outdoor celebrations, and it will be very dark tonight since the moon is a thin waxing crescent. We will spend a few minutes outside looking at the stars, and perhaps we will light a celebratory candle on the deck, but our observance will be indoors for the most part. All are welcome at the table, and there are enough chairs and mugs to go around. See you there.