Thursday Poem - The Peace of Wild Things

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

Wendell Berry

(August 5, 1934 – August 31, 2026)

A rare light has gone out of the world with Wendell Berry's passing. I admired him, and not just for his written work. He was a passionate advocate for the earth, for common sense, decency and compassion, for all those values that are, or ought to be, the bedrock of our existence on this dear little blue planet.

Sunday, Saying Yes to the World

Grace is the celebration of life, relentlessly hounding all the non-celebrants in the world. It is a floating, cosmic bash shouting its way through the streets of the universe, flinging the sweetness of its cassations to every window, pounding at every door in a hilarity beyond all liking and happening, until the prodigals come out at last and dance, and the elder brothers finally take their fingers out of their ears.

Robert Farrar Capon, from Between Noon & 
Three: Romance, Law and the Outrage of Grace

Thursday Poem - The Peace of Wild Things

When despair for the world grows in me

and I wake in the night at the least sound

in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,

I go and lie down where the wood drake

rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.

I come into the peace of wild things

who do not tax their lives with forethought

of grief. I come into the presence of still water.

And I feel above me the day-blind stars

waiting with their light. For a time

I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

Wendell Berry

Thursday Poem - The Peace of Wild Things

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound

in fear of what my life

and my children’s lives may be,

I go and lie down where the wood drake 

rests in his beauty on the water,

and the great heron feeds.

I come into the peace of wild things

who do not tax their lives

with forethought of grief.

I come into the presence of still water.

And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light.

For a time I rest in the grace of the world

and am free.

Wendell Berry, from Collected Poems

Sunday, Saying Yes to the World

Finding beauty in a broken world is acknowledging that beauty leads us to our deepest and highest selves. It inspires us. We have an innate desire for grace. It’s not that all our definitions of beauty are the same, but when you see a particular heron in the bend in the river, day after day, something in your soul stirs. We remember what it means to be human. 

Terry Tempest Williams

Thursday Poem - The Peace of Wild Things

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

Wendell Berry, from Collected Poems

Magnolia Lighting the Day

Nights in the village are cool; morning skies are gray and overcast. The forecast for the next few days is for lower temperatures, clouds from here to there and rain. The word for this week ought to be "puddle".

Not a leaf to be seen on her fretwork of arching branches, the magnolia tree around the corner ignores the gloom (both weather and COVID related) and is unfurling a cloud of tulip-shaped blooms. In years past, she gifted her subtle colors and delicate fragrance to commuters running for buses, to children in rainbow boots and slickers wending their way to school and postmen stuffing mailboxes, to rumbling trucks sweeping village streets clean of dust. This morning she offers her grace and silent benediction to one old hen and her canine companion out for an early walk.

By the end of today, the tulip tree will probably be bare, her petals set free by the wind and floating down to carpet the garden like confetti.  This morning, she is a candle, a veritable tree full of candles lighting the murky day.

Sunday - Saying Yes to the World

Grace is the celebration of life, relentlessly hounding all the non-celebrants in the world. It is a floating, cosmic bash shouting its way through the streets of the universe, flinging the sweetness of its cassations to every window, pounding at every door in a hilarity beyond all liking and happening, until the prodigals come out at last and dance, and the elder brothers finally take their fingers out of their ears.

Robert Farrar Capon, from Between Noon & Three:
Romance, Law & the Outrage of Grace

Friday Ramble - Taking in Light

Oh, how these buttery yellow gerbera blooms capture and hold the sun within.

Kin to dahlias, daisies, marigolds, calendulas, coneflowers, chrysanthemums, zinnias, and the great towering sunflowers, gerberas are as devoted to the sun as their cousins are, drinking in morning light and storing it in the frilly tutus of their lavish petals.  Their centers (capitula) appear to be single flowers, but each is a community made up of hundreds of tiny individual blooms.

Little earthbound suns, gerbera dish out abundance like honey, and other garden flowers behind them are moved and uplifted by their frothy golden magnificence, by their almost imperceptible swaying movement, by the soft, sighing music of their duet with the wind.

Now and then, all living creatures falter from time to time. The loss of my soulmate toward the end of last year, and the pandemic that has us all (or nearly all) sequestered indoors have me feeling more so than ever this time around. There are intervals when I mark current events in the great wide world and the paucity of light beyond my windows and despair, am restless, out of sorts and heartsick, have the feeling that I am out of the world or dwelling apart from it.

Then I remember how my native place loves the light in early summer, and I am moved by the thought to do a little blooming of my own within. In the words of Wendell Berry, I come into the peace of wild things who do not tax their lives with forethought, I rest for a while in the grace of the world and am free. If only foolish beings like ourselves could take in light and store it as flowers do.

Sunday - Saying Yes to the World

Grace is the celebration of life, relentlessly hounding all the non-celebrants in the world. It is a floating, cosmic bash shouting its way through the streets of the universe, flinging the sweetness of its cassations to every window, pounding at every door in a hilarity beyond all liking and happening, until the prodigals come out at last and dance, and the elder brothers finally take their fingers out of their ears.

Robert Farrar Capon, from Between Noon & Three:
Romance, Law & the Outrage of Grace

Late Autumn, Songs in a Different Key

Leaves crunching underfoot or rattling like sabres in in the wind, ice crystals limning cedar fence rails along the ridge, blowsy plumes of frosted grasses along the perimeter of the western field, stands of frozen reeds along the pond—all are fine representations of the season, plangent leitmotifs in the windy musical work that is late autumn. At this time of the year, the Two Hundred Acre Wood is an Aeolian harp, a vast musical instrument that only the wind can play.

The season marches onward, settling slowly, and with deep sighs, into the subdued tints of early winter: soft bronzes, creams, beiges and silvery greys, small splashes here and there of winey red, burgundy, russet, a midnight blue almost iridescent in its sheen and intensity, but oh so fragile.

Frosts in the eastern Ontario highlands make themselves known as sugary drifts over old wood and on fallen leaves almost transparent in their lacy textures. An owl's artfully barred feather lies in thin sunlight under the fragrant cedars down by the spring and seems to be giving off a graceful pearly light of its own. The weedy residents of field and fen cavort in fringed and tasseled hats.

One needs another lens and tuning for late autumn and early winter, a different sort of vision, a song in a different key. The crone's senses are performing a seasonal shift of their own, moving carefully into the consideration of things small, still and muted, but complete within themselves and perfect, even when they are cold and wet and tattered. She couldn't hold a tune for all the tea in China, but she hums to herself and Beau as she goes along.

There is light in the world, even in these dark times, and she has to remember that. Her camera and lens never forget, and out in the woods, they drink in light like nectar. She is thankful that they do and that they remind her of the world's indwelling grace at every turning along the trail.

Sunday - Saying Yes to the World

Grace is the celebration of life, relentlessly hounding all the non-celebrants in the world. It is a floating, cosmic bash shouting its way through the streets of the universe, flinging the sweetness of its cassations to every window, pounding at every door in a hilarity beyond all liking and happening, until the prodigals come out at last and dance, and the elder brothers finally take their fingers out of their ears.

Robert Farrar Capon, from Between Noon & Three:
Romance, Law & the Outrage of Grace

Looking Across the Pond

It's the light that grabs your attention, every single time.
Sometimes, a little light gets inside you too.

Sunday - Saying Yes to the World

Finding beauty in a broken world is acknowledging that beauty leads us to our deepest and highest selves. It inspires us. We have an innate desire for grace. It’s not that all our definitions of beauty are the same, but when you see a particular heron in the bend in the river, day after day, something in your soul stirs. We remember what it means to be human. 
Terry Tempest Williams

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.

Thursday Poem - Tobar Phadraic (for St.Patrick's Day)

Turn sideways into the light as they say
the old ones did and disappear
into the originality of it all.

Be impatient with easy explanations
and teach that part of the mind
that wants to know everything
not to begin questions it cannot answer.

Walk the green road above the bay
and the low glinting fields
toward the evening sun, let that Atlantic
gleam be ahead of you and the gray light
of the bay below you, until you catch,
down on your left, the break in the wall,
for just above in the shadows
you’ll find it hidden, a curved arm
of rock holding the water close to the mountain,
a just-lit surface smoothing a scattering of coins,
and in the niche above, notes to the dead
and supplications for those who still live.

But for now, you are alone with the transfiguration
and ask no healing for your own
but look down as if looking through time,
as if through a rent veil from the other
side of the question you’ve refused to ask.

And you remember now, that clear stream
of generosity from which you drank,
how as a child your arms could rise and your palms
turn out to take the blessing of the world.

David Whyte (from River Flow)

Friday Ramble - Comfort

This week's word hails from the Middle English word comforten, meaning to make strong, thence from the Old French verb conforter, meaning to strengthen. Both forms probably have their origins in a Latin expression consisting of com (a prefix conveying intensity) and fortis meaning strong. Notions of comfort have at their core the idea of being strengthened, soothed and calmed, and the strength involved is not brawn or brute force, but vitality, courage and fortitude - one of the synonyms (and so far unplumbed here) for strength in my tattered thesaurus is connection. It made me think of something penned by Clarissa Pinkola Estes in Women Who Run With the Wolves: "We are strong when we stand with another soul. When we stand with one another, we cannot be broken."

Family and community go right at the top of the list when it comes to comfort, and there is comfort to be found in other things, activities and places (especially liminal places).  Mirabile dictu, my comforts can be revisited anywhere and any time in their radiant stillness: bowls of cafe-au-lait served up in my favorite coffee shop, the village on a foggy morning in early December with warmly dressed villagers and whiskery trees appearing out of the mist like magic and then disappearing again; the first snowfall of the season; a fire in the old fireplace burning apple or birch wood; a lovely big  fat book, my favorite teapot wafting clouds of freshly brewed chai steam into the air, the Two Hundred Acre Wood in Lanark, rambles among the old trees there with Himself and Spencer (at any time of the year).

There's a special stretch of shoreline on Dalhousie Lake where we love to go in early winter to say goodbye to the geese, and one breathtaking view from the edge of a road in Lanark. One looks out over miles of rolling pine clad ridges and shadowed alleys, and being there expresses the Great Mystery in ways I cannot begin to describe here - the vista never fails to nourish and enchant.  I revisit it often in my thoughts and in every season, but most often in late November and early December when the fog rolls in. This week, the image is on my desktop, and looking at it before going off to chemo was like a meditation.

Precious beyond words are things that convey comfort, peace of mind and elemental grace in a world which often seems to be barking mad and totally out of balance.  One takes her comfort where she finds it at this time of the year when days are short and, for the most part, dark. Now and again though, individual hours sparkle, and sometimes they sing like birds.  One of these mornings I just may start drawing flocks of migrating geese in the foam of my caffè latte.

Thursday Poem - Thanksgiving

I have been trying to read
the script cut in these hills—
a language carved in the shimmer of stubble
and the solid lines of soil, spoken
in the thud of apples falling
and the rasp of corn stalks finally bare.

The pheasants shout it with a rusty creak
as they gather in the fallen grain,
the blackbirds sing it
over their shoulders in parting,
and gold leaf illuminates the manuscript
where it is written in the trees.

Transcribed onto my human tongue
I believe it might sound like a lullaby,
or the simplest grace at table.
Across the gathering stillness
simply this: "For all that we have received,
dear God, make us truly grateful."

Lynn Ungar (from Blessing the Bread)

Happy Thanksgiving!

Sunday - Saying Yes to the World

Finding beauty in a broken world is acknowledging that beauty leads us to our deepest and highest selves. It inspires us. We have an innate desire for grace. It’s not that all our definitions of beauty are the same, but when you see a particular heron in the bend in the river, day after day, something in your soul stirs. We remember what it means to be human.
Terry Tempest Williams

Thursday Poem - Tobar Phadraic (for St.Patrick's Day)

Turn sideways into the light as they say
the old ones did and disappear
into the originality of it all.

Be impatient with easy explanations
and teach that part of the mind
that wants to know everything
not to begin questions it cannot answer.

Walk the green road above the bay
and the low glinting fields
toward the evening sun, let that Atlantic
gleam be ahead of you and the gray light
of the bay below you, until you catch,
down on your left, the break in the wall,
for just above in the shadows
you’ll find it hidden, a curved arm
of rock holding the water close to the mountain,
a just-lit surface smoothing a scattering of coins,
and in the niche above, notes to the dead
and supplications for those who still live.

But for now, you are alone with the transfiguration
and ask no healing for your own
but look down as if looking through time,
as if through a rent veil from the other
side of the question you’ve refused to ask.

And you remember now, that clear stream
of generosity from which you drank,
how as a child your arms could rise and your palms
turn out to take the blessing of the world.

David Whyte (from River Flow)