The Measure of Our Winter Days

Beau and I are out and about early on winter mornings, but salt and icy pavement are not kind to his toes so we keep our ramblings brief. After our first outing, we return home and fill bird feeders in the garden. Then we put a little something out for the squirrels who are having a difficult time too. When I pull draperies open in the morning, the first thing I see is their delicate footprints in the snow on the deck.

Indoors, heaps of reading material, candles, potions, puckish pursuits and small eccentricities are the measure of our winter days. Ditto sketchbooks, baking, baskets of mending, researching oddities like building igloos and straw houses, pottery, spinning, making authentic French pâtés and pasta. The soup cauldron has a place of honour on the stove in winter, and there is always a pot of something or other bubbling away on it. Then there is the old "what else can I do with this eggplant" exercise. Failing anything else, I plot another garden bed, pummel bread or make scones. Out of my midwinter restlessness, good and comforting things occasionally come.

If the weather was a little warmer, we would be checking out local bookshops and shopping for art supplies like sketchbooks and watercolor pens, but that is unlikely to happen for a while. Thankfully, shelves in the study contain a lovely stash of yarn, scraps of fabric (the powsels and thrums of Alan Garner's incandescent memoir), ribbon, paper, paint, and sticky stuff to keep us out of trouble. First and foremost (of course), there are books. There are never too many about, and passing a tottering heap of friends as yet unknown is always a happy thing. 

It is tempting to embrace the notion that life becomes smaller in winter, but that is simply not so. Like our magnificent universe, like this dear little blue world, like the Great Round of time and the seasons in which we spend our allotted days, life continues to expand - we are simply reaching outward in different ways.

Sunday, Saying Yes to the World

Life will break you. Nobody can protect you from that, and being alone won't either, for solitude will also break you with its yearning. You have to love. You have to feel. It is the reason you are here on earth. You have to risk your heart. You are here to be swallowed up. And when it happens that you are broken, or betrayed, or left, or hurt, or death brushes too near, let yourself sit by an apple tree and listen to the apples falling all around you in heaps, wasting their sweetness. Tell yourself that you tasted as many as you could.

Louise Erdrich, The Painted Drum

Sunday, Saying Yes to the World

By telling the holy, we acknowledge that life is a gift. In fact, the whole universe is a gift. From where or what, and why, we cannot know. All we do know is that it issues forth, moment by moment, eon by eon, ever fresh, astounding in its richness and beauty. None of this is to gainsay the pain, the suffering, the eventual death that awaits all created things. But we measure that pain and suffering, we mourn that death against the sheer exuberant flow of things.

Scott Russell Sanders

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 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. 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 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 is an atomy, a minute complete world teeming with vibrant life, and 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 recoiling in dismay. I don't think I will 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 old thing.

Sunday - Saying Yes to the World

How is one to live a moral and compassionate existence when one is fully aware of the blood, the horror inherent in life, when one finds darkness not only in one’s culture but within oneself? If there is a stage at which an individual life becomes truly adult, it must be when one grasps the irony in its unfolding and accepts responsibility for a life lived in the midst of such paradox. One must live in the middle of contradiction, because if all contradiction were eliminated at once, life would collapse. There are simply no answers to some of the great pressing questions. You continue to live them out, making your life a worthy expression of leaning into the light.
Barry Lopez

Sunday - Saying Yes to the World

A day is perfect when you've got a mountain face right in front of you that nobody's ever climbed. A summer is perfect when for weeks you are on a road where no car ever goes, where no mobile phone has reception. A life is perfect when you try everything.

David Lama
(1990 - 2019)

David Lama perished on Howse Peak in Canada's Banff National Park several days ago with his climbing companions, Jess Roskelley and Hansjörg Auer. The three had climbed an exceptionally difficult route (M16) on the peak's east face and were coming down when they were caught in an avalanche.