Gold and Pewter

Occasionally the morning sun sparks gold for a minute or so in the pewter sky, and it slants weakly through the village grove where we stand and shiver. There is freshly fallen snow underfoot and on the whiskery trees overhead.

The wind has brushed the white stuff away from the frozen puddle near our feet, and the pine needles, acorns and leaves held fast in the ice twinkle and glitter and flash. The chance meeting of the elements forges a pleasing image, but everything is muted and foggy this morning because the earth is still much warmer than the air above it. The damp cold penetrates right through to the bones.

November finds us perched between Samhain (Hallows) festivities and the frantic scurryings of Yule. Migratory species like loons and herons have been gone for weeks, and only few small flocks of Canada geese remain in local fields. Nights are subzero, and most of the geese have shrugged their wings and flown south.

The landscape always seems empty at this time of the year, a pallid sepia study carpeted with fresh snow and crunchy field grasses, crowned from here to there with skeletal trees. It is beautiful for all that. Never mind shopping malls with their towering gift displays and trite holiday carols, this is where it is at.

Here we go again, another long white season in which the doddering scribe/artist wraps up in every warm garment she possesses, slings a camera around her neck, crams her pockets with poo bags and dog biscuits and goes off with her canine companion to plumb the mysteries of winter. When she returns home later, she will move autumn's vibrant images from her computer to an archival DVD, and she will create a new folder called "Winter".

Pale Gold and Pewter Sky

The morning sun sparks pale gold in the pewter sky, slanting through the grove where I stand and shiver. There is frost on the bare trees overhead, and there is a skim of glassy ice on the puddle below my booted feet. Sunlight claims the pine needles and ice crystals suspended in the water, making them twinkle and glitter and flash by turns. The chancy meeting of the elements forges a pleasing abstract image, but almost everything else is muted and hazy this morning. The damp cold penetrates right through to the bones.

Late November finds northern dwellers perched between Samhain (or Halloween) festivities and the frantic scurryings of Yuletide. Migratory species like loons and herons have been gone for weeks, and only few small flocks of Canada geese remain in local farm fields. Nights are below zero, and many geese have already flown south.

The rural landscape always seems empty at this time of the year, a pallid sepia study carpeted with crunchy field grasses and crowned from here to there with skeletal, whiskery trees. It is beautiful for all that. Never mind shopping malls with their towering gift displays and trite holiday carols, this is where it is at.

A north wind whips through the hollow, scouring the earth and driving fallen leaves, pebbles and twigs before it. A few miles up the road, a favorite gorge is lashed with torrents of water a few degrees above freezing. The rocks glisten, and they wear the season's first slick shards of lacy ice. Winter weather is wild "stuff", absolutely exhilarating when one is in the right frame of mind and wearing the proper gear for rambling.

Here we go again, another long white season in which the doddering scribe/artist wraps up in every warm garment she possesses, slings a camera around her neck, crams her pockets with peripherals and doggie biscuits and goes off to plumb the mysteries of winter. She can do this, and really, she is looking forward to it, at least for now. When she returns home later, she will move autumn's vibrant images from her computer to an archival DVD, and she will create a new folder called "Winter".

Sunday, Saying Yes to the World

The act of "seeing" for photography is of course like entering—no, not an other element but another facet of the same element, another vocabulary, visual this time, responding to the same abiding and indefinable source of art. "Every tool carries with it the spirit by which it was created", Heisenberg says in his Physics and Philosophy.

This spirit reveals a unity of expression deep enough to take in diversity—whether from one art to another or from one image to the next. Macro photography gets you so close to daily sights and objects that they change their shape and yield a mystery. A paperweight can produce a phantom. Ten inches of sand on a lakeshore can become cloud and coast and water. Water itself, close up, will offer anything from quicksilver, to amoebas, to knots and knurls of wood, to molten lava. The patterns and transformation prove endless.

Padma Hejmadi, from Room to Fly, A Transcultural Memoir 

Out of the White Stuff, A Reminder

For all the cold and the white stuff deposited here this winter, the endless shoveling and heaving, our weariness of the season and its gelid trappings, there are surprises now and then. Morning sunlight turns icicles to gold, long blue shadows fall across the snow, a single leaf dangles from a branch in the woods—such things have a way of engaging one's attention when the world is windswept, clean and stark.

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

Dried fronds, wands and seed heads coming back into the light of day have curving, sinuous shapes. There is just a hint of the vibrant hues they once wore, but their emergence is a sign that winter is "getting old", that there are brighter times are ahead. We perch in towering snowdrifts and bear witness to the long white season's passing. We think about springtime and nesting owls, about maple syrup gathering, snowdrops and songbirds. We rattle and creak, and we keep right on shoveling—we go on.

Perceptions totter and fade and take on odd shapes in late winter and we need connection—we need reminders of cyclical nature of existence, of the earth's own wonder, magic and infinite change. This morning the reminder is a strand of tansy, last summer's flowing curves against a background of deep blue snow. 

Wordless Wednesday - Looking Through

Sunday - Saying Yes to the World

The universe is still and complete. Everything that ever was, is; everything that ever will be, is - and so on, in all possible combinations. Though in perceiving it we imagine that it is in motion, and unfinished, it is quite finished and quite astonishingly beautiful.

In the end, or rather, as things really are, any event, no matter how small, is intimately and sensibly tied to all others. All rivers run full to the sea; those who are apart are brought together; the lost ones are redeemed; the dead come back to life; the perfectly blue days that have begun and ended in golden dimness continue, immobile and accessible; and, when all is perceived in such a way as to obviate time, justice becomes apparent not as something that will be, but something that is.

Mark Helprin, Winter's Tale

(One of the most beautiful books ever written) 

The World in a Cup

A pure wind envelops my body.

The whole world seen in a single cup.

Kokan Shiren

Some mornings, my cup seems to hold the whole world in its depths.  I fall in love with the tea and its earthenware vessel, with the battered oak table on which they rest, with the whole wide world and the deep blue space in which it floats, with my kitchen window and this tattered old life, all over again.

Then I sit down in front of the computer to write about the experience, and I simply can't get the words together to describe it.  I can manage one or two clumsy paragraphs, and that is all I can do - I craft a rapt little bowl of meager and woefully inadequate words to describe something vast and beautiful, something sentient and breathing and boundless and inexpressible. Emaho!

Friday Ramble - Reflect

Feeling vaguely restless and in need of something or other, I went for a walk along the lake at twilight this week. I didn't know what the something might be, but I hoped I would have the wits to recognize it when I found it.

When I paused on a favorite ribbon of beach near the bridge, the setting sun was painting a trail across the water, and the ripples at my feet offered up a dazzling reflection in return, islands and magical archipelagos floating in the seemingly boundless sky as Helios dropped out of sight for another day. Bulrushes and fronds of pickerel weed fringed the lake, every stem swaying and sighing and casting a fey reflection. Loons drifted on the current like little boats, and herons haunted the shallows nearby. The scene was one of joyous untrammeled reciprocity - no reservations, no limitations and no holding back, just exquisite buttery light and deep shadow, inky shapes across the water, the cadence of the waves as they greeted the shore.

The word reflect has been with us since the fourteenth century, coming from the Old French reflecter and the Middle English reflecten, thence the Latin reflectere, all meaning to bend or bend down. Until the fifteenth century, the common usage had to do with diverting things, with turning things aside or deflecting that which is undesirable. Some time around 1600 CE, we began to use the word to describe processes of thought and quiet contemplation. When we use the word in conversation today, we are usually musing about deep thought processes, about light and mirrors - anything and everything except bending.

There were no deep musings by the lake, and my thoughts were closer to the original meaning of the word reflect than they were to anything else. Seeing the fiery sundown light in all its perfection, I felt like bending in a deep reverential bow or gassho.  I could manage a shallow movement of sorts that evening, but anything deeper was out of the question. So be it. It's always about the light.

Twilight - Seeing Through

Among the Dreaming Trees

It could be the wild and somewhat melancholy pleasure that comes in looking at expanses of snow demarcated by rocks, trees and hills, nary a building in sight.  It could be Zen notions of emptiness and impermanence (anicca), stirred up by the song the north wind sings as it scours the hills, sculpting random waves and abstract shapes as it passes over them.  It could be the inky blue of the deep shadows that lie over and around everything.  It could be an unexpressed desire for the order and containment, a vague and inchoate yearning for the realms that always seem to beckon beyond summits and slopes.

In winter, landscape reveals itself to an intrepid wanderer as it does at no other time during the year. The true contours of the countryside are visible, and she can trace its rocky bones with her eyes, feel the earth's peaceful sleep and share its slow dreams, sometimes even glimpse the shape of the springtime to come (although spring seems far away on such a day as this). There is music in the wind, and there are astonishing swaths of  color in the snow and shadows. Who knew that blue came in so many entrancing shades?

There was no profound rhyme or reason for this weekend's sojourn on the hill. I was home among the rocks and snow people, and oh, the perfect light...

Suspended in Ice and Winter Light

The morning sun sparks pale gold in a pewter sky, slanting through the grove where I stand and shiver. There is frost on the bare trees over my head, and there is a skim of glassy ice on the puddle underneath them. Sunlight claims the pine needles and ice crystals suspended in the water, making them twinkle and glitter and flash by turns. The chancy meeting of the elements forges a pleasing abstract image, but almost everything else is muted and hazy this morning. The damp cold penetrates right through to the bones.

Late November finds northern dwellers perched between Samhain (or Halloween) festivities and the frantic scurryings of Yuletide. Migratory species like loons and herons have been gone fro the eastern Ontario highlands for weeks, but a few small flocks of Canada geese remain in local farm fields. Nights are well below zero now, and it will not be long until the geese fly south too.

The rural landscape always seems empty at this time of the year, a pallid sepia study carpeted with crunchy field grasses and crowned from here to there with skeletal, whiskery trees. It is beautiful for all that. Never mind shopping malls with their towering gift displays and trite holiday carols, this is where it is at.

A north wind whips through the wooded hollows above Dalhousie Lake, scouring the earth and driving fallen leaves, pebbles and twigs before it. The bottom of the gorge at Geddes bridge is lashed with torrents of water a few degrees above freezing - the rocks glisten, and they wear the season's first slick shards of lacy ice.  Winter weather is wild "stuff", absolutely exhilarating  when one is in the right frame of mind and wearing the proper gear for rambling.

Here we go again, another long white season in which the artist wraps up in every warm garment she possesses, slings a camera around her neck, crams her pockets with peripherals and goes off to plumb the mysteries of winter.  She can do this, and really, she is looking forward to it, at least for now. When she returns home later, she will regretfully move autumn's vibrant images from her computer onto an archival DVD, and she will create a new folder called "Winter".

The World in a Single Cup

A pure wind envelops my body.

The whole world seen in a single cup.

Kokan Shiren

Some mornings, my cup seems to hold the whole world in its depths.  I fall in love with the tea and its earthenware vessel, with the battered oak table on which they rest, with the whole wide world and the deep blue space in which it floats, with my kitchen window and this tattered old life, all over again. 

Then I sit down in front of the computer to write about the experience, and I simply can't get the words together to describe it.  I can manage one or two clumsy paragraphs, and that is all I can do - I craft a rapt little bowl of woefully meager and inadequate words to describe something vast and beautiful, something sentient and breathing and boundless and inexpressible. Emaho!

Friday Ramble - The Small, the Blue, the Transcendant

She is a little weary of deep snow and icy cold, and at times, she is even a little tired of the color blue, no matter how intensely blue the blue happens to be.

It is at such times that something curved or fragile or delicately robed in snow shows up and begs rapt and focused attention, glossy bubbles suspended in the ice of the frozen creek, snow crystals frosting the evergreens over her head, an oak leaf in the trail at her feet, pine cones casting vivid shadows in pools of early morning sunlight.

Just when she decides that she will not sketch another icicle or take another photo of such things, another eloquent winter tableau presents itself to the eye. Small and perfect, complete within itself, it conveys an elemental peace and balance, lowers the blood pressure and stills the breathing, returns her eyes and focus to simplicity and grace and assent.

For a minute or two, her pain subsides into the background, and balance returns. It is a miracle that she is standing here at all, and her fleeting interval on the edge of the woods has to be enough. It is enough and more.

There are worlds great and small everywhere, worlds within and worlds without, and every one is a wonder to behold and remember and love with her eyes. Surely, she can do this for a little while longer.

Friday Ramble - The Eyes of Winter

There is ice everywhere on the trailing edges of a calendar year, and the puckish lenses of eye and camera linger lovingly on it.  We are spending most of our time indoors at the moment, but winter's attentive eyes are passionate for all that, and it is astonishing what can be seen from one's window on a winter morning near the end of December.

Ice glosses trees in the village and dangles in artless suspension from eaves, roof lines and wind chimes. As glossy as hard candy, it sheathes roads, driveways and cobblestones.  When the winter sun touches it, the layers are revealed as lacy blankets draped over streets, sleeping hills and fields with crystalline fronds of grass and ferns poking out here and there. Lovely stuff, ice, whether seen in an urban setting or the snow-drowned countryside.

Obviously, all this ice is trying to tell us something, and occasionally I get the message.  There is effortless grace and form and natural perfection in every seasonal turning if we can cultivate the patience and wits to see it.  Everything around us has a story to tell, and we need trailing edges, liminal intervals and seasonal turnings to learn and grow, to exercise the wonder and connection and creativity that is our birthright.

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

Snow and Morning Light

All the World in a Melting Icicle

Friday Ramble - Hibernate/Hibernation

The two words hail from the Latin hībernātus and the past participle hībernāre meaning to spend the winter. Both forms share a relationship with hiems, meaning winter, and that word bears a resemblance to the Greek chiá  meaning snow, cheimṓ also  meaning winter and the Sanskrit hima meaning cold, frost or snow.  Believe it or not, there is a summer equivalent to hibernation, and we call it aestivation or aestivating.

Bears exhibit an elegant and impressive physiology in hibernation, and some species such as ground squirrels, marmots, prairie dogs, dormice, hamsters, lemurs and hedgehogs also den up when temperatures fall, sleeping quietly until temperatures rise and food becomes available again.  Northern frogs, toads, snakes and turtles are also masters of the art of hibernation.

For humans on the other hand, hibernation is something different - withdrawing into an aware awakened seclusion or retirement from the world, perhaps traveling to warmer climes to escape inclement weather. For some of us, the accumulation of books, libations, potions and music is our hibernating thing, surrounding of one's chilly winter self with that is warm, embracing and redolent of comfort.  (A fringed shawl in deep, earthy red shawl comes to mind here.) We curl up like bears, cocooning ourselves within and enfolded in all that we love best.

In my own case, hibernation also means wandering from window to window in the farmhouses of friends with camera in hand and capturing the sun through ice crystals and frost on the rippled old panes - every single view is a wonder and no two scenes are ever the same.  It's a personal meditative process holding out tantalizing hints of wild, hoary and elusive wisdoms out there in the white beyond the glass. Cold, ice, snow and the paucity of light notwithstanding, it's all good, and really, springtime is not that far off when one thinks about such things.

Seeing Through and Lovin It All

Is this place an ocean or a desert in winter? I am never sure which one it is, but either way, there is always something to feast one's eyes on and capture with the lens. Artfully frosted windows, heaps of books, bowls of fruit and cups of tea, it's all good. Besides, isn't a little uncertainty a good thing, every now and then?

There are patterns here everywhere one looks at this time of the year, and they all have to do with liquid turnings and transformation: feathery patterns in river ice, glossy icicles suspended from trees along the shore, field grasses poking their silvery heads out of snowdrifts,  beads of water falling in the garden and freezing in midair, fallen leaves with snow crystals shining through tiny apertures in them.  Closer to home, or rather, at home, everything my cronish eye alights on is food for thought and camera too.

Winter's eye is passionate indeed. In the absence of most of the vibrant colors dancing on my palette at other times of the year, the Old Wild Mother (Gaia) has turned these winter places into a commonwealth of swirling shapes and patterns, each and every one exquisite.  Even an egg yolk sun shining through the kitchen window delights and enchants.