Thursday Poem - To Be of Use

The people I love the best
jump into work head first
without dallying in the shallows
and swim off with sure strokes

almost out of sight. They seem

to become natives of that

element, the black sleek heads of seals

bouncing like half-submerged balls.

I love people who harness themselves,

an ox to a heavy cart, who pull like

water buffalo, with massive patience,
who strain in the mud and the muck

to move things forward, who do what

has to be done, again and again.

I want to be with people who submerge
in the task, who go into the fields to harvest
and work in a row and pass the bags along,
who are not parlor generals and field

deserters but move in a common

rhythm when the food must come

in or the fire be put out.

The work of the world is common as mud.

Botched, it smears the hands, crumbles

to dust. But the thing worth doing

well done has a shape that satisfies,

clean and evident. Greek amphoras

for wine or oil, Hopi vases that held corn,

are put in museums but you know

they were made to be used.

The pitcher cries for water to carry

and a person for work that is real.

Marge Piercy from Circles on the Water

Thursday Poem - From Blossoms

From blossoms comes
this brown paper bag of peaches
we bought from the boy
at the bend in the road where we turned

toward signs painted Peaches.

From laden boughs, from hands,
from sweet fellowship in the bins,
comes nectar at the roadside,

succulent peaches we devour,

dusty skin and all, comes the familiar

dust of summer, dust we eat.

O, to take what we love inside,
to carry within us an orchard, to eat
not only the skin, but the shade,
not only the sugar, but the days, to hold
the fruit in our hands, adore it, then bite

into the round jubilance of peach.

There are days we live
as if death were nowhere
in the background; from joy
to joy to joy, from wing to wing,
from blossom to blossom

to impossible blossom, to sweet

impossible blossom.

Li-Young Lee

Wordless Wednesday - Jewel in Summer Stillness

Spatterdock or yellow pond lily (Nuphar advena)

Trying to Be Cool

A week of blistering heat and drenching humidity. Best for staying in the shade and sipping fizzy drinks in glass tumblers (NEVER plastic) with lots of ice, slices of fruit and snippets of Mojito mint. We have been thinking wistfully of the glorious, sunny, slightly cooler September days that are (surely) only a few weeks away.

Cooking and hot food? Not so much. Most meals are cold stuff, lightly tossed salads with whatever is ripe in the garden (or tucked in the fridge) along with a drizzle of balsamic. The crunchy veggies and lovely, crisp greens on my plate are tarted up with generous dollops of fresh parsley, olives and feta. Yum.

In August, there are Carolina grasshoppers (also called road-dusters and Quakers) everywhere in the garden, and when they take sudden, swooping flight out of the tomato patch right in front of us, their airborne antics startle. 

Love the blue in the bottom of the beaker here. I seem to be drinking sky.

Ripening Under the Sun

For most of the year, I adore the old crabapple tree in the garden, its whiskery branches in winter, its new leaves and blossoms in springtime, the tiny, hard green fruit in July. Not so much at this time of the year though.

Crabapples are lovely things pickled, juiced or jellied, but picking the little dears out of the veggie patch in August and raking them out of the grass before mowing is something else entirely. The bees and the wasps do not agree.

Friday Ramble - Consider

The annual Perseid meteor shower is in progress, and this year, it will peak on August 12 - 13. I just have to write something about late summer nights and the dazzling streams of comet debris that turn pre-dawn August hours into the greatest show on earth. Until October and the Orionids that is.

Throwaway children of the Swift-Tuttle comet, the Perseids take place between July and August every year. The shower takes its name from Perseus, the constellation in the northern sky from which it appears to (but does not really) originate. Who knows, some of the particles rocketing around up there may be kin to my own star stuff. Awesome doings up there, a new extravaganza every night. The adjective "cosmic" is one of this tottery backyard astronomer's favorite adjectives.

Our wordy offering hails from around 1350 CE, tracing its origins through the Middle English word 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".

Humans are spun from the dust of ancient stars, and we are probably never more true to ourselves and our beginnings than when we are considering something, in the original sense of the word that is. The thought tickles me greatly. In doing so, we move away from the mundane and profane and intuitively toward a bone deep and authentic connection with the dimension from which we emerged, and of which we are such miniscule elements. Dancing motes in the eye of the infinite are we.

Clear summer nights are perfect times for stargazing, and so are cold clear nights when one can almost reach up and touch the stars. On late summer and early autumn nights, the sky is often filled with clouds from here to there, and one can hardly see eye or lens, let alone the wonders above us. Who doesn't love a good haze or fog though, and weather on the cusp of the seasons dishes 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."

Wordless Wednesday - Ripening

Easy Rider

Happy Lammas/Lughnasadh (First Harvest)

Happy Lammas, happy August!

Lammas Thoughts

Here we are on the last day of July, and the eve of Lammas,sometimes called Lughnsadh, Lúnasa, Calan Awst, "First Harvest" or "Loaf Mass". The festival celebrates summer, farming and harvesting, particularly the gathering, milling and putting by of grains and cereals.

Humans have gathered and consumed grains and cereals since Neolithic times, and the beginning of domestic grain cultivation is an important moment in our evolution. It marks the transition from an ancient, nomadic lifestyle of hunting and gathering to one of farming and settlement. Sickles, sheaves, stooks, mill wheels and grinding stones are common motifs in almost every culture on island earth.

Gods and goddesses? Oh yes, our festival has a throng of harvest gods: Lugh, Tammuz, Osiris, Adonis and Attis to name a few. Then there is Dionysus or Bacchus -  the grapey god is in a class all by himself, deity of vineyards and harvesting, wine making, drunken revelry and ritual madness.  He stands at the gate between summer and autumn, and his magical tavern with its ever turning mill wheel and rapture inducing brews is the stuff of legend. According to folk tales, its doorway can be entered from any street in the great wide world if one is in the right frame of mind and receptive to the alluring tug of the wild, the intoxicating and ecstatic.

According to Irish mythology, the August 1st festival was established by the god Lugh to honor his foster mother (Tailltiu), who perished from exhaustion after clearing the plains of Ireland for cultivation. The date is also associated with other harvest goddesses like Demeter, Persephone, Ceres, Bridget, the Cailleach, Selu, Nokomis (the Corn Mother) and Freya, who is sometimes known as the Lady of the Loaf. 

In the ninth century Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, August 1st was called "the feast of first fruits", and the occasion also marked the end of the hay gathering that had begun at Midsummer (June 21st). Loaves of bread were baked with grain from the first harvest and placed on church altars. The loaves were blessed and later used in simple charms and rustic enchantments. Tenant farmers paid an allotment of grain to their landlords as rent, and a tithe (one tenth of a farm's yield) was given to the local church to sustain it. Farmers delivered their portion to parish tithe barns, and a number of the elegant timber, brick and stone structures survive today. 

While it is difficult to date many British tithe barns precisely, many can be dated back to the middle of the fourteenth century. The oldest standing tithe barn in existence is probably the timber-framed Barley Barn at the Cressing Temple complex in Essex. Cressing Temple was the largest of the Knights Templar holdings in Britain, and the barn was erected for the Templars early in the thirteenth century. Dendrochronological analysis has yielded a date for its timbers of around 1220. The adjacent Wheat Barn is only slightly younger and was probably constructed around 1280.

Tim Powers' fabulous The Drawing of the Dark always comes to mind around this time of year. The book is full of harvest and brewing metaphors, and it's a rollicking good read. The main characters are King Arthur (reborn as an aging Irish mercenary named Brian Duffy), a sorcerer called Aurelius Aurelianus (the legendary Merlin himself), and the Fisher King. Dionysus and his magical tavern put in an appearance, and they're in good  company - the woodland god Pan, Gambrinus (the mythical brewmaster), Finn MacCool, the Morrigan, Guinevere, Morgan le Fay, Odin, Thor and Hercules also show up. There's a shipload of Vikings sworn to defend the ancient brewery at the heart of the story and stave off Ragnarok, and there are other mythical creatures too numerous to mention. There has been a paperback copy of the novel in my library since it was published in 1979, and I have retired at least three tattered PB copies since. When a dear friend gave me a hardcover copy a while ago, I was ecstatic. It seems appropriate to read the novel again before Lammas, and I am about to do so. 

The first day of August marked the beginning of the harvest for the ancients, but it also marked summer's end in some cultures, and so it is for moderns. Days are still blisteringly hot for the most part, but mornings and evenings are often cooler. Some mornings, Beau and I find fallen leaves in the birdbath when we go out, and the air is filled with the splendid whiff of herbs going to seed in the garden. There are still many warm and sunny weeks before us, and it is difficult to believe that summer is waning, but it is doing just that. Our days are growing shorter, and autumn is not far off. 

We've come a long way from our early "hunting and gathering" days, but traces of old seasonal rites remain here and there. When I arrived in Lanark county years ago, I was delighted to learn that Lammas festivities are alive and well in the eastern Ontario highlands. They are called céilidhs or "field parties", and the attendees are unaware of their origins for the most part, but all the festival trappings are there: bonfires, corn, grilled munchies and fresh baked bread, wine and beer, music, storytelling, dancing, parades by lantern light and merrymaking in abundance. Once in a while, there is even a ritual or formal harvest observance. Blessed be.

Wordless Wednesday - Sunrise Field

The Music of a Summer Night

I lean against the railing on the deck with an iced coffee in hand and watch fireflies frolicking through the shrubbery in the garden.

Midsummer has passed, and Lammas is only a few days away, but I am thinking of a watercolour (1908) by Robert Edward Hughes called Midsummer Eve. Hughes was acquainted with members of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, and their influence on his work shows. In his painting, a young woman stands in a forest clearing surrounded by a ring of fairies who are holding softly glowing lanterns. It is night, and the woods behind her are alight with fireflies. There is magic in the air.

In our darkened garden, there are the last cicada raspings of the day and a few crickets are doing their thing. Classical guitar (Rodrigo) wafts from the speakers on my neighbor's veranda, and a hound around the corner is singing soulfully to the waxing moon. A light wind blows through the old trees, and there is an occasional crackle from the lantern burning on the deck. By rights, a Pan flute or a harp should be playing too. Perhaps something by the Breton harper, Alain Stivell?

On nights like this, I feel ancient and young at the same time, and I know beyond a doubt that there is a wild, elemental magic at work in the great wide world. I can almost reach out and touch it, and that is comforting.

Dark Swallowtail in the Garden

Eastern Tiger Swallowtail on Bergamot

Female, Dark Morph (Papilio glaucus)

The commoner yellow form of the Eastern Tiger Swallowtail is a frequent visitor to the garden at this time of the year. I always enjoy seeing them, but the appearance of this dark morph female in the bergamot a few days ago was something to crow about. 

All dark morphs of the species are female. They are examples of Batesian mimicry, a phenomenon in which members of a harmless species evolve to resemble another species which is toxic or unpalatable. The lady mimics the poisonous Pipevine Swallowtail butterfly, thus gaining a measure of protection from predators. 

Thursday Poem - At Dawn

At dawn this morning, a waning moon

floating high in the cloudless blue,

graces a perfect summer day, one

that will never come again in all its

sweetness and its fey perfume.

Slow walkers in the early hours, we go along

together, paw and paw, through fragrant

yieldings of chicory, clover and daisies,

attended on our rambles by rhyming crickets,

by humming bees and dancing leaves.

While around us, unseen but deeply felt

and loved, the world is breathing softly

in and out, many voices falling together

into seamless light and tune and time.

Cate (me)

Wordless Wednesday - Mermaid in the Green

Bumble Girl in the Bergamot

Friday Ramble - Little Singers in the Trees

An annual cicada's song is the quintessential music of August, a sonorous vocal offering from little jeweled beings who emerge from the ground, shed their nymph skins, climb high into the light-filled trees and sing for a handful of days before expiring and returning to earth. It's a joyful, ecstatic and poignant element in the slow, irrevocable turning of one northern season into another.

Only male cicadas sing, but oh how they do, vibrating the complex abdominal membranes called tymbals over and over again to generate a raspy tune that will attract a mate. I have much to learn about identifying cicadas, but I think this one is the bigger Linne's cicada, rather than a Dog-day cicada. Whichever one it was, my little visitor was absolutely gorgeous. 

In ancient Greece and Rome, the cicada symbolized resurrection, immortality, and  spiritual ecstasy. The Greeks associated it with the sun god (Apollo), and with Dionysian rituals of ecstasy and madness. For the Romans, its emergence from the earth was a powerful symbol of transformation and rebirth.

In some Hispanic cultures, particularly those with strong Mesoamerican traditions, the cicada is associated with life, death and metamorphosis. It represents resilience, defiance, enduring hardship and surviving against the odds.  

In the southern French province of Provence, the cicada is viewed affectionately as a kindred spirit, a creature that loves the sun and makes music for the sheer joy of it. It is considered a lucky charm, and it is a popular motif in local art and crafts. 

We (Beau and I) often find abandoned cicada shells on trees at this time of the year but always feel fortunate when we encounter a newborn in all its pastel green splendor, sometimes still clinging to its discarded exoskeleton. Imagos (adults) darken as their new skins harden and their wings expand, but there is some variation in coloration, and many will retain greenish wings all the days of their lives.

For the last few days, we have been rescuing cicadas from sidewalks, driveways and roadways and moving them to safe perches where they will not be trampled by pedestrians or moving cars. On early walks, Beau and I always encounter at least two or three before we arrive home again. Evenings, I take my mug of tea out to the garden and listen to cicada serenades before the sun goes down, and I shall be sad when I go outside one night, and there are no cicada songs to be heard.

Call it "cicada mind" and cherish the notion. Our task is one of cultivating just this kind of patience, acceptance, rapt attention and unfettered Zen sensibility, of embracing our allotted days fully and singing wherever we happen to be, then dissolving effortlessly back into the fabric of the world when the time comes.

Thursday Poem - How the Trees on Summer Nights

How the trees on summer nights turn into

a dark river, how you can never reach it,
no matter how hard you try, walking as fast
as you can, but getting nowhere, arms and
legs pumping, sweat drizzling in rivulets;
each year, a little slower, more creaks
and aches, less breath. Ah, but these soft
nights, air like a warm bath, the dusky wings
of bats careening crazily overhead, and
you’d think the road goes on forever.
Apollinaire wrote, “What isn’t given to love
is so much wasted,” and I wonder what
I haven’t given yet. A thin comma moon
rises orange, a skinny slice of melon, so
delicious I could drown in its sweetness.
Or eat the whole thing, down to the rind.
Always, this hunger for more.

Barbara Crooker, (from More)

Wordless Wednesday - Summer's Golden Coin

Catching the Sun

They capture and hold the sun within, these buttery yellow gerbera blooms. Kin to dahlias, daisies, marigolds, calendulas, coneflowers, chrysanthemums, zinnias, and the great towering sunflowers, they drink in morning light and store it within the frilly tutus of their lavish petals. Like sunflowers, their capitulum appears to be a single flower, but each is a community made up of hundreds of tiny individual blooms.

The blooms are little earthbound suns on stems, and they dish out light as if it is warm honey. All the other garden flowers around them are uplifted by their frothy golden magnificence, by their almost imperceptible swaying, by the soft, sighing music of their duet with the wind. Bumbles and bees adore them.

Now and then, I falter as all living creatures do from time to time. On dreary days, I mourn the paucity of light in the world, and I think about the injustice and suffering and deliberate cruelty rampant everywhere. Then I remember how my garden loves the light in summer, and I resolve do a little inward blooming of my own, to breathe in light and send joy and comfort back out into the great wide world.

If I could take in light as flowers do in season, I would do that, but I haven't a clue how to go about it. Perhaps all that is required is to stand in the garden with my face to the sun. I could become a garden myself. Now there's a thought.