A Tree Full of Reindeer

What could be more cheerful than a crabapple tree full of reindeer on the morning before Christmas? The reindeer are in threes, a number dear to my heart.

Several inches of snow fell overnight, and most of today will be spent clearing white stuff from the threshold, the walkway in front of the house and the driveway. First I will clear snow from the deck and the steps down into the sleeping garden and excavate a track around the yard for Beau.

At the moment the stairs down to the garden cannot be seen, and my companion is up to his tummy in snow whenever he goes out. He is not a happy camper. It is still dark outside, and it will be for some time, so our snow clearing will have to wait for an hour or two. First, a fragrant mug of coffee to get us going... 

On such mornings, my neighbours are out moving snow too, and we call greetings to each other as we work. The first intrepid souls to finish their own exercises simply pick up their equipment and move on to assist whoever is still beavering away. It takes a village (or at least a block) to move this much white stuff out of the way, and move it we do, working together and happy to be doing so.

Why are there so few words in the English language for snow? The Yupik tribes of Siberia have forty or so, and the dialects spoken by the indigenous peoples of Canada's far north have at least fifty. Surely we can do better.

Wordless Wednesday - On the Edge

Sunday, Saying Yes to the World

I would say that there exist a thousand unbreakable links between each of us and everything else, and that our dignity and our chances are one. The farthest star and the mud at our feet are a family; and there is no decency or sense in honoring one thing, or a few things, and then closing the list. The pine tree, the leopard, the Platte River, and ourselves - we are at risk together, or we are on our way to a sustainable world together. We are each other's destiny.

Mary Oliver, Upstream: Selected Essays

Sunday, Saying Yes to the World

What we need, all of us who go on two legs, is to reimagine our place in creation. We need to enlarge our conscience so as to bear, moment by moment, a regard for the integrity and bounty of the earth. There can be no sanctuaries unless we regain a deep sense of the sacred, no refuges unless we feel a reverence for the land, for soil and stone, water and air, and for all that lives. We must find the desire, the courage, the vision to live sanely, to live considerately, and we can only do that together, calling out and listening, listening and calling out.

Scott Russell Sanders, Writing from the Center

Sunday, Saying Yes to the World

I would say that there exist a thousand unbreakable links between each of us and everything else, and that our dignity and our chances are one. The farthest star and the mud at our feet are a family; and there is no decency or sense in honoring one thing, or a few things, and then closing the list. The pine tree, the leopard, the Platte River, and ourselves - we are at risk together, or we are on our way to a sustainable world together. We are each other's destiny.

Mary Oliver, Upstream: Selected Essays

Sunday - Saying Yes to the World

The roots of all living things are tied together. Deep in the ground of being, they tangle and embrace. This understanding is expressed in the term nonduality. If we look deeply, we find that we do not have a separate self-identity, a self that does not include sun and wind, earth and water, creatures and plants, and one another. We cannot exist without the presence and support of the interconnecting circles of creation, the geosphere, the biosphere, the hydrosphere, the atmosphere, and the sphere of our sun. All are related to us; we depend on each of these spheres for our very existence.

Joan Halifax, The Fruitful Darkness

Sunday, Saying Yes to the World

Not just animals and plants, then, but tumbling waterfalls and dry riverbeds, gusts of wind, compost piles and cumulus clouds, freshly painted houses (as well as houses abandoned and sometimes haunted), rusting automobiles, feathers, granite cliffs and grains of sand, tax forms, dormant volcanoes, bays and bayous made wretched by pollutants, snowdrifts, shed antlers, diamonds, and daikon radishes, all are expressive, sometimes eloquent and hence participant in the mystery of language. Our own chatter erupts in response to the abundant articulations of the world: human speech is simply our part of a much broader conversation.

It follows that the myriad things are also listening, or attending, to various signs and gestures around them. Indeed, when we are at ease in our animal flesh, we will sometimes feel we are being listened to, or sensed, by the earthly surroundings. And so we take deeper care with our speaking, mindful that our sounds may carry more than a merely human meaning and resonance. This care -- this full-bodied alertness -- is the ancient, ancestral source of all word magic. It is the practice of attention to the uncanny power that lives in our spoken phrases to touch and sometimes transform the tenor of the world's unfolding.

David Abram, Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology

Sunday - Saying Yes to the World

The trees act not as individuals, but somehow as a collective. Exactly how they do this, we don’t yet know. But what we see is the power of unity. What happens to one happens to us all. We can starve together or feast together.

Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom,
Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants

Sunday, Saying Yes to the World

I would say that there exist a thousand unbreakable links between each of us and everything else, and that our dignity and our chances are one. The farthest star and the mud at our feet are a family; and there is no decency or sense in honoring one thing, or a few things, and then closing the list. The pine tree, the leopard, the Platte River, and ourselves - we are at risk together, or we are on our way to a sustainable world together. We are each other's destiny.

Mary Oliver, Upstream: Selected Essays

Sunday, Saying Yes to the World

It is no secret. All power is one in source and end, I think. Years and distances, stars and candles, water and wind and wizardry, the craft in a man’s hand and the wisdom in a tree’s root: they all arise together. My name, and yours, and the true name of the sun, or a spring of water, or an unborn child, all are syllables of the great word that is very slowly spoken by the shining of the stars. There is no other power. No other name.

Ursula Le Guin, A Wizard of Earthsea

Thursday Poem - For the Children

The rising hills, the slopes, 

of statistics

lie before us.

The steep climb

of everything, going up,

up, as we all

go down.

In the next century

or the one beyond that

they say,

are valleys, pastures,

we can meet there in peace

if we make it.

To climb these coming crests

one word to you, to

you and your children:

stay together,

learn the flowers,

go light.

Gary Snyder, from Turtle Island

For Valentine's Day

My soulmate and I usually didn't do anything lavish or opulent for Valentine's Day, and that was just fine with us.

I would create a card for him with one of my photos or graphic designs, brew a special pot of tea, carve something into a piece of fruit, make tiny cookies in heart shapes. We shared a single piece of scrumptious (organic) dark chocolate and then went for a long walk in the snowy woods with our beloved canine companions, first Cassie, then Spencer, then (and now) Beau.

There were no special declarations of love on February 14th. We told each other so every day, and we were content with the way this day unfolded. No frilly gestures and lovey-dovey professions were needed. We knew how we felt about each other, how good we were together, how amazingly blessed we were to have found each other so many years ago.

Irv traveled on ahead several months ago, but there is a handmade card on his bureau as always. I carved a heart on a McIntosh apple and put it on the old oak table with a pot of Darjeeling and his favorite cookies. Beau and I will take a long walk in the woods, and my soulmate will be with us, but he won't leave any tracks in the snow. I will tell him I love him as I did every day when he was here on earth, and as I still do every single day.

Wishing you deep and everlasting love too.

Sunday - Saying Yes to the World

What we need, all of us who go on two legs, is to reimagine our place in creation. We need to enlarge our conscience so as to bear, moment by moment, a regard for the integrity and bounty of the earth. There can be no sanctuaries unless we regain a deep sense of the sacred, no refuges unless we feel a reverence for the land, for soil and stone, water and air, and for all that lives. We must find the desire, the courage, the vision to live sanely, to live considerately, and we can only do that together, calling out and listening, listening and calling out.

Scott Russell Sanders, Writing from the Center

Sunday - Saying Yes to the World

I would say that there exist a thousand unbreakable links between each of us and everything else, and that our dignity and our chances are one. The farthest star and the mud at our feet are a family; and there is no decency or sense in honoring one thing, or a few things, and then closing the list. The pine tree, the leopard, the Platte River, and ourselves - we are at risk together, or we are on our way to a sustainable world together. We are each other's destiny.

Mary Oliver, Upstream: Selected Essays

Thursday Poem - For This One Day

Let fall from our hands
the busy pages and works.

Walk in the sunlight

and read the holy book of earth

leaf by cloud, wave by wing.

Listen by moonlight

to wind and cricket, owl and wolf.

In the smooth skin of stones,

in the flowing heart of trees,

in the gathering ocean,

we will know each other again

for the first time.

Dolores Stewart Riccio

Thursday Poem - At Dawn

at dawn this summer morning,
a waning moon floating high in the cloudless
blue consecrates 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 summer
yieldings of chicory, clover and golden daisies,
attended on our rambles by rhyming crickets,
by humming bees and dancing leaves

while all around us, unseen but deeply felt
and loved, the world is breathing softly
in and out, our many voices falling together
into seamless light and tune and time.

Cate (me)

Coming Up Purple

Gaudeamus igitur. Verna est.

(Let us give thanks. It is spring.)

Can there ever be too much purple and gold in the world? Not in the autumn when saffron crocuses bloom. Not in the long white season. Not in summer when the whole world is arrayed in rainbow colors and dancing in light.

Certainly not in this this springtime of pandemic, social distancing, sequestering and retreat from the world. Purple and gold gladden the spirit.

Together. We are together. We are together when we wave to each other from our windows and converse from opposite sides of the street, when we post cheerful notes and images in places like this to uplift the spirits of our fellow beings.

We are all together in this, and we must remember that.

Sunday - Saying Yes to the World

What we need, all of us who go on two legs, is to reimagine our place in creation. We need to enlarge our conscience so as to bear, moment by moment, a regard for the integrity and bounty of the earth. There can be no sanctuaries unless we regain a deep sense of the sacred, no refuges unless we feel a reverence for the land, for soil and stone, water and air, and for all that lives. We must find the desire, the courage, the vision to live sanely, to live considerately, and we can only do that together, calling out and listening, listening and calling out.

Scott Russell Sanders, Writing from the Center

My Two Beautiful Guys

The Moon by Rose Light

At twilight, an at-the-end-of-July blooming of the exquisite David Austin rose in my garden called simply "Heritage"...The perfect shape and glowing petals were a fine earthly counterpoint to the waxing moon last evening - the lady poured her light out over the garden, and the rose lifted her own face in greeting, gifting the realm of night with her own light and fragrance and silent song.

All the core elements of good counterpoint were there - a flowing lyrical relationship between two or more entities independent in their contour and rhythm, but perfectly and seamlessly interwoven in lineament and harmony.

Moon and night were exquisite in themselves, and together they formed a greater wholeness - as Cassie, Himself and I did for so many years and Spencer, Himself and I are doing now.  Ever companions, we compliment other perfectly and last night we were out in the garden together, breathing gently in and out as the moon moved across the sky.

Last evening, I sensed Cassie leaning contentedly against me as she did in life - she loved sunrises and summer moons and roses, and she would not miss such an evening with us for anything.  There we were again, Himself and I, Cassie on our left and Spencer on our right, all of us paw in paw.  Now we are four...