Wordless Wednesday - Still Cold

Friday Ramble - Cauldron

This is one of my favorite intervals in the whole turning year - the cluster of sunny days and cold nights in late winter and early springtime when the eastern Ontario highlands gear up for the maple syrup season.

In the woods, the sugar bird (saw-whet owl) sings its courtship songs, and local lore says that when it does, the time has come to tap the maples. Clouds of smoke and steam rise from wooden sugar shacks tucked in among the old trees, and the intoxicating fragrance of boiling maple sap is everywhere. Magic is afoot, and no mistake. No doubt about it, ambrosial is the word.

The sylvan alchemy in progress is wild and sweet, and the homely metaphor of the maple syrup cauldron has profound resonance for me. I still have the battered cast iron Dutch oven I carried when I rambled the continent many years ago, stirring soups, potions and stews by starlight and watching as sparks went spiraling into the inky sky over the rim of my old pot. The motes of light rising from its depths were stars too, perfect counterpoint to the constellations dancing over my head.

At home, there is usually a stockpot bubbling away on the stove in my kitchen. There are cast iron skillets and pots, bean crocks in assorted sizes and a slow cooker or two. Squirreled away in the cupboard are enameled cookware by Staub and Le Creuset in bright red and unglazed earthenware tagines. One can never have too many cooking vessels, and I can always be tempted into acquiring others. A small three-legged incense bowl rests on the table in my study, and I use it every day. 

Out in the Lanark woods, there are the sugar camps of friends with miles of collecting hose in confetti colors strung from maple to maple. Modern evaporators are used these days, but in some camps, antique syrup cauldrons boil over open fires to show how maple syrup was made in times past.

The word cauldron comes from the Middle English cauderon, thence from the Anglo-Norman caudiere and the Latin caldāria, the latter meaning “cooking pot” and rooted in the adjective calidus meaning warm or “suitable for warming”. At the end of the trail is the Proto-Indo-European (PIE) root kelə meaning simply “warm”. Calendar, calorie, chafe, chiaroscuro, claim, clamor, class, clear, council, hale, haul and lee are kin. So is caldera, the term geologists use to describe the massive crater formed when a volcano's magma chamber is emptied by a massive eruption or its roof collapses. The biggest caldera on earth is the Apolaki Caldera located in the Pacific ocean off the Philippine islands, and the most active is probably the La Garita Caldera in southwestern Colorado. Of course, Wyoming's magnificent Yellowstone Caldera is in a class all by itself.

The night that gifts us with stars and enfolds us gently when the sun goes down is a vast cauldron or bowl. Somewhere in the darkness up there, Cerridwen is stirring her heady cosmic brew of knowledge, creativity and rebirth, her magical kettle simmering over a mystic cook fire. From her vessel, the bard Taliesin once partook of a single drop and awakened into wisdom and song. We're all vessels, and one of the best motifs for this old life is surely a pot or cauldron, one battered, dented and well traveled, but useful and happy to be so, bubbling and crackling away in the background (sometimes in the foreground), making happy musics and occasionally sending bright motes up into the air.

And so it is with this old hen when her favorite wild places begin to awaken again. Notions of alchemy bubble away gently. Sparks fly upward; images of pots and cauldrons cosmic and domestic whirl about in her thoughts. She could not (and would not) be anywhere else in the great wide world. Is she a wild thing herself? Oh, yes.

A repeat performance (slightly edited, with a few additions and rewordings) but this remains one of my favorite bloggy offerings ever.

Stirring Things Up

Springtime may be happening in some parts of the world, but it is not happening here yet, and it won't for some time. There is nary a whisper of its coming, just Old Man Winter rattling his icy talons, rampaging through bare trees in the garden, roaring down the chimney and delighting in our glum expressions.

I feel cauldrons of soup, meatloaf and sourdough coming on this morning, also molasses cookies and scones. Stirring up such things is comforting when the wind howls in the rafters, and I can't see my neighbor's veranda for towering heaps of snow.

The teapot is warming, the kettle is burbling happily, and my favorite mug awaits. It is time to pull out Sarah Leah Chase's New England Open-House Cookbook and hatch a few culinary plots, also Alexandra Stafford's Bread Toast Crumbs, and The Art of Simple Food (I & II) by Alice Waters. Yum, we can do this.

This afternoon, I will curl up in a comfortable corner with a mug of tea and continue reading Richard Grant's delightful (and hilarious) Tex and Molly in the Afterlife. Let the wind and the season and this bitterly cold day do what they will.

Sequestered, week 342 (CCCXLII)

Wordless Wednesday - Evergreen

Happy Valentine's Day

Thursday Poem - Don't wait for something beautiful to find you.

Go out into the weather-beaten world
where straw men lean on frozen fields
and find the cardinal's scarlet flash of wing,
a winter heart, a feathered hope.

Without a camera or a memory,
we travel these old country roads,
turn corners like the pages of a book,
enchanted by the ordinary life

of fields and rocks and woods,
of small wild creatures stirring in the brush.
We take home pockets full of myths
and wonders seldom seen.

We will not give up easily.
Across the breakfast table
in our precarious nest,
we make those promises keep on going

that no one ever keeps. And yet...
there is the cardinal again,
a finial on our old gray fence.
Red is for Valentines.

Dolores Stewart (Riccio)

Wordless Wednesday - Coming to Light

Sequestered, week 340 CCCXL

Early Guest in the Garden

American goldfinch (Spinus tristis) 

The goldfinches visiting the garden in winter are not as brightly coloured as they were last summer, but the little dears are welcome visitors for all that. Their delight on discovering that our feeders have been topped up with fresh munchies for their breakfast buffet is something to behold. 

Friday Ramble - Though the Month Be Short

February is a short month, and it is very cold this year, but there are astonishing things to be seen at night, if one can bring herself to wrap up and go outside for a bit of stargazey stuff. The sky is deep, inky velvet, the moon an icy orb framed by the vague shapes of sleeping trees and attended by a tapestry of faraway stars. On full moon nights in winter, Lady Moon always seems to be cradled in the whiskery branches of the old ash tree in the garden, and I never tire of looking at her.

Capturing  cold night skies with camera and notebook is an uncomfortable business in winter, but we (Beau and I) wrap up warmly and go outside anyway. It is our way of "saying yes to the world", to the innate wildness of life in the Great Round of time, to the grandeur of the starry, starry night over our heads.

This month just has to be about owls. In early February, the Great Horned Owl (Bubo virginianus), claims a nest in the woods with its lifelong mate and settles down to the arduous business of raising another brood. The great "hornies" are among my favorite birds, and it is enchanting to hear a couple calling to each other across the snowy forest in winter. Northern residents to the core, the great owls thrive in cold climates, and the further one travels toward the Arctic, the bigger they grow. 

The Saw-whet Owl or sugar bird (Aegolius acadicus) will not be far behind the great hornies in its own courtship rituals, and neither will the  other owls of the Lanark highlands. There is love, fertility and parenthood in the air at this time of the year, among northern owls anyway. The rest of us are just trying to stay warm and not succumb to complete and utter madness before spring gets here.

Life can be stressful for those who lack feathers and dine not on mice and voles. Wolves and coyotes howl plaintively, across the snow dunes. Deer are yarded up in the woods and rapidly running short of cedar browse. Even the squirrels and rabbits in the garden look hungry and a little worried. No doubt about it, hunger is a beast well known in these northern snowbound places.

If we can just manage to hang on for several weeks longer, there are better and brighter times ahead. March promises slightly milder temperatures, relief and incomparable sweetness. Perhaps the ambrosial alchemy of the maple syrup season will be in full swing when the next full moon makes its appearance.

Wordless Wednesday - Imbolc Light

Beech Daughters in Winter

Friday Ramble - Thoughts Before Imbolc

Here we are on the closing pages of January, nearing the eve of Candlemas or Imbolc. The festival falls on Monday, February 2nd, beginning at sundown on the evening before (Sunday, February 1st). Strange to relate, this observance in the depths of winter celebrates light and warmth, the stirring of new life in the earth and the advent of springtime.

In many French speaking countries, February 2nd is also called La Chandeleur, a Christian feast honoring the presentation of the infant Jesus Christ in the temple and the purification of his mother, forty days after she had given birth. The festival's name comes from the Latin festa candelarum, meaning "the festival of candles", and there are links to the ancient Roman purification feasts known as the Lupercalia. The modern observance is marked by blessing candles and eating festive crepes which represent the sun and the return of the light to the northern hemisphere.  

For those of us of Celtic lineage, the day is called Imbolc or Candlemas, sometimes the Féile Bride (Festival of St. Brigid) or "Bride's Day". It is consecrated to Brigid, honored as an Irish saint in modern times, but hallowed as a Tuatha Dé Danann goddess many centuries before. Brigid is a deity of fire and creativity, wisdom, eloquence and craftsmanship, patroness of the forge and the smithy, poetry, fertility and the healing arts, especially midwifery. Light is her special province. Hers are the candle, the hearth and the blacksmith's forge.

Made of light ourselves, we are Brigid's unruly children, forged from the dust of stars which lighted the heavens billions of years ago, went super nova at the end of their time and dissolved back into the cosmos. Within the motes of our being are encoded the wisdoms of the ancient earth and all its cultures, the star knowledge of unknown constellations and "The Big Bang" which created not just our own precious world, but the whole cosmic sea in which it floats..

We are recycled matter, our dancing particles having assembled into diverse life forms over and over again, lived and expired as those life forms, then vanished into the stream of existence to emerge as something else.  The universe never wastes a thing, and we could learn a lot from her.  In our time, “we” have been many things, worn many shapes and answered to many names. In this lifetime I exist as a tatterdemalion, specific and perhaps unique collection of wandering particles called Catherine or Cate, but in previous incarnations, I was someone or something altogether different.

Buddhist teacher and deep ecologist Joanna Macy has written that since every particle in our being goes back to the first flaring of space and time, we are as old as the universe itself, about fifteen billion years. We are the universe, and it is us.

I have my own small festival observances, and I cherish them. Food is prepared using ingredients associated with sunlight, sweetness and abundance: eggs, butter, saffron and honey, a little green to invoke springtime. Since such things often feature in my culinary efforts anyway, perhaps there is a ritual element in my kitchen doings all year long, and I like to think so. There will be a festive lunch with a dear friend, and small gifts will be exchanged. I will light a candle at nightfall and nest it in a snowdrift in the garden. We are up to our eyebrows in white stuff this year, so clambering up on a snowdrift with a candle and matches will be good fun.

Happy Imbolc to you and your clan. Happy St. Brigid's Day. May warmth and the manifold blessings of Light be yours.

Wordless Wednesday - Snow People

Sequestered, Week 328 (CCCXXVIII)

And Away We Go...

Friday Rambles - Little Blue

Weary of deep snow and icy cold, I am a little tired of the color blue at times too, no matter how intensely blue the sky or snow drifts or spruce trees or the cast iron crane out on the deck. Its migratory kin have been gone for months, but our splendid metal bird is frozen in place, and it is well and truly stuck until springtime rolls around again. I like looking at it.

There are some lovely words for blue in the English language: azure, beryl, cerulean, cobalt, indigo, lapis lazuli, royal, sapphire, turquoise, ultramarine, to name just a few. I recite them like a litany under my breath as I look out at our sleeping garden with mug in hand or break a trail into the woods.

Just when I decide that I am all wintered out and will not sketch another icicle or frame another photo of such things, another eloquent winter composition presents itself to the eye. Something curved or fragile or delicately robed in snow shows up and begs rapt and focused attention. Glossy bubbles dance in the icicles above a frozen creek in the Lanark highlands. Snow crystals adorn the evergreens over my head and make them blaze like diamonds. As Beau and I wander along, faded and tattered oak leaves flutter down to lie on the trail at our feet. Pine and spruce cones cast vivid blue shadows in pools of early morning sunlight. Is there anything on the planet as fine as the scent of snowy blue spruce boughs in late January? Look closely, and every needle is wearing stars.

Small and perfect, complete within itself, each entity conveys an elemental serenity and equilibrium, lowers the blood pressure and stills the breathing, returns eyes and focus to simplicity and grace and just plain old being here. Beau looks up at me, grinning and wagging his tail, and for a minute or two, my sadness takes a step backward. These scraps of time on the edge of the woods will have to be enough. They are, and they are more than enough.

There are worlds great and small everywhere, worlds within and worlds without. Every one is a wonder to behold and remember with my eyes and patient recording lens. Surely, I can do this for a little while longer.

Thursday Poem - The Road

Here is the road: the light
comes and goes then returns again.
Be gentle with your fellow travelers as they

move through the world of stone and stars

whirling with you yet every one alone.
The road waits.
Do not ask questions but when it invites you
to dance at daybreak, say yes.

Each step is the journey; a single note the song.

Arlene Gay Levine

(from Bless the Day: Prayers and Poems to Nurture Your Soul)

Wordless Wednesday - Blowing