Birch Mothers in the Wind

Paper (or canoe) birch

(Betula papyrifera)

February is the shortest month of the year, but for some reason, it often feels like the longest month of the calendar year. Here we are again, stuck in the dreary borderlands between winter and springtime, weary of cold and snow, longing for warmth and sunshine and longer days. 

It is below freezing here for the most part, cold winter winds scouring the bare trees and making their branches sway and rattle and creak like old wooden sailing ships. Now and then, there are hints of springtime, but they are few and far between. This is the month when I think about installing a big rubber palm tree in the living room with a sun lamp, a load of beach sand and a deck chair. 

Springtime is a puckish wight this far north, teasing us with hints of brighter, warmer times, then disappearing for several days at a time. After so many years of watching her antics, I am tolerant of her fickle conduct, her tricksy toing and froing. These late February days are liminal intervals with gifts of their own. They have a wonderful way of quieting our thoughts and breathing rhythms, of bringing our winter weary selves back to a still and reflective space in the heart of the living world.

I sat on a log in the woods a few days ago, watching as tattered scraps of birch bark fluttered back and forth in the wind. There were melted alcoves under the trees, and the morning felt like spring. The lines etched in the birches' paper were words written in a language I could almost understand when my breath slowed and my mind became still. The sun came and went, and when it slipped out from behind the clouds, its rays passed through the blowing strands and turned them golden and translucent, for all the world like elemental stained glass.

When I touched the old tree in greeting, my fingers came away with a dry springtime sweetness on them that lingered for hours. I tucked a thin folio of bark in the pocket of my parka and inhaled its fragrance all the way home. Some day soon, there will be spring in the eastern Ontario highlands, oh yes there will.

Sequestered, week 341 (CCCXLI)

Sunday, Saying Yes to the world

I build a platform, and live upon it, and think my thoughts, and aim high. To rise, I must have a field to rise from. To deepen, I must have bedrock from which to descend. The constancy of the physical world, under its green and blue dyes, draws me toward a better, richer self, call it elevation (there is hardly an adequate word), where I might ascend a little -- where a gloss of spirit would mirror itself in worldly action. I don't mean just mild goodness. I mean feistiness too, the fires of human energy stoked; I mean a gladness vivacious enough to disarrange the sorrows of the world into something better.

It is one of the great perils of our so-called civilized age that we do not acknowledge enough, or cherish enough, this connection between soul and landscape—between our own best possibilities, and the view from our own windows. We need the world as much as it needs us, and we need it in privacy, intimacy, and surety.

Mary Oliver, Long Life: Essays and Other Writings

Happy Valentine's Day

Friday Ramble - For the Birds

Alas, much of the last week has been spent clearing white stuff from around the little blue house in the village. At times, the threshold, cobblestones, driveway, sundeck and steps disappeared from view completely, and getting out and about to do anything at all was quite an exercise.

In winter, I maintain a track around the garden for Beau, and recent snowfalls have filled it in over and over again. His circuit has been dredged out several times in recent weeks, but Himself is up to his houndy ears in white stuff whenever he goes out, and he is not amused by the situation. Clearing his path is more akin to tunneling than it is to anything else at the moment, but we keep at it.

After waiting out high winds and heavy snowfall in the cedar hedge, village birds are hungry, and first thing in the morning, the garden is filled with clamorous fluttery folk waiting for their breakfast. Before anything else is done, bird feeders are cleaned and refilled, and seed is scattered on the deck for ground noshers. There have been many mornings recently when just getting to the feeders was a chore.

Cardinals, blue jays, nuthatches, various woodpeckers and winter finches visit from time to time, but sparrows, chickadees and juncos are always about. How can one not feel affection for the tiny feathered spirits who visit every day and express their thanks when food is put out for them, even in the most inclement weather? I keep hoping that grosbeaks (evening, pine, rose-breasted) will turn up, but they prefer rural areas and only visit village feeders when they are desperate.

I once wrote here about an icy morning when a sparrow flew into the house, made itself comfortable in the sunlit dining room for a few minutes and sang joyously, then flew back out into the garden when it had warmed up a bit and had something to eat. Sparrows are as numerous here in winter as they are in most urban areas, but it is always a pleasure to watch the little passerines who stay around when other bird kin have forsaken us and headed for warmer climes.

Depths is an appropriate word for the circumstances in which we and the birds find ourselves this winter. We are almost drowning in snow, and village plows are fast running out of places to put it. Our little feathered friends are having a hard time finding food in the white stuff and appreciate well provisioned feeders.

The bird at the top of this morning's post is a male house finch. They are welcome visitors in any season, and I try to provide them with their favorite nosh in winter: black oil sunflower seed, nyger seed and white millet.

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

Puddles, Wind and Light

A brilliant scrap of waning moon rose before dawn this morning and could be seen through the bare trees in our garden. Luna was a fey and compelling presence through the bedroom draperies, and sleeping was well nigh impossible.

Temperatures were well below zero overnight. As I watched the moon from my pillow, I could hear the north wind dancing across the roof and through the eaves of the little blue house in the village. When the wind moved through them, the icicles dangling from the roof of the potting shed rang like bells, and the whole snowbound garden seemed to be in motion, the cedars swaying in unison and talking among themselves.  No doubt about it, winter plans to hang about for some time to come.

On this icy morning in February, I am grateful for small things, the aroma of freshly ground coffee beans, the sputtering of the Di Longhi espresso machine in a corner of the kitchen, homemade sourdough crisping in the toaster, the square of blue sky seen through a window when the clouds roll away for a while, the warmth of a coffee mug cradled in my gnarly paws as I look out across the garden.

Strange as it may seem, even the deep blue snow beyond the windows merits a little appreciation and gratitude, such graceful curls and waves and billows, so many shades from pastel to indigo, such eye grabbing sculptured shadows.

Beau and I paused in a pool of sunlight this morning to watch the sun nibble delicately at the edges of a puddle. As cold as the morning was, there was melting going on, and the lagoon at our feet was a work of art in progress.

Sequestered, week 340 CCCXL

Sunday, Saying Yes to the World

Magic doesn't sweep you away; it gathers you up into the body of the present moment so thoroughly that all your explanations fall away: the ordinary, in all its plain and simple outrageousness, begins to shine -- to become luminously, impossibly so. Every facet of the world is awake, and you within it.

David Abram, Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology

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.

Thursday Poem - Storytelling

Come in where the fire casts shadows

of longing. Sit near each other.

Hold hands

while I tell you a story that has never been

told, a story with music, a flute and singing,

a drum and dancing, a story of life’s circle

and the hungry wolves

waiting for caribou, and the caribou lingering
over a feast of lichen, and ravens

poised in the trees at the edges

of the wolves’ eyes,

a story with a grandmother spider
stealing a piece of the sun,
a story with medicine plants

and sacred weeds,

a story of how men and women

found each other, of how coyote

got his cunning, of arrow boy,

of the owl's beak tapping, always

the owl, the death bird,

and the mouse, timorous, scuttling

into its den, a story of you, and you,

and you. What does it mean

this dream fruit?

Nothing more than to peel and eat
the sweet juicy flesh, to let its seeds
become part of your spirit.

Long after I am gone you will

remember a story that never happened
how things that never were

came into being.

Dolores Stewart, from Doors to the Universe

Wordless Wednesday - Imbolc Light

WIshfully Stirring Something or Other

Another frigid winter morning, motes of sunlight scattering like stars in the cold air, snow everywhere, an icy wind that goes right to the bones. Underwhelming to say the least, and I am not alone in my disgruntlement. When I tried to entice Beau into going outside a few minutes ago, he looked into the garden, gave me a filthy look, then turned his back on the door (and me) and trotted back to bed.

At times like these, exotic spices and culinary offerings from faraway places go dancing through my sconce, clattering their cymbals and shaking their tambourines in the depths of the pantry. How to begin? The day's opening gambit is a beaker of Logdriver espresso (strong enough to walk on) and a stack of cookbooks. 

I feel a major stirring exercise coming on. Whatever happens in the kitchen this morning, it will be an impromptu creation and redolent of aromatic spices, something containing saffron, perhaps a few pomegranate arils, an anise star or two.

Just seeing a dish of saffron threads always cheers me up, and I wish I had enough hair to tint that fabulous color. Since I don't, I painted the front door of the little blue house in the village the precise scarlet of a bowl of saffron threads.

My culinary adventures will conjure sunlight and warmth and comfort, all three welcome on a deep freeze day when one can't wander about freely, and her canine companion won't go out anyway. There is an element of ritual to this morning's activities - perhaps my wishful stirrings will entice Lady Spring into making an early appearance. If not, the dazzling reds and golds make my heart glad.

Happy Imbolc/Candlemas

Why a sheep here this morning? The name Imbolc is taken from an Old Irish expression meaning "in the belly", a respectful nod to the ewe sheep who are pregnant in early February. This day is sometimes called "Oimelc", meaning "ewe's milk".

The livelihood and status of ancient tribes depended on the fertility of their livestock, and the ancients considered raiding other tribes for prime specimens quite acceptable. Ballads were sung to celebrate the more daring thefts, and wars were sometimes waged to regain the ownership of prized animals which had been pilfered.

Today's festival celebrates fertility, springtime, and the lambing season about to begin in so many corners of the northern hemisphere. No lambs will be born in the eastern Ontario highlands for several weeks, but here is a contented face from another lambing season. This morning, we are halfway between winter and spring, and that is something to celebrate.

Happy Imbolc, happy Candlemas! May there be light in your life.

Sunday, Saying Yes to the World

Grace is the celebration of life, relentlessly hounding all the non-celebrants in the world. It is a floating, cosmic bash shouting its way through the streets of the universe, flinging the sweetness of its cassations to every window, pounding at every door in a hilarity beyond all liking and happening, until the prodigals come out at last and dance, and the elder brothers finally take their fingers out of their ears.

Robert Farrar Capon, from Between Noon & 
Three: Romance, Law and the Outrage of Grace

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.

Thursday Poem - Instructions in Magick

You don’t need candles,
only the small slim flame in yourself,
the unrevealed passion
that drives you to rise on winter mornings
remembering summer nights.

You don’t need incense,

only the lingering fragrance

of the life that has gone before,

stew cooking on an open fire,

the good stars, the clean breeze,

the warmth of animals breathing in the dark.

You don’t need a cauldron,

only your woman’s body,

where so many of men’s fine ideas

are translated into life.

You don’t need a wand, hazelwood or oak,

only to follow the subtle and impish

leafy green fellow

who beckons you into the forest,

the one who goes dancing

and playing his flute

through imperial trees.

And you don’t need the salt of earth.

You will taste that soon enough.

These things are the trappings,

the tortoise shell, the wolf skin,

the blazoned shield.

It’s what’s inside, the star of becoming.

With that ablaze, you have everything

you need to conjure up new worlds.

Dolores Stewart, from The Nature of Things

Wordless Wednesday - Snow People

Just Hanging In...

It was bitterly cold yesterday morning. Several inches of white stuff had fallen overnight, and ice lurked under every frill and flake and mound. Vehicles in the village had almost disappeared from view and were only visible as vaguely rounded shapes in the murk. The music of the day was plows roaring about and depositing the results of their efforts in places where they did not belong, like my driveway where they blithely dumped about two feet of hard rocky snow. Harumph.

According to the day's forecast, we were headed for another squall and several more inches of snow fell as predicted. High winds and minimal visibility were in the cards, and the weather pundits were right about that too. Lucky us. A fair bit of time was spent outside pushing snow about and exchanging banter with my neighbors who were all outside tossing white stuff around too.

What else to do on such a day? While the storm raged, sourdough bread, molasses cookies, cornbread and a cauldron of minestrone soup were conjured up. A fair amount of time was also spent huddled in a comfortable corner with Beau, a mug of tea, a good book and a shawl.  Once in a while, I looked out at the falling snow, shrugged and went off to pour another mug of something hot.

The day was one of quiet contentment, and surprisingly, it was not adversely affected by the weather conditions—it tickled me greatly that the day was enjoyable and I was not letting  Old Man Winter (Boreas) bring me down. Fimbulwinter or no, we (Beau and I) can do this, and by golly, we are doing it. Having said that, the aches and pains at the end of the day from flinging snow about are something else entirely.

Sequestered, Week 328 (CCCXXVIII)

Sunday, Saying Yes to the World

Existential loneliness and a sense that one’s life is inconsequential, both of which are hallmarks of modern civilizations, seem to me to derive in part from our abandoning a belief in the therapeutic dimensions of a relationship with place. A continually refreshed sense of the unplumbable complexity of patterns in the natural world, patterns that are ever present and discernible, and which incorporate the observer, undermine the feeling that one is alone in the world, or meaningless in it. The effort to know a place deeply is, ultimately, an expression of the human desire to belong, to fit somewhere.

The determination to know a particular place, in my experience, is consistently rewarded. And every natural place, to my mind, is open to being known. And somewhere in this process a person begins to sense that they are becoming known, so that when they are absent from that place they know that place misses them. And this reciprocity, to know and be known, reinforces a sense that one is necessary in the world.

Barry Lopez, from Embrace Fearlessly the Burning World

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

Let There Be Blue

That dazzling blue . . . Sky, clouds, fields and trees, are rendered in exquisite shades of blue, and when the sun touches them, they sparkle like a dragon's hoard. A dragon's hoard composed only of blue stones that is: topaz, sapphire, tourmaline, turquoise, tanzanite, labradorite and lapis lazuli, amethyst too. The sheer "blueness" of this snowy day in January's middling pages is a marvel.

When I come here, I let the wind and the light and the stillness enfold me, and I just breathe in and out for a while. This is the place of my belonging, magical in every season, but particularly so in winter. An old friend, it quiets a weary, aching heart.

Sequestered, Week 327 (CCCXXVII)