Sunday, March 31, 2013

Happy Easter

 White Easter Lily (Lilium longiflorum)
It's simply a white lily in bloom, but this Japanese island native with its enchanting fragrance is one of my favorite flowers ever - it says "springtime" and Easter better than almost anything else I can think of. Everything about the bloom is quietly opulent, from the gently swaying stem to the silky white petals and velvety golden heart. 

Happy Easter to you and your tribe!

Saturday, March 30, 2013

Visiting the Old Crabapple

Cedar Waxwing (Bombycilla cedrorum)

Friday, March 29, 2013

Friday Ramble - Journey

Journey comes from the Middle English journei, meaning day (or day's travel), through the Old French jornee and Vulgar Latin diurnta, thence the Late Latin diurnum (meaning day), or perhaps the neuter form of the Latin diurnus, meaning daily or "of a day". The word claims kinship with journal, diurnal and diary which comes to us from the Latin diārium meaning daily allowance or record. Somewhere in there too and predating 950 CE by a fair nugget of time are the Middle English dæg; and the Germanic tag.

The word harks back to the beginning time when we moved from place to place on our own two feet and measured our barefoot progress by the amount of daylight involved in the process. There are some lovely synonyms for this week's word in our language: adventure, campaign, caravan, expedition, exploration, migration, odyssey, passage, peregrination, pilgrimage, quest, ramble, roaming, roving, safari, sally, seeking, sojourn, transmigration, vagabondage, voyage, wandering and wayfaring.

Journeying is not just the simple business of getting from one place to another place though. When I say the word (and I am fond of it), I think not of trips to school or marketplace, but of childhood rambles and a clear sense even then that life was an adventure unfolding - that something grand, magical and illuminating awaited behind the next tree or around a bend on the trail ahead. My childhood self spent hours watching leaves float down rivers of windfall light, how light turned the whole world dazzling gold as the sun went down at the end of the day. A child has no words for such things, but oh, how feelings of wonder tugged at my sensibilities in those times.  "Ready or not, here I come, seeking something magical, mysterious and incandescent, I know not what."

From rapt childhood moments that odd little girl moved on into college, adulthood, work, marriage, parenting and all the bumps and potholes in the shambolic road of life. Oh, there were snippets of fey knowing here and there, but the midlife journey often seemed to be "arrow straight" and running toward a flat horizon, nary a tree, a hill, a cantrip or a mystery in sight.

Older now and hopefully (not sure about that though) a little wiser for all my meanderings, in these eldering days, I think about the wind in highland trees and sunrises seen from the top of the cliffs over Dalhousie Lake.  I think of migrating geese and drifting fogs in early morning, the way clouds seen from "up there" seem to form a sparkling road - one spiraling right out into the great beyond and eternity.  There are glorious sunsets to be seen if one climbs the mountain at twilight, but they can be seen from the shoreline too, often in the splendid company of herons.

Here I am again, watching leaves float down the river in season, haunting shorelines with a camera and trying to capture that twilight moment when the world seems to be spun out of gold.  The childhood sense of journeying and mystery that seemed to vanish during my frantic middling years has returned and so have my dreams.  There are sleep wrapped sojourns on the shore of Lake Superior, oceans of cloud seen from the roof of the world, sunrises over the yellow mountains of China's Anhui province. There are adventures in the offing, eldritch musics offered in the voices of the sirens.

Childhood rambles, mortgage payments, the straight line highways of middle years, and fabulous skies in wondrous places - all are part of the journey and whether or not we remember it most of the time, that journey is about community, wildness, light and grace unfolding. May there be joy and adventure on your own wanderings...

Monday, March 25, 2013

Standing in the Light

Spencer takes in the sun

Sunday, March 24, 2013

They're Back!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

It is a bad image to be sure, but the first flocks of Canada Geese crossed into the Lanark Highlands in the last day or so and plunked themselves down in the snowy fields, looking unconcerned by all the white around them.  I may have seen a heron standing on the edge of the ice in the Clyde River yesterday, but I am not sure.

There is still deep snow for the most part, but here and there are open pools of water for swimming about, and on southern slopes there are bare patches of ground with enough "stuff" for munching.

All the talk here is of returning birds, and we trade snippets of information about them with enthusiasm when we meet on corners or in local shops.  Temperatures will rise this week, and the snow will begin melting, so the air will be filled with singing as throngs of geese make their way home. 

Seeing the great birds yesterday for the first time in months, I felt like dancing and greeted every bird that flew over my head.  Perhaps we are on our way at last.

Saturday, March 23, 2013

Waiting and All Aflutter...

 Black-capped Chickadee (Poecile atricapillus)

Wednesday, March 20, 2013

Monday, March 18, 2013

Sunday, March 17, 2013

Tobar Phádraic (for St. Patrick's Day)

Turn sideways into the light as they say
the old ones did and disappear into the originality
of it all. Be impatient with explanations
and discipline the mind not to begin
questions it cannot answer. Walk the green road
above the bay and the low glinting fields
toward the evening sun. Let that Atlantic
gleam be ahead of you and the gray light
of the bay below you,
until you catch, down on your left,
the break in the wall,
for just above in the shadow
you’ll find it hidden, a curved arm
of rock holding the water close to the mountain,
a just-lit surface smoothing a scattering of coins,
and in the niche above, notes to the dead
and supplications for those who still live.
Now you are alone with the transfiguration
and ask no healing for your own
but look down as if looking through time,
as if through a rent veil from the other
side of the question you’ve refused to ask,

and remember how as a child
your arms could rise and your palms
turn out to bless the world.

David Whyte (from River Flow)

David's online home is here.

Saturday, March 16, 2013

Friday, March 15, 2013

Friday Ramble - Melt

The word melt has been around since before 900, coming to us through the Middle English melten, the Old English meltan, mealt and gemæltan  all meaning to liquify and (or) digest.  It is cognate with the Old Norse melta  and Greek méldein  meaning the same thing.  Then there is the Proto Germanic meltanan and West Saxon gemyltan (W.Saxon) also meaning "to make liquid".  All or most of the forms spring from the Proto Indo-European (PIE)  meld meaning "softness" or "to render soft". The business of word origins is a curious one indeed.

The later verb form meld (meaning variously to amalgamate, dissolve, blend or mingle) seems to be a kindred spirit, hailing instead from the Old High German melden meaning "to announce" and the Old English meldian meaning "to make known". I am not sure how we get from here to there, but malt, the germinated barley used in brewing beer and distilling whiskey is a kindred word too.  Perhaps the curious relationship is defined simply by the fact that barley is softened in water and then fermented in order to produce malt.

For the past few days, I have been watching as the icicles dangling from the eaves of the little blue house in the village and its various garden structures dwindle and melt away.  A favorite springtime exercise in March is wandering about with camera and macro lens and photographing the watery stalactites as they droop at their moorings, grow skinny and then disappear into the earth, drop by shining drop.  

Like the artfully frosted windows of January and February, this month's vanishing icicles are an old love and something my camera is always eager to capture. Within the icy wands over my head are worlds great and small and too numerous to imagine - the great wide world all around us and whole multitudes of microscopic universes complete within themselves and teeming with life and radiance. Sometimes the melting icicles hold merely this doddering photographer and her lens; at other times they are filled with sky and clouds and bare trees and wonder and this remarkable changing season.  It's all good, and the Old Wild Mother's art is better "stuff" than I shall ever make.

Wednesday, March 13, 2013

Monday, March 11, 2013

Sunday, March 10, 2013

Space Jam: Is Somebody Singing?


Soon to be mission commander, Colonel Chris Hadfield (presently orbiting Earth on the International Space Station), performs "I.S.S. (Is Somebody Singing)" with Ed Robertson, the Barenaked Ladies band and Scarborough's acclaimed Wexford Gleeks choir at the CBC studios in Toronto.

The song was composed by Hadfield and Robertson in partnership with Music Monday, CBC Music and the Canadian Space Agency.  Their composition explores what it is like to look down on the Earth from space.

There are echoes here of the late Dr. Carl Sagan's, Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space. The book's title was taken from that of a photograph of planet Earth captured in 1990 by the Voyager 1 spacecraft from a record distance of about six billion kilometers (or 3.7 billion miles) from Earth.

In the photograph, Earth is shown as a tiny dot (0.12 pixel in size) against the vastness of space. Voyager 1 had completed its primary mission and was leaving the Solar System behind forever when it was directed by NASA to turn and to take a photograph of Earth, at Dr. Sagan's request. 

I was in need of "a small happy" when I saw this for the first time a few days ago, and the performance made me happy all over, so I am sharing it this morning. I am about to read Carl's book again this week.  It has been years since he departed earthly life, but I still miss his wisdom and thoughtfulness, his eloquence and sense of wonder, his joy and humor.  Such a mind does not come along often.

Thursday, March 07, 2013

Thursday Poem - Frost

Notice each windowpane has a different
Swirling pattern of frost etched on the glass.

And notice how slowly the sun melts
The glaze.  It is indelible: a fossil of a fern,

Or a coelacanth, or a derelict who
Rummages in his pockets and pulls out a few

Apple cores.  Notice the peculiar
angle of light in the slow shift of sunrise.

Where is the whir of the helicopter?
The search for escaped convicts in the city?

Be amazed at the shine and the wet.
Simply to live is a joy.

~ Arthur Sze ~

Wednesday, March 06, 2013

Tuesday, March 05, 2013

Late Winter Epiphany

It begins with the March sun hitting the cliffs above Dalhousie Lake, then a slow trickle down the icy rock face and into the fast flowing river below High Falls.

The ripples and frothy music of that madly singing river would be quite enough by themselves, but suddenly there is a small rainbow, a blithe harbinger of springtime, herald of the greening season and all things new.

Winter still wraps these hills and shores, and the north wind is dancing through the trees, but light and warmer times are on their way.

Monday, March 04, 2013

Into the Woods...

There are mornings when the trail through the deep snow, the whiskery trees along its verges and the long blue shadows across the path speak more eloquently than I can ever do, standing here freezing with my camera and notebook and trying to figure out how to describe this place on the edge of the woods.

If I never spoke again or wrote another word, would it matter in the greater scheme of things? Sometimes I wonder... These wild wonders speak and sing for themselves.

Sunday, March 03, 2013

Little Friends Along the Trail

White-breasted Nuthatch (Sitta carolinensis)

Saturday, March 02, 2013

Another Snow Day

For all the new white stuff deposited this week and our weariness of it, there are still bits of gnarly magic poking their way out of it here and there, potent suggestions that it is not the seasons that "get old", but we who are bearing witness to them.

It is our all-too-human perceptions that totter and wither and fade, and we need reminders of the earth's own wonder and magic and infinite change from time to time, in this case just a strand of milkweed with arty curves and deep blue shadows.

Now if I could just locate the bird bath in the garden - it has vanished completely.