From the Bridge

Sunday - Saying Yes to the World

At some point, one asks, "Toward what end is my life lived?" A great freedom comes from being able to answer that question. A sleeper can be decoyed out of bed by the sheer beauty of dawn on the open seas. Part of my job, as I see it, is to allow that to happen. Sleepers like me need at some point to rise and take their turn on morning watch for the sake of the planet, but also for their own sake, for the enrichment of their lives. From the deserts of Namibia to the razor-backed Himalayas, there are wonderful creatures that have roamed the Earth much longer than we, creatures that not only are worthy of our respect but could teach us about ourselves.
Diane Ackerman, The Rarest of the Rare: Vanishing Animals, Timeless Worlds

Swans on the Rideau

Friday Ramble - Of Orchids and Bears

 Showy Lady's-slipper (Cypripedium reginae)

This rare wild terrestrial orchid of the highlands blooms gloriously in a hidden corner of the Two Hundred Acre Wood, and we guard the whereabouts of its existence jealously.  Only a handful of close friends and companions know where it sends its roots into the fertile muck, puts up spiraling emerald leaves and blooms for a few days in late June.

Clambering down a steep slippery slope in wellies and carrying a whole bag of camera equipment is a perilous undertaking at any time, but there are wonders to be seen down  in the depths late in June.  Now and then there are surprises too.

This week's ramble among the wild orchids was abruptly cut short when I reached a corner of the bog and found myself eye to eye with a truculent black bear about eight feet away, her cub half way up a nearby leaning tree and looking merely curious.  Concealed by deep shadows and flickering light, the two had been invisible until I was almost on top of them. As much as I wanted to stick around and capture a few photos, strategic retreat was the order of the day.  I withdrew slowly (in reverse and keeping my eyes on Mama), leaving the lady and her son (or daughter) to their wanderings in the bug-infested and odiferous swamp.  No wait, the bears were the ones who reeked, at least more so than the vegetation they were clambering about in.

Thursday Poem - Sometimes

Sometimes, when a bird cries out,

Or the wind sweeps through a tree,

Or a dog howls in a far off farm,

I hold still and listen a long time.

My soul turns and goes back to the place

Where, a thousand forgotten years ago,

The bird and the blowing wind

Were like me, and were my brothers.

My soul turns into a tree,

And an animal, and a cloud bank.

Then changed and odd it comes home

And asks me questions. What should I reply?

Hermann Hesse

Wordless Wednesday - Himself at Play in the Green

Rose of the Sun at Its Height

Kordana Rose - Maya

Sunday - Saying Yes to the World

What does it take to make a journey? A place to start from, something to leave behind. A road, a trail, or a river. Companions, and something like a destination: a camp, an inn, or another shore. We might imagine a journey with no destination, nothing but the act of going, and with never an arrival. But I think we would always hope to find something or someone, however unexpected and unprepared for. Seen from a distance or taken part in, all journeys may be the same, and we arrive exactly where we are. . . .  There is the dream journey and the actual life.
John Haines, from Moments and Journeys

Midsummer Morning

Shining Through

Sunday - Saying Yes to the World

A voyage to a destination, wherever it may be, is also a voyage inside oneself; even as a cyclone carries along with it the center in which it must ultimately come to rest.  At these moments I think not only of the places I have been to but also of the distances I have traveled within myself without a friend or ship; and of the long way yet to go before I come home within myself and within the journey. And always when the curtains are lifted, the night is without, peering in steadily and constantly, with the light of the stars far beyond.
Laurens van der Post, Venture to the Interior

What Falls Away

One has to love creatures so exotic and lavishly endowed.  Summer's peonies are glorious creatures in their time of blooming - all velvety curves and fragrance, lavishly dappled with dew at the beginning of day, and oh the colors they come in...

The peonies we encounter on morning walks in the village come in hues ranging from delicate cream to deep magenta. Having a particular fondness for Oriental peonies (and an interest in their uses in the traditional medicines of China, Japan and Korea), I never tire of capturing them with the camera when we come across them in our wanderings.  The French word for peony is pivoine, and an fragrance of that name is marketed by the French perfumier Yves Rocher - a scent that is lush and sensual, redolent of blushing peonies, sunshine and summer.

These blooms are from an heirloom specimen that escaped from a village garden many years ago and now lives in a hedgerow not far from home. Their blooming is almost over for this year, but when I look at them, it seems to me that like roses, they are loveliest as they fade and dwindle and wither, their petals falling away and fluttering to the earth like confetti. There's a sweet and poignant aspect to such thoughts as the summer solstice approaches, and I remember feeling the same way last year around this time.

Here we go again... In a few days we will step into the second half of this calendar year and start down the luscious golden slope to autumn and beyond. Strange to relate, my pleasure in the season and a gentle melancholy seem to be all wrapped up together in fringed and flowery bundles of peony petals.  I recognize it as wabi sabi and treasure the feelings - they're an elemental expression of wonder, rootedness and connection, the suchness of all things.

Thursday Poem - The Moment

The moment when, after many years
of hard work and a long voyage
you stand in the centre of your room,
house, half-acre, square mile, island, country,
knowing at last how you got there,
and say, I own this,

is the same moment when the trees unloose
their soft arms from around you,
the birds take back their language,
the cliffs fissure and collapse,
the air moves back from you like a wave
and you can't breathe.

No, they whisper. You own nothing.
You were a visitor, time after time
climbing the hill, planting the flag, proclaiming.
We never belonged to you.
You never found us.
It was always the other way round.

Margaret Atwood
(from Morning in the Burned House)

Wordless Wednesday - Blowin' in the Wind

Oriental Poppy (Papaver orientale)

Moondancing in My Garden

No, not a song by Van Morrison (as much as I have always enjoyed his music), but something just as amazing...  The first rose of the season is always special, but the colors and textures and the fragrance of this one are something sing and dance about, and quite beyond description.

Seeing a splash of creamy color through the kitchen window yesterday morning a little after sunrise, I put down my mug of tea and ran for the camera, then just sat silently in the wet grass looking at the bloom for some time - it would have been difficult to find anything at all to say.

My Jackson and Perkins floribunda is as radiant and ethereal as its name suggests, and as beautiful as something birthed in the Elysian fields - even its name (Moondance) is perfect.  Who knew, plucking its once and sorry pot from a bargain bin a year or two ago, that it would be such a glorious dweller in my garden?

Keeping Watch With a Smile

He has been with us for years, and he carries out his appointed tasks from a quiet, comfortable and rather wild corner behind the little blue house, one of two garden Buddhas who keep watch over our leafy backyard realm in three seasons of the calendar year: springtime, summer and autumn.

White and purple violets grow nearby, and a shoot of the Maiden's Blush rose has taken root in front of him this year, all on its own - a fragrant offering and surely an act of dana.  There are songbirds in season, and on early summer mornings, cottontail rabbits sometimes visit for mindful conversations. One eye open and one eye closed, the old guy in the garden smiles at every sentient being who turns up, and they smile right back at him, recognizing a friend and protector.

Sunday - Saying Yes to the World

Winding river, endless mountains—the dark forest breathing mist. There is no road into the sacred place. It’s just that, the deeper you go, the more wondrous it becomes.

John Daido Loori, The True Dharma Eye

When we see ourselves as separate from nature, we abdicate our responsibility to it. We are nature—just as much as a tree or a wolf or a fish is nature. The spider web and the Brooklyn Bridge are both works of nature. We must learn how the delicate dynamics of this unlikely relationship work. The earth's heart is big enough to hold both. The question is, how big is the heart we manifest?

John Daido Loori, Inconceivably Wondrous

Another View From the Edge

Friday Ramble - On Summer Shores Reflecting

Feeling vaguely restless, one goes for a walk along the lake at twilight with camera in hand and a field notebook in her pocket. She is searching for something, and she knows not what that something is, or rather, what it will turn out to be.  She reckons she will recognize it when she sees it.

She stops on a favorite swath of beach.  The setting sun paints a trail across the surface of the tarn, and the ripples at her feet offer up a dazzling reflection in return. There are wide vistas, islands and magical archipelagos floating in the limitless expanses of sky as Helios drops out of sight for another day - a sense of fine cloud drifting adventures too. Down below, loons drift on the current like little boats, and there is at least one heron in the shallows nearby.  Bulrushes and fronds of pickerel weed fringe the margins of the lake, every stem swaying and sighing and casting  a fey reflection of its own.  The scene is one of joyous untrammeled reciprocity - no reservations, no limitations and no holding back, just exquisite buttery light and deep shadow, the inky shapes of trees, the tuneful cadence of waves as they arrive on the shoreline.

The word reflect has been with us since the fourteenth century, rising from the Old French reflecter and the Middle English reflecten, thence the Latin reflectere, all meaning to bend, bend down or bend back. During the fifteenth century, the common usage had to do with diverting things, with turning things aside or deflecting that which is undesirable. Somewhere around 1600 CE, we began to use the word to describe processes of thought and quiet contemplation. When we use the word in conversation today, we are usually musing about deep thought processes, matters of light and mirrors - anything and everything except bending and/or turning.

There were no deep musings as I stood by the lake a few nights ago, and the thoughts entertained were probably closer to the original meaning of the word reflect than they were to anything else.  I watched the slow flush of this dear little world at sunset, the intense colors moving across the water, and I felt like bending in a deep reverential bow or gassho.   I could manage a bow of sorts that evening, but anything more was out of the question.  So be it.

Nothing I ever capture on a memory card, nothing I sketch or write down here can do justice to such moments. All my fumbling clumsy efforts are a mere soupçon, a shadow, an echo of the Great Mystery - just reflections and a few bars of what the legendary Celtic warrior Finn called “the music of what happens".  The music is the earth's own wild and sweet music, and it's the finest music in the world.

Thursday Poem - A Walk

My eyes already touch the sunny hill,

going far ahead of the road I have begun.

So we are grasped by what we cannot grasp;

it has its inner light, even from a distance—

and changes us, even if we do not reach it,

into something else, which, hardly sensing it,

we already are; a gesture waves us on,

answering our own wave…

but what we feel is the wind in our faces.

Rainer Maria Rilke

Wordless Wednesday - Rose Leaves and Rain

Window Into Summer

Sometimes it's a door, sometimes a window in the stone wall of an abandoned house.  Whatever it is and wherever it happens to be, it's a lighted and leafy aperture into a season of waving branches, astringent sap and wild herbal fragrance, birdsong in the overstory, quiet winding waters crowned with yellow spatterdock and white water lilies.

It's a time and a place the elderly artist/scribe knows well - a never ending story that draws her like a magnet through endlessly branching rooms leading one after the other into the greenwood, complete with a wild piper she can hear but never see.  This is an eldritch season and wild places everywhere in the north are filled with wonder.

This week it's also an elderly 32-bit PC with a display capability that leaves much to be desired, little or no memory and antiquated versions of all the apps the artist/scribe loves best.  Slower than the second coming, this box growls  and it lumbers along like a tortoise, but it works, and it gets where it has to go, eventually.   As she taps away here this morning, the contents of the old box are being transferred into a brand new 64-bit box with Windows 7 and speed comparable to that of a Porsche 918 Spyder cruising the autobahn in the fast lane.  How on earth will she ever make it to Friday?  This week's experience will teach her patience, and that is a very good thing.

Little Dragons of the Air (I)

Four-spotted Skimmer (Male)

(Libellula quadrimaculata)

Sunday - Saying Yes to the World

As time went by, I realized that the particular place I'd chosen was less important than the fact that I'd chosen a place and focused my life around it. Although the island has taken on great significance for me, it's no more inherently beautiful or meaningful than any other place on earth. What makes a place special is the way it buries itself inside the heart, not whether it's flat or rugged, rich or austere. wet or arid, gentle or harsh, warm or cold, wild or tame. Every place, like every person, is elevated by the love and respect shown toward it, and by the way in which its bounty is received.
Richard Nelson, The Island Within