Friday Ramble - Between Here and There

Here we are on the cusp between autumn and winter. There is an element of impatience in the voices of Canada geese as they fly over the house, and the other migratory beings who are still here seem agitated and anxious to be off on their adventures.

I'm restless too, and words alone don't quite "do it" for me; nor do images, at least most of the time. Morning after morning, I scribble a few words and regard them with mild disdain. I prowl through old photos, looking for an image that adequately describes the dark foggy daybreak beyond the windows, the frosted garden grasses and wilting shrubbery, the bare and eloquent trees. Archive prowling at the break of day is a perilous undertaking through volume after volume of photo archives and disk after disk of stored images, all leaving something to be desired. At times, I consider tossing everything out, flogging the cameras to a pawn shop and taking up soap operas or macrame.

What I need at such times is sunlight and clear skies, a fine crunchy frost and an hour or two of wandering around the woods, camera around my neck, vest pockets crammed with filters, lenses and other photographic trappings, seed for the birds and Beau's homemade doggy biscuits. For various reasons, my ramblings are brief this fall, but I often journey into the eastern Ontario highlands in my thoughts. There are years of autumn rambles to revisit when I can't get out to the woods, and every step I take is a step through treasure.

Sometimes, what we need is already here and has simply been waiting for us to acknowledge it. When we wake up and notice, we are stopped right in our tracks, so taken by the breathtaking wonders before us that we can hardly draw in air. Old barns and whiskery trees, towering crags and limpid streams, sandhill cranes serenading each other and slow dancing in frosted farm fields at sunrise, herons and loons calling goodbye as they rise from their summer haunts and head south. Timeless, enchanted and liminal, all of it, and if we are lucky, from time to time, elemental magics rub off on us as we wander about in wild places.

Out of the north wind, there's fine blue stillness and pools of articulate silence, long resonant conversations with dreaming trees and old stones. Camus wrote that in the depths of winter, he discovered within himself an invincible summer. I suspect that for this old hen, what lies invincible within is an early highland winter in all its grace and grandeur. The last year's health issues notwithstanding, frosted leaves underfoot, geese overhead and treed hills with morning light shining through them still catch me by the throat and leave me breathless, every single time.  I just wish I could find a way to say it as it ought to be said.