Thursday Poem - Sleeping in the Forest

I thought the earth remembered me,

she took me back so tenderly,

arranging her dark skirts, her pockets

full of lichens and seeds.

I slept as never before, a stone on the river bed,

nothing between me and the white fire of the stars

but my thoughts, and they floated light as moths

among the branches of the perfect trees.

All night I heard the small kingdoms

breathing around me, the insects,

and the birds who do their work in the darkness.

All night I rose and fell, as if in water,

grappling with a luminous doom. By morning

I had vanished at least a dozen times

into something better.

 

Mary Oliver

(from Twelve Moons)

Wordless Wednesday - Willow Dancing With the Sky

Eyes of Heaven

The irises reside in a sunny hillside alcove on the Two Hundred Acre Wood, surrounded by a dense thicket of armored Prickly Ash. Because of the wicked thorns, I usually avoid the area, and local deer also give a wide berth to Zanthoxylum americanum. The thicket is a secure nesting place for indigo buntings, and they flit merrily in and out in summer, lighting up the hill with plumage in a fetching variation of my favorite color.

In Greek, the word iris means "eye of heaven" as well as "messenger", and our sumptuous summer blooms take their name from Iris, goddess of the rainbow. As messenger of the gods, she carried their missives between heaven and earth along the prismatic trail, and another of her sacred tasks was escorting the souls of deceased women along the same path to the Elysian fields, the final resting place of those who were heroic and virtuous in life.

There has always been something alluring and powerful about irises and the number three.  One form or another of the three-petaled iris grows in almost every tropical or temperate corner of island earth, and the flower has been cherished by individual cultures for time out of mind. In its regal purple form, the iris symbolizes royalty and divine protection, and it was venerated by Merovingian monarchs like Clovis who used it as a device on their military banners and painted it on the walls of their dwelling places.  I've always found it incongruous that the iris was used as a heraldic device by a legendary confederation of bellicose Frankish tribes. After the Merovingians, along came the combative Carolingian kings, and the iris became the "fleur-de-lis" beloved of France today.  

For ancient cultures, the iris represented life, virtue and resurrection.  For us, it is the essence of summer, and when it comes to purple, the irises have it all.

Jacks are dancing

Jack-in-the-pulpit (Arisaema triphyllum)

In winter, snow covers the shady ground down by the creek for months at a time, and the little tributary's voice is silent under its blanket of ice. The sheltering trees on the hillside above are bare and silent.

In springtime, the lovely, crumbly, dark earth is revealed in all its elemental fragrance, and the water sings a raucous ditty as it gambols downhill with its tumbling freight of winter detritus, broken twigs and and dessicated leaves.

Hallelujah, now the "jacks" are dancing there in all their stripey magnificence. Wood ducks are nesting on a pond nearby, and the forest is a towering green cathedral again. Sunlight flickers through the leaves, and choirs of grosbeaks hop from branch to branch in the overstory, singing their hearts out.

Winter was all right, and we got through it, even managed to do a little inward blooming now and then.  Spring was late, brief and rather wet, but sunlight and warmth have returned to the Two Hundred Acre Wood at last. We can do this, verily, merrily, we can do this, oh yes,we can.

Sunday - Saying Yes to the World

When it’s over, I want to say: all my life
I was a bride married to amazement.
I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.

When it is over, I don’t want to wonder
if I have made of my life something particular, and real.
I don’t want to find myself sighing and frightened,
or full of argument.

I don’t want to end up simply having visited this world.

Mary Oliver
Excerpt from When Death Comes

Blooming in the Hedgerow

Friday Ramble - Reflect

Feeling vaguely restless and in need of something or other, I went for a walk along the lake at twilight this week. I didn't know what the something might be, but I hoped I would have the wits to recognize it when I found it.

When I paused on a favorite ribbon of beach near the bridge, the setting sun was painting a trail across the water, and the ripples at my feet offered up a dazzling reflection in return, islands and magical archipelagos floating in the seemingly boundless sky as Helios dropped out of sight for another day. Bulrushes and fronds of pickerel weed fringed the lake, every stem swaying and sighing and casting a fey reflection. Loons drifted on the current like little boats, and herons haunted the shallows nearby. The scene was one of joyous untrammeled reciprocity - no reservations, no limitations and no holding back, just exquisite buttery light and deep shadow, inky shapes across the water, the cadence of the waves as they greeted the shore.

The word reflect has been with us since the fourteenth century, coming from the Old French reflecter and the Middle English reflecten, thence the Latin reflectere, all meaning to bend or bend down. Until the fifteenth century, the common usage had to do with diverting things, with turning things aside or deflecting that which is undesirable. Some time 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, about light and mirrors - anything and everything except bending.

There were no deep musings by the lake, and my thoughts were closer to the original meaning of the word reflect than they were to anything else. Seeing the fiery sundown light in all its perfection, I felt like bending in a deep reverential bow or gassho.  I could manage a shallow movement of sorts that evening, but anything deeper was out of the question. So be it. It's always about the light.

Thursday Poem - Bio

I am a leaf-dance in the woods.
I am the green gaze of the ocean.
I am a cloud-splitter in the sky.
I arrived robed in red
out of nowhere and nothing.
I whisper between pages.
I disappear in the painting.
I rest between musical notes.
I awake among strangers
in a country I never imagined.
I am timbales and bells,
a parade under your window.
I am the riddle I cannot solve,
hands on the clock's face,
seven crows on a branch.
I am the one whose footfall
changes the pattern of stars.

Dolores Stewart
from The Nature of Things
(reprinted here with the late poet's kind permission)

Wordless Wednesday - Early Morning Rain

Golden Lily of the Woods

Trout lily or Dogtooth violet 
(Erythronium americanum)

The Dutchman's Trousers

Dutchman's breeches or Kingcup 

(Dicentra cucullaria)

Sunday - Saying Yes to the World

Looking at the heavens places me in time and space - and beyond them. Gazing at the stars, I look through heaven’s wrinkle; the light I see now represents their past, having traveled many years across space to reach my eyes here on earth; the light they are emitting now will be visible only in some future, years away.

I and all the other lives on Earth are connected to the stars, held together by  gravity, the invisible glue that defines our universe, and bound elementally by a common material: stardust.  This atomic grit of interstellar space paints dark clouds on the Milky Way, condenses itself into swirls of gravity-bound suns and planets, and provides the minerals bonded by the push and pull of electrical charges into the molecules that form our cells. Like stardust and the other materials of life itself, we are in constant motion, changing shape as we pass through our lives, and after the makings of our bodies break down and are recycled, rearranged into other forms of life.

The stars remind me of where I come from and who I am.

Susan J. Tweit, Walking Nature Home

Just Passing Through

Sandhill Crane (Antigone canadensis)

Lanark Highlands, May 16, 2018

Friday Ramble - Aestival

Can there be anything sweet than magenta crabapple blossoms and foraging bumble girls? The crabapple tree in the front yard is in full, riotous, fragrant bloom, and every single flower wears an intoxicated bumble lassie.

This week's word is one of my favorites, hailing from French, thence the Late Latin aestīvālis and earlier Latin aestās meaning summer or summery.  Both forms are cognate with the Sanskrit इन्द्धे (inddhé) meaning to light or set on fire. At the root of our wordy explorations  is the Proto-Indo-European (PIE) form h₂eydʰ- meaning heat, fire or to burn.

In the science of zoology, aestival refers to the tendency of all living creatures to be somewhat sleepy and slow moving in the heat of summer, and botanists use the word to describe the arrangement of organs or components in a flower bud.

I once thought that the word siesta (referring to a leisurely nap after lunch) was related, but I discovered a year or two ago that its roots are in the Latin sexta meaning the sixth hour of the day (midday).  The two words sound similar, but as far as I know, they are not related.

June is only a week or two away, and this week's word is one of my favorites for the brief greening season at the heart of the calendar year.  Of course, summer is a fine word too, but somehow or other, it doesn't hold a candle or even a tiny wooden match to the frothy perfumed magnificence of the golden season that reigns so briefly here in the sub-Arctic climes of Canada. Aestival says it all, and I love the shape of the word on my tongue.

I say "aestival" and its sibilance summons up images of outdoor festivals and al fresco celebrations, shaggy gardens of scarlet poppies and towering purple lupins, trees filled with singing birds, bees in the orchard, roses sweeter than any vineyard potion, perfect sunsets across the lake shared with stately herons.  It's all gold, and it's all good. Here comes June in all her glory, and I am ready.

Thursday Poem - Mornings at Blackwater Pond

For years, every morning, I drank
from Blackwater Pond.
It was flavored with oak leaves and also, no doubt,
the feet of ducks.

And always it assuaged me
from the dry bowl of the very far past.

What I want to say is
that the past is the past,
and the present is what your life is,
and you are capable
of choosing what that will be,
darling citizen.

So come to the pond,
or the river of your imagination,
or the harbor of your longing,

and put your lips to the world.
And live
your life.

Mary Oliver

Wordless Wednesday - Woodland White

Great White Trillium (Trillium grandiflorum)

Froth and Fragrance

One day there are no leaves on trees in the village at all, and the next day the same trees are fully leafed out, their voluptuous canopies alive with birds who dish out madrigals at sunrise and trip the light fantastic from branch to branch until the sun goes down. Their pleasure in the day and the season is obvious.

Crabapple trees, flowering almonds and plums seem to leaf out and flower overnight, and wonder of wonder, they are alive with madly buzzing bumbles, honey bees and wasps.  Dusted with pollen from stem to stern, the little dears are in constant motion, ecstatic to be feeling sunlight on their wings and foraging for nectar on a balmy morning in May.

Here comes another fine summer of prowling about in gardens wild and domestic with camera and macro lens, drinking in light and gathering nectars of my own. Now and then, I will put down my gear and dance with the joyous bumble girls. Ungainly creature that I am, I hope no one is watching.

Heart Opening Wide

Sunday - Saying Yes to the World

There is a fundamental reason why we look at the sky with wonder and longing—for the same reason that we stand, hour after hour, gazing at the distant swell of the open ocean. There is something like an ancient wisdom, encoded and tucked away in our DNA, that knows its point of origin as surely as a salmon knows its creek. Intellectually, we may not want to return there, but the genes know, and long for their origins—their home in the salty depths. But if the seas are our immediate source, the penultimate source is certainly the heavens… The spectacular truth is—and this is something that your DNA has known all along—the very atoms of your body—the iron, calcium, phosphorus, carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, and on and on—were initially forged in long-dead stars. This is why, when you stand outside under a moonless, country sky, you feel some ineffable tugging at your innards. We are star stuff. Keep looking up.
Neil deGrasse Tyson

Floating in the Light

Friday Ramble - Radical

This week's word is radical, a natural choice for this madcap season when wildflowers are popping up all over the place, when we are planting (or considering planting) packets of seeds and flats of flowers, herbs and veggies into our gardens.  It comes to us through the late Latin rādīcālis meaning having roots, and the Old English wrotan meaning to root, gnaw or dig up, both entities originating in the early Indo-European wrad meaning branch or root.

Synonyms include: fundamental, basic, basal, bottom, cardinal, constitutional, deep-seated, essential, foundational, inherent, innate, intrinsic, native, natural, organic, original, primal, primary, primitive, profound, thoroughgoing, underlying, vital. They also include pejorative words such as anarchistic, chaotic, excessive, extremist, fanatical, far-out, freethinking, iconoclastic, immoderate, insubordinate, insurgent, insurrectionary, intransigent, lawless, left wing, militant, mutinous, nihilistic, rabid, rebellious, recalcitrant, recusant, refractory, restive, revolutionary, riotous, seditious, severe, sweeping, uncompromising and violent.

In common parlance, a person who cultivates dissident political beliefs is "radical".  Ditto those who dwell outside the mainstream, who have departed from accepted social standards or do their very own thing rather than just following the herd. The word has been so used since the sixties, and being called "radical" may be a compliment, but it is usually pejorative. It always intrigues me that a word used to describe the unconventional, independent, mildly eccentric and downright peculiar actually means something as lovely, organic and simple as "rooted". Do I consider myself radical? Anyone who writes, paints, sketches, takes heaps and heaps of photos, rambles in the woods in all sorts of weather and talks to trees is radical, so I suppose I am.

Our word simply means being connected, and it is one of my favorites in the English language. It signifies (for me anyway) a bone deep connection with everything that matters, the earth under my feet, the sky and the sun and the moon and stars over my head - with timeless notions of rebirth, transformation and non-duality. Roots down, branches up and away we go...

Thursday Poem - Come to Dust

Spirit, rehearse the journeys of the body
that are to come, the motions
of the matter that held you.

Rise up in the smoke of palo santo.
Fall to the earth in the falling rain.
Sink in, sink down to the farthest roots.
Mount slowly in the rising sap
to the branches, the crown, the leaf-tips.
Come down to earth as leaves in autumn
to lie in the patient rot of winter.
Rise again in spring’s green fountains.
Drift in sunlight with the sacred pollen
to fall in blessing.
                                    All earth’s dust
has been life, held soul, is holy.

Ursula K. Leguin

Wordless Wednesday - The Power of Three

Fey Steeds and Tiny Riders

Dryad's Saddle or Pheasant Back Mushroom 

(Polyporus squamosus or Cerioporus squamosus)

One goes off to the forest in May in search of wildflowers and sometimes encounters these fetching fungi instead.  It's always a treat to discover such arty structures, and they pop out of the woodwork around the same time as morels do, sometimes growing quite large - well over a foot across.  This one was growing out of an elm stump along the trail into the deep woods, and it could be seen from quite a distance because of its tawny ochre coloring.

The growths are a species of bracket fungus, and their common name derives from a Greek myth that the fey woodland beings called dryads found them comfortable to sit on and liked to use them on their steeds. Do manes, legs and hooves appear when nobody is watching, then canter off with tiny riders? As for the second common name, patterns on the fungi do resemble the lovely mottled feathering on a pheasant's back.

Tough in their maturity (like me, I suppose), the "saddles" are edible and delicious when they are young and tender, and they smell like watermelons, apparently taste like them too when raw.  I haven't tried it, but one can make a lovely, stiff, creamy, thick paper out of the fibers.  All the specimens I have located so far are old and stringy so I haven't tried eating them - I simply like them for their shape (kind of like the starship Enterprise), their vivid earthy hues, and the fact that they show up unexpectedly on stumps and fallen trees, no two the same.

Coming Into the Light

Siberian squill (Scilla siberica)

Sunday - Saying Yes to the World

I breathe in the soft, saturated exhalations of cedar trees and salmonberry bushes, fireweed and wood fern, marsh hawks and meadow voles, marten and harbor seal and blacktail deer. I breathe in the same particles of air that made songs in the throats of hermit thrushes and gave voices to humpback whales, the same particles of air that lifted the wings of bald eagles and buzzed in the flight of hummingbirds, the same particles of air that rushed over the sea in storms, whirled in high mountain snows, whistled across the poles, and whispered through lush equatorial gardens…air that has passed continually through life on earth. I breathe it in, pass it on, share it in equal measure with billions of other living things, endlessly, infinitely.

Richard Nelson, The Island Within

Coming to Light

Friday Ramble - Bloom

Blue skies and fluffy clouds overhead, birdsong, avian courtship rites and birds building nests everywhere - the village is opening out and greening up before our eyes as Beau and I potter about and peer into hedgerows. Spring does not make a quiet entrance this far north - she comes over the hill with an exuberant bound, reaches out with a twiggy hand, and everything bursts into bloom. When we went off to the park a few mornings ago, the first narcissus of the season were blooming in a sheltered, sunny alcove, and we both did a little dance.

How can this week's word be anything except bloom? The word originates in the Middle English blo or blome, meaning to open up and flower lavishly, to glow with health and well-being, to be as sleek and glossy as an otter, as dewy and flushed with sunlight as a garden tulip or an early blooming orchid in a wild and wooded place. There are probable connections (or roots) between bloom and bhel in Proto-Indo-European, the hypothetical common ancestor of all modern European languages - in that ancient, oral and unscribed tongue, bhel means to grow, swell, or unfold, to leaf out or come into flower.

Perhaps a better word for this week would be sex, because that is what springtime's lush colors, alluring fragrances, velvet textures and warbling ballads are about - the Old Wild Mother's madcap dance of exuberance, fertility and fruitfulness. Every species on the planet seems focused on perpetuating its own heady genetic brew, and the collective pleasure in being alive is almost tangible.   

Forsaking appointed chores, we poke around in the garden, lurch about in village thickets, peer into trees and contemplate the blue sky for long intervals.  It's simply a matter of blooming wherever one happens to be planted.  Beau is already a master of that splendid Zen art, and his silly old mum is working on it.

Thursday Poem - In Passing

How swiftly the strained honey
of afternoon light
flows into darkness

and the closed bud shrugs off
its special mystery
in order to break into blossom:

as if what exists, exists
so that it can be lost
and become precious

Lisel Mueller, from Alive Together

Wordless Wednesday - Golden

Happy Beltane (May Day)

Bloodroot (Sanguinaria canadensis)

This is Beltane (or May Day) in the northern hemisphere, Samhain in lands below the equator. As we in northern lands drift from winter into springtime, our kindred in the south are moving from summer into autumn..

It was a long winter here in the eastern Ontario highlands, and nights are still cool so it will be another week or so until colonies of bloodroot are well and truly up and blooming in our forest, but early specimens lift their gold and white heads in protected nooks here and there in the woods.

The shy white bloomers with their golden centers are dear to my heart, and they are something of a seasonal marker. Encountering this one glowing softly in its flickering, stone-warmed alcove last weekend, I was overcome, and I felt like kneeling and kissing the good dark earth where the flower made its home—it was that perfect. Ignoring my painful and protesting knees, down I went on the dead leaves, and I stayed there for quite a while, nose to nose with the little wonder and as happy as a clam.  In feasting my eyes on the little flower and focusing my attention on the moment, I discovered another fragile blooming within. Getting up again was quite another story.

The experience was one of the wild epiphanies I love so much, especially in springtime when the north woods are just coming to life, a moment of kensho, one of those fleeting intervals of quiet knowing and connection that I like to call "aha" moments.  Forget the fancy stuff - this right here is the ground of my being.

Happy Beltane (or May Day), everyone. May there be light and blooming and fragrance in your own precious life, in your own part of the great wide world. Wherever you make your home on the hallowed earth, may all good things come to you and your clan at this turning of the wheel in the Great Round of Time.