Let There Be Red

June would not be June without clay pots and planters of red geraniums (cranesbills) blooming on the thresholds of houses in the village, and tomorrow is the first day of June. Here we are again, heading toward another summer solstice.

Beau and I have noticed on early morning walks that many of this year's geranium offerings are attended by purple petunias and marigolds. There are also some splendid coleuses in rainbow shades, and sometimes all four dwell comfortably in the same pot, geraniums, petunias, marigold and coleus. What a riot of aestival color!

My gypsy soul craves spectacular coleus strains like "Dragon Heart, "Rainbow Dragon", "Kingswood Torch" and "Chocolate Covered Cherry", and I am looking for other places in the garden to plant them this year. Ditto some of the more arty amaranth varieties in local nurseries like "Joseph's Coat", "Molten Fire" and "Early Splendor".

A pot of geraniums on the cobblestones in front of the house is a long standing tradition, and every year, I think of their ancestors who graced our threshold in years past and greeted everyone who came to the door. I remember their shape, their color, their texture, their green and rather peppery fragrance, their joyous blooming. They were perfect expressions of summer, and I thanked them. Happy June, everyone!

Sequestered, Week 113 (CXIII)

Sunday, Saying Yes to the World

Stars, too, were time travelers. How many of those ancient points of light were the last echoes of suns now dead? How many had been born but their light not yet come this far? If all the suns but ours collapsed tonight, how many lifetimes would it take us to realize we were alone? I had always known the sky was full of mysteries—but not until now had I realized how full of them the earth was.

Ransom Riggs, Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children

White Empress in Bloom

Great White Trillium (Trillium grandiflorum)

Friday Ramble, River

To trace the history of a river or a raindrop . . . is also to trace the history of the soul, the history of the mind descending and arising in the body. In both, we constantly seek and stumble upon divinity, which like feeding the lake, and the spring becoming a waterfall, feeds, spills, falls, and feeds itself all over again.

(Gretel Ehrlich, from Islands, The Universe, Home)

This week's word comes to us through the good offices of the Middle English and Anglo-Norman rivere and the Vulgar Latin riparia, thence the proper Latin riparius and ripa all meaning "of a bank" or simply "bank". The word's closest kin is the adjective riparian, and we use it to describe the fertile ground along waterways and those who live in such places. To be called riparian would be a fine old thing.

From the quiet alcoves and fields of their beginning places to the lakes and estuaries where they end their journeys and merge into their greater kin, a thousand and one little rivers in the Lanark highlands lift their voices, murmuring, cooing, laughing, singing, occasionally roaring. At sunset or in cool morning light, reflections of sky and clouds and trees fill every pool and eddy. After dark, the moon pours its light over everything and Luna seems as much a dweller in the quiet waters as she is in the sky above.

Solitary voices, choruses and concertos, there is attentive presence and connection in every note, and what a metaphor for life and journeying. If I could have named myself, the name would probably have been "River". As it happens, the youngest member of the family now wears the name, and I was delighted when it was chosen. I would like to be around to explore puddles, rivers and tide pools with her in a few years.

Wherever we land up living out our days, we are never far from rivers, and they are fine motifs for wandering. If we are lucky, we will know many in our lives, learn their dialect and cadence, trace the patterns of their ebbing and flowing, commit their rumbling chants and fluid harmonies to fragile memory — the canticles of earth's rivers are ancient stories, and they are the music of our journey.

A peaceful river and a few golden summer full moons, what more can one ask for?

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 - Planted

What Falls Away

Last Friday, the crabapple trees in the garden were covered with blooms and attended by thousands of ecstatically buzzing bees and bumbles. The next day, something akin to a tornado rampaged through the area, and farewell to fragrant crabapple offerings, not to mention many of the trees themselves. Whole woodlots were wrenched out of the ground, and there are wide expanses where no trees are left standing at all.

Goodbye to hydro towers, transformers, residential roofs, fences, garden sheds, telephone poles, trees and shrubberies. Windows were smashed and roof shingles shredded. Patio umbrellas, chairs and flower pots  were liberated from their moorings and went tumbling up the street in noisy, exuberant throngs, proclaiming their freedom from domestic tyranny. Beau and I watched them go and wondered if we were next.

The little blue house in the village escaped damage, and we still have power, but other parts of the metropolitan area were not so lucky, and it will be several days before power is restored everywhere and homes are repaired.  Community centers have set up kitchens and recharging stations so residents have access to hot beverages, cold drinks, food and recharging for their laptops, tablets and cell phones. Those who who still had old rotary phones retrieved them from storage and put them back to work.

It is a happy thing that most of the trees in the village survived the big blow, but I could weep when I think of the dear old trees who were destroyed by the storm. Some were more than a century old, and I considered them friends.

Sequestered, Week 112 (CXII)

Sunday, Saying Yes to the World

Turn off the lights. Go outside. Close the door behind you.

Maybe rain has fallen all evening, and the moon, when it emerges between the clouds, glows on the flooded streets and silhouettes leafless maple trees lining the curb. Maybe the tide is low under the docks and warehouses, and the air is briny with kelp. Maybe cold air is sinking off the mountain, following the river wall into town, bringing smells of snow and damp pines. Starlings roost in a row on the rim of the supermarket, their wet backs blinking red and yellow as neon lights flash behind them. In the gutter, the same lights redden small pressure waves that build and break against crescents of fallen leaves.

Let the reliable rhythms of the moon and tides reassure you. Let the smells return memories of other streets and times. Let the reflecting light magnify your perception. Let the rhythm of rushing water flood your spirit. Walk and walk until your heart is full.

Then you will remember why you try so hard to protect this beloved world, and why you must.

Kathleen Dean Moore, from Moral Ground: Ethical Action for a Planet in Peril

After the Rain, Lilacs

Friday Ramble - Earth

Earth is a good word for pondering in this all-too-brief and shaggy season as we till our garden plots and and tend the sweet beginnings of the harvest to come. All things, or at least most things, arise from the earth and return to it in time, us included.

Our word dates from before 950 CE, coming to us through the Middle English erthe, Old English eorthe; German erde, Old Norse jǫrth, Danosh jord and Gothic airtha, all springing from the Ancient Saxon eard meaning soil, home, or dwelling. All forms are likely related to the Latin aro, meaning to plough or turn over. Way back there somewhere is the Proto-Indo-European (PIE) form *h₁er- meaning ground, soil, land or place.

When we say "earth", we think of the ground under our feet, of gardens, orchards, wooded hills, farm fields and shadowed arroyos. We think of saplings and seeds and roots doing their appointed work in the good dark stuff below. We think of the granite bones of our planet and the fiery heart beating way down deep in its molten core.

In my own case, I am also thinking of the nine bags (150 liters in total) of premium garden soil still to be dug into the veggie patch. Three have already been put down, and the deck is covered with flats of veggies (tomatoes, kale, carrots, leeks, sweet onions and radishes) and herbs waiting to be planted when I get my act together and finish the job. Then there are several floral planters to contend with...

We almost never consider ourselves as elements in the same story, but blood and bones, roots and branches, rivers and rocks, we too are part of the Great Round—we are part of a vast elemental process, one far beyond the scope of our feeble human imaginations. Endlessly befuddled strands in the cosmic web that we are, we forget most of the time that we are part of anything at all. What a benighted lot we are.

Once in a while, the simple truth that we are NOT separate shows up and insists we pay attention. It can happen while dangling half way down a rock face with a camera or seated in a pool of sunlight under a tree in the woods, on a hill somewhere under the summer stars, or the shore of a favorite lake at sunset. A good sunset or a starry, starry night does it for me every time, and occasionally it even happens while I am parked in the waiting room of my local cancer clinic. Moments of kensho (見性) can't be predicted, and nor should they, but I have noticed that they often show up right when they are needed most.

There we are with our feet in the dirt and our heads in the clouds, and a scrap of elemental knowing pops out of the blue. For a moment we understand that we are part of everything around us, and that we belong here, roots, branches, star stuff and every dancing particle. We belong here as much as rivers, mountains, acorns, wild salmon and sandpipers do. Dirt, clouds, moonlight and stardust, it's all good. On mornings when I awaken feeling lonely and fragile and in rough shape physically, that keeps me going. That and Beau and my garden. Oh, and a good cup of tea.

Wordless Wednesday - Rainy

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 northern summer of prowling about in gardens wild and domestic with trowel and hoe, 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.

Sequestered, Week 111 (CXI)

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

Trinity (The Perfection of Three)

Friday Ramble - Aestival

This week's word is one of my favorites, hailing from Middle English, Middle and Old French forms, 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 this time around 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 rather 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 two weeks away, and aestival is one of my favorite words for the brief greening season at the heart of the calendar year. Summer is a fine word too, but 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.

After an unusually long, cold winter, things are heating up, and nectar gathering insects are starting to appear. Ornamental trees in the village (almond, cherry, crabapple and mock orange) are flowering, and the air is full of fluttering petals and sweet fragrance. On sunny mornings, the objects of our rapt attention are chock full of blissed out bees, bumbles and wasps. Beau and I stop to look at them, and it is a wonder we ever make it home in time for tea.

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 herons. It's all golden, and it's all good. Here comes June in all her glory, and we (Beau and I) are so ready.

Thursday Poem - For the Children

The rising hills, the slopes, 

of statistics

lie before us.

The steep climb

of everything, going up,

up, as we all

go down.

In the next century

or the one beyond that

they say,

are valleys, pastures,

we can meet there in peace

if we make it.

To climb these coming crests

one word to you, to

you and your children:

stay together,

learn the flowers,

go light.

Gary Snyder, from Turtle Island

Wordless Wednesday - Sweet

Magnolia (Magnolia x soulangeana)

The Music of What Happens

Around the corner, three song sparrows are trilling their hearts out from a rooftop.  Their pleasure in the day and the season is echoed by a construction worker a few doors away belting out Doug Seeger's “Going Down to the River” as he installs drywall in the old Victorian house on the corner.  The door of the place is wide open, and his rendering of the gospel classic is somewhat off key, but it's a right soulful crafting and fine stuff indeed.

This morning, the crows left me a gift in the birdbath, a dead field mouse with its entrails spilled out and floating forlornly around in limp spaghetti-ish circles.  Not the way one would like to start the day, and I returned to the deck and held my nose firmly over the aromatic mug of Italian dark roast waiting for me there. Later I donned rubber gloves, scrubbed out the birdbath and refilled it with clean water. The crows will return with new booty tomorrow, and we will commence clean up operations all over again.

Tulips are starting to bloom, and in every shade of the rainbow, but it is the reds that dazzle truly - the blooms are almost incandescent in the early sunlight and so bright they hurt one's eyes. Frilly daffodils and scarlet fringed narcissus nod here and there, and violets sprinkle the garden in deep purple and creamy white. A neighbor's bleeding heart bush is covered with tiny green buds swaying to and fro on artfully arching stems. The magnolia trees in the village are flowering and rain fragrant petals like snow, their perfume lingering everywhere. Wonder of wonders, the first few bumble girls of the season have arrived, just in time to partake of the crabapple blossoms that will be out in a day or three. When Lady Spring finally shows up here, she hits the ground running.

What a splendid trip this season is, and how much there is to feast one's eyes on: blue skies, trees leafing out, wildflowers popping up everywhere, bird feeders in the garden full of cardinals, nuthatches, chickadees, grosbeaks, song sparrows and goldfinches. If I were to stop and take photos of every splendid thing I see on morning walks (and everything is splendid at this time of the year), I might not get home again for weeks.

Sequestered, Week 110, (CX)

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.

Gerald Waxman, Astronomical Tidbits: A Layperson's Guide to Astronomy

First Lily of the Woods

Trout Lily or Dogtooth Violet (Erythronium americanum)

Friday Ramble - Enough Already

This week's word dates from well before the year 900, having its origin in the Middle English enogh, and Old English genōh. Both forms are cognate with the German genug, Gothic ganohs and  Old Norse nōgr, all meaning reached or sufficient. The Old English form geneah (it suffices) and Sanskrit naśati (reaches or reaching) are kindred words. At the end of this week's wordy explorations are the Proto-Indo-European (PIE) forms *h₂eh₂nóḱe (has reached, attained) and h₂neḱ (to reach).

Roget gives us other words for the same thing, or nearly the same thing: abundant, adequate, ample, full, sufficient, suitable, acceptable, bountiful, comfortable, competent, complete, copious, decent, enough already, plentiful and satisfying.  Frugal and frugality are modern kin, and one of these days, they will turn up in a wordy ramble.

In The Gift: How the Creative Spirit Transforms the World, Lewis Hyde makes good arguments for embracing the commonwealth aspects of our existence and sharing them freely, drawing upon the values espoused by old gift giving cultures and their relation to art and community. His focus is on imagination, creativity and intellectual property, but there are insights relevant to the pandemic times that have turned our existence into islands and cloisters and hollows. I am currently rereading Hyde's The Gift and Trickster Makes This World and enjoying them as much as I did the first few times around.

Immerse yourself in Robin Wall Kimmerer's Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants, also the writings of Barry Lopez and Terry Tempest Williams. Leaf through Finding the Mother Tree by Suzanne Simard. If you can find a copy in your local library or online, read Hestia Come Home, by Jerrilee Cain. One of these mornings, there will be a reading list of such works here - perhaps even several, Such is the lot of one who spends much of her time with her nose firmly planted in volumes and tomes and folios, when she is not knee deep in the veggie patch, that is. Perhaps I can drag a chair out to the garden and read aloud to the Romas and leeks and kale, the roses and herbs?

In cultivating the power of enough, we use what we have been given with grace and respect. We partake of a wild and earthy fruitfulness, a careful abundance, a bone-deep ethic of universal stewardship. We walk through this world rooted and knowing our places in it as the good stewards, artists and creators we were meant to be. The writers mentioned here today say it much better than I ever could.

We need to be kinder to each other. We need to tread lightly on the earth. We need to whittle down our demands on a world strained almost beyond its regenerative powers by excess, greed and contempt. Something's gotta give.

Why are there so few words in the English language for "read" and "reading"? It's a sin and a tragedy and a crying shame that bookish pursuits are so shabbily treated. 

Thursday Poem - Invisible Work (for Mother's Day)

Because no one could ever praise me enough,

because I don’t mean these poems only

but the unseen

unbelievable effort it takes to live
the life that goes on between them,
I think all the time about invisible work.
About the young mother on Welfare
I interviewed years ago,
who said, “It’s hard.
You bring him to the park,
run rings around yourself keeping him safe,
cut hot dogs into bite-sized pieces for dinner,

and there’s no one
to say what a good job you’re doing,
how you were patient and loving
for the thousandth time even though you had a headache."
And I, who am used to feeling sorry for myself
because I am lonely,
when all the while,
as the Chippewa poem says, I am being carried

by great winds across the sky,
thought of the invisible work that stitches up the world day and night,
the slow, unglamorous work of healing,
the way worms in the garden
tunnel ceaselessly so the earth can breathe
and bees ransack this world into being,
while owls and poets stalk shadows,

our loneliest labors under the moon.

There are mothers
for everything, and the sea
is a mother too,
whispering and whispering to us
long after we have stopped listening.
I stopped and let myself lean
a moment, against the blue
shoulder of the air. The work
of my heart
is the work of the world’s heart.
There is no other art.

Alison Luterman, from The Largest Possible Life

Wordless Wednesday - Paperwhites (Narcissus)

Violets Are For Love

My departed soulmate's favorite spring flowers were the violets in our garden, and they were his mother Nan's favorite too. Every year, he waited for them to bloom and feasted his eyes on them when they did. He would bend and inhale their delicate fragrance, then smile at me and say that violets are for love.

When I discovered our violets were flowering yesterday, I plunked myself down on the steps nearby and had a good cry. I don't weep gracefully, and I probably looked like Hades as I sat there, blubbering and sniffling and wailing and sore of heart. Beau curled against me as closely as he could, trying to comfort me as he always does at such times.

And so it goes... the violets are just being violets and doing what violets are meant to do on this earth, but they feel like a message from my soulmate, and I miss the man so. This morning it is raining, and their days are numbered, but oh, how they bloom in their appointed time, spring in and spring out. Violets are for love, and love goes on.

Sequestered, Week 109 (CIX)

Happy Beltane (May Day)