Friday Ramble - Clouds in My Cuppa

Clouds, cooler mornings, rain and fog were our lot this week. Oilskins and rubber boots waited by the door for soggy excursions to the park, and a towel dangled from a nearby newel post, ready to dry Beau's fingers and toes when he came in from the garden.

Through the kitchen window comes the smell of rain and wet earth as I sip my mug of tea, the sound of branches in the garden shedding their cloaks of wetness, jubilant robins in the overstory singing down more life giving precipitation. There is never enough rain for them, and they are singing up a fine, drenching drizzle. 

In the darkling street, umbrellas bloom like peonies, carried by village children off to school with their parents, older siblings, and occasionally the family dog. There is the swish of early commuters splashing through lovely deep puddles when they think nobody is looking, the resonant grumble of village buses, the soft growl of motor vehicles heading uptown for the day's roiling and toiling. 

On our early morning walks in the park, trees float into view like the masts of wooden sailing ships and then disappear again in the mist. Somewhere in the murk, blackbirds and song sparrows are exercising their vocal cords, and an unseen woodpecker (probably a pileated from the volume of its exuberant hammering) is mining a tattered birch for breakfast bugs.

My umbrella has sprung a leak or two, and sometimes we are wet when we arrive home after rainy rambles. I am hoping to find a large green cotton one to replace it, but it has to be something substantial, NOT one of those folding contraptions that succumbs to a good blow at the drop of a hat. If I had a penny for every brolly I have ever owned that preferred spending most of its time inside out, I would be rich.

Leaky umbrellas and wet collars notwithstanding, there is something restful and very soothing about rainy days. If I could climb the old maple in the garden, I would perch right up there with the thrushes, trilling for more days like these fine soggy hours just unfolding. Getting up there in oilskins and wellies might be difficult though, and what would I do with my tea and the umbrella?

Thursday Poem - When I Am Wise

When I am wise in the speech of grass,
I forget the sound of words
and walk into the bottomland
and lie with my head on the ground
and listen to what grass tells me
about small places for wind to sing,
about the labor of insects,
about shadows dank with spice,
and the friendliness of weeds.

When I am wise in the dance of grass,
I forget the name and run
into the rippling bottomland
and lean against the silence which flows
out of the crumpled mountains
and rises through slick blades, pods,
wheat stems, and curly shoots,
and is carried by wind for miles
from my outstretched hands.

Mary Gray

from Wild Song: Poems of the Natural World

Wordless Wednesday - Raining, Greenly

Catching the Sun

Oh, how they capture and hold the sun within, these buttery yellow gerbera blooms. Kin to dahlias, daisies, marigolds, calendulas, coneflowers, chrysanthemums, zinnias, and the great towering sunflowers, they drink in morning light and store it within the frilly tutus of their lavish petals. Like sunflowers, their capitulum appears to be a single flower, but each is a community made up of hundreds of tiny individual blooms.

Little earthbound suns on stems, gerbera dish out light as if it is warm honey. They are the essence of summer, and all the other garden flowers behind them are uplifted by their frothy golden magnificence, by their almost imperceptible swaying movement, by the soft, sighing music of their duet with the wind.

Now and then, I falter as all living creatures must from time to time. On dreary days, I mourn the paucity of light in the world beyond my windows. I think about the injustice and suffering in the great wide world, and I am sad, very sad. Then I remember how my garden loves the light in early summer, and I resolve do a little inward blooming of my own, to take in light and send a little joy and comfort out to others. 

If only I could take in light and store it as flowers do in summer! I haven't a clue how to go about it, but I am working on it. Perhaps all that is required is to stand in the garden with my face to the sun as the gerbera do, all day long. I could become a garden myself. Now there's a thought.

Sequestered, Week 214 (CCXIV)

Sunday, Saying Yes to the World

Once upon a time, when women were birds, there was the simple understanding that to sing at dawn and to sing at dusk was to heal the world through joy. The birds still remember what we have forgotten, that the world is meant to be celebrated.

Terry Tempest Williams, When Women Were Birds

White Empress in Bloom

Great White Trillium (Trillium grandiflorum)

Friday Ramble - Earth/Earthy

Earth is a good word for pondering in this shaggy season as we cultivate our gardens 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, and it comes to us through the good offices of the Middle English erthe, the Old English eorthe; the German erde, Old Norse jǫrth, and the 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 way back is the Proto-Indo-European (PIE) form *h₁er- meaning ground, soil, land or place.

When we say "earth", we are most likely thinking of the ground under our feet, of garden plots, orchards, wooded hills, city parks, farm fields and shadowed arroyos. We may be thinking of wild plums, oak leaves, weeping willows, of the seeds and sleeping roots below our feet, the granite bones of our little blue planet and the fiery heart beating way down deep in its molten core.

We almost never consider ourselves as elements in the same story, but blood and bones, root and branch, rivers and rocks, we are all parts of a vast elemental process, a cosmic web. Endlessly befuddled strands in the web that we are, we humans tend to forget that we are part of anything at all. In fact, we are the earth, and the earth is us.

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 up a rock face or seated in a pool of sunlight under a tree in the woods, on a hill somewhere under the summer stars, or on 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. Such moments can't be predicted, and nor should they, but I have noticed that they often show up right when I need them.

There we are with our feet planted in the dirt and our heads in the clouds, not a lofty thought in sight, and out of the blue a scrap of elemental knowing puts in an appearance. In that moment, we know beyond a doubt that we are part of all this and right where we should be. We belong here, our roots, branches, star stuff and every dancing particle - we belong here as much as rivers, mountains, acorns, wild salmon and sandpipers do. Dirt, clouds and stardust, it's all good.

Thursday Poem - To the Rain

Mother rain, manifold, measureless,
falling on fallow, on field and forest,
on house-roof, low hovel, high tower,
downwelling waters all-washing, wider
than cities, softer than sisterhood, vaster
than countrysides, calming, recalling:
return to us, teaching our troubled
souls in your ceaseless descent
to fall, to be fellow, to feel to the root,
to sink in, to heal, to sweeten the seas.

Ursula K. Le Guin, from So Far So Good

Wordless Wednesday - After the Rain

How Sweet It Is

And so it goes . . . One day, the old crabapple is bare and forlorn, the next day it wears a multitude of tiny leaves. Almost overnight, the tree is covered with blooms and buzzing with throngs of ecstatic, blissed-out bumbles, bees and wasps.

Along comes a summer breeze, and the crabapple symphony is over, fragile petals drifting through the air like windblown confetti, coming to rest on lawns and hedges and gardens, on fences and birdbaths and pergolas and fountains.

Lilacs in the village are blooming, and when I stepped outside with Beau last evening around ten, the night air was full of their heady fragrance. We leaned against the railing on the veranda and breathed in the glorious perfume.

Suddenly, I remembered a long ago garden I planted with purple heliotrope. The color was gorgeous, and the sweet, cherry-like scent of the blooms pulled in hummingbirds, butterflies, bumbles and bees from miles around. I shall have to plant it again.

 How sweet all this is, how fleeting and poignant, and just a little sad.

Sequestered, Week 213 (CCXIII)

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

Bunch of Gladness

Friday Ramble - Aestival

This week's word is one of my favorites, hailing from Middle English, Middle and Old French, 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 end of all our wordy explorations  is the ancient Proto-Indo-European (PIE) root form h₂eydʰ- meaning heat, fire or to burn.

Proto-Indo-European (PIE) is the hypothetical common ancestor of all Indo-European languages, and its elements have been assembled from known Indo-European languages. There is no record that PIE ever actually existed, but if so, it would have been spoken from the Late Neolithic (6,400–3,500 BC) to the Early Bronze Age (3300 to 1200 BC), a very long time ago. Current thinking is that the prehistoric Proto-Indo-Europeans were nomadic tribes from the steppes of eastern Europe and central Asia. An adventurous lot, they wandered as far as the Aegean, northern Europe, Central Asia and Siberia, leaving their language, religious beliefs and customs wherever they went.

In the science of zoology, aestival refers to the tendency of many living creatures to be sleepy and slow moving in the heat of summer, and botanists use the word to descri 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 while 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 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 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.

At last, things are warming up in this part of the world, 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. Beau and I stop to look at the flowering trees on our walks, and on fine sunny mornings, the objects of our rapt attention are full of ecstatic bees, bumbles and wasps. 

Within a few days, there will be trout lilies, trilliums, columbines and wild orchids in the woods, Dutchman's breeches sprouting from every nook and rock cranny on the Two Hundred Acre Wood. The creek among the trees will gurgle its way down to the beaver pond as it always does, and grosbeaks will sing in the overstory.

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.  

What splendid offerings the Old Wild Mother holds out to us in springtime. It's all golden, and it's all good. Here comes June in all her glory, and we (Beau and I) are ready.

Thursday Poem - This

This is what was bequeathed us:
This earth the beloved left
And, leaving,
Left to us.

No other world
But this one:
Willows and the river
And the factory
With its black smokestacks.

No other shore, only this bank
On which the living gather.

No meaning but what we find here.
No purpose but what we make.

That, and the beloved's clear instructions:
Turn me into song; sing me awake.

Gregory Orr
(from How Beautiful the Beloved)

Wordless Wednesday - The Color of Morning

Froth and Fragrance

One day there are no leaves or flowers on village trees, and the next day the same trees have embraced the season, 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 is obvious, and oh the fragrance, the splendid pinks!

Crabapple trees, flowering almonds and plums seem to leaf out and flower overnight, and wonder of wonders, 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 feel sunlight on their wings and forage 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 (or the camera on the Samsung S24), 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 212 (CCXII)

Sunday, Saying Yes to the World

We are showered every day with gifts, but they are not meant for us to keep. Their life is in their movement, the inhale and the exhale of our shared breath. Our work and our joy is to pass along the gifts and to trust that what we put out into the universe will always come back.

Robin Wall Kimmerer 

Hepatica in Bloom

Friday Ramble - Enough (Already)

This week's word dates from before the year 900, having its origin in the Middle English enogh, and Old English genōh; both are cognate with the German genug, Gothic ganohs and Old Norse nōgr. The Old English geneah (it suffices) and Sanskrit naśati (reaches or reaching) are kindred words.

Roget gives us the following synonyms: abundant, adequate, ample, full, sufficient, suitable, acceptable, bountiful, comfortable, competent, complete, copious, decent, enough already, plentiful and satisfying. Frugal and its noun form frugality are modern kindred and words I occasionally use in conversation.

Lewis Hyde's The Gift, Trickster Makes This World and Common As Air, are fine reading, and he makes good arguments for appreciating what we already have, for embracing the non-commercial (or commonwealth) aspects of the creativity that is our birthright and sharing it with other entities, with the Old Wild Mother (Earth) herself.

Have a look too at the works of Barry Lopez, in particular Arctic Dreams, also About This Life: Journeys on the Threshold of Memory and Horizon.

Those of you who have been visiting this place for a while already know that I am a long time admirer of Robin Wall Kimmerer's work, especially Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants.

In cultivating enoughness, we use what we have been given with grace and respect. We partake of a wild and earthy fruitfulness, a careful abundance and an ethic of universal stewardship. We walk through this world rooted and knowing our place in it. We live as the good stewards, artists and creators we were meant to be. Lewis Hyde, Barry Lopez and Robin Wall Kimmerer say it a lot better than I ever could.

I say it often. We should say thank you. We have to tread lightly on the earth and reduce our ecological footprint. We must whittle down our demands on a world strained almost beyond its regenerative powers by human excess, greed, cruelty and contempt.

Is the cup of our earthly days half empty or half full? That is up to us.

Thursday Poem - May

May, and among the miles of leafing,

blossoms storm out of the darkness—

windflowers and moccasin flowers

The bees dive into them and I too,

to gather their spiritual honey.

Mute and meek, yet theirs is the deepest

certainty that this existence too—

this sense of well-being, the flourishing
of the physical body—rides near
the hub of the miracle that everything
is a part of, is as good as a poem

or a prayer, can also make luminous
any dark place on earth.

Mary Oliver

Wordless Wednesday - The Power of Three

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 soulful and fine stuff indeed.

This morning, the crows left an offering in the birdbath, a tiny, dead field mouse with its entrails spilled out and floating forlornly around in limp spaghetti-ish circles, assuredly not the way one likes to start the day. Somewhat downcast, I went back to the deck and held my nose resolutely over the aromatic mug of Italian dark roast waiting for me there. Later I donned rubber gloves, gave the wee mouse back to the earth, scrubbed out the birdbath and refilled it with clean water. The crows will probably return with new booty tomorrow, and we will commence clean up operations all over again.

Tulips in every shade of the rainbow are starting to bloom, 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. 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 are starting to appear. When Lady Spring finally shows up here, she hits the ground running.

What an amazing trip this season is, and what wonders there are to feast one's eyes on; trees leafing out, wildflowers popping up everywhere, feeders in the garden full of songbirds. If I were to stop and take photos of every splendid thing we (Beau and I)  see on our morning walks (and everything is splendid at this time of the year), we might not get home again for weeks.

Sequestered, Week 211 (CCXI)

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

Lake and Setting Sun

 It's the light that gets you, every time.

Friday Ramble - Swimming in Light

We awaken to gray skies and rain beating a staccato rhythm that shuns meter and metronome. Puckish breezes cavort in the eaves and ruffle tiny green leaves in the garden like decks of playing cards. A thousand and one little waterfalls have appeared out of nowhere, and impromptu streams are dancing happily through village gutters carrying sodden twigs, oak leaves, pine needles and catkins.

Here and there are precious islands of stillness. Sheltered by overhanging trees, the ornamental pond in a friend's garden is like glass, white and scarlet koi hovering almost motionless in the early light, their open mouths like tiny perfect "o"s. Sometimes, the jeweled carp seem to be swimming in sky.

In springs past, there was sometimes water in the garage, and the dear old Passat (gone now) rested easy in a shallow lagoon until the wet stuff gurgled its way down through frantically working drains and out into village collectors. When the tide receded, I scraped rust into glass jars and tucked them away on a shelf - iron oxide pigments produce lovely ochre hues, and my gleanings were used in arty projects, often on other rainy days. The glass jars and their crumbly contents were found treasure, and looking at them made me smile. These days, my fingers are seldom up to such activities, but that doesn't stop me from thinking up neat "stuff" to try out.

While claiming my rusty bounty, I sometimes thought about the fact that humans have been using iron oxides in artistic undertakings as far back as the prehistoric caves of Lascaux. I would be a happy camper indeed if I had ever managed to produce something a scrap as vibrant as the Chinese horse. Just think, that magnificent beast has been galloping along its cave wall for at least fifteen thousand years. 

A heady brew of rust (iron oxides), carbon dioxide and water is where all sentient life on earth may have begun. It is interesting to note that the Japanese word for rust is sabi (錆). Then there is wabi-sabi (侘寂), the enfolding aesthetic or world view which is centered on notions of impermanence, simplicity and naturalness or imperfection.

Clouds and rain, then sunshine and blue sky, then back to clouds and rain again, who knows what spring days will hold? When good weather prevails, Beau and I go off to the woods and ramble as far as we can, a long way from the miles of rugged terrain we once covered, but there are wonders everywhere we go, grace and gratitude in every step.

On wet days, we listen to Bach or Rameau, read and drink tea. We watch raindrops dappling the windows, the painterly way in which trees, stones and old wood fences are beaded with moisture and shining in the grey. Each and every raindrop is a minuscule world teeming with exuberant life, whole universes looking up at us, great and bumbling creatures that we are. Rain or shine, up and down, in and out, us and them, it's all good. Is there any such thing as us and them? I think not. Just us. Together. All One.

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 awaken 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)

Happy Beltane (May Day)

Wordless Wednesday - Pot of Gold