Sunday, Saying Yes to the World

Life will break you. Nobody can protect you from that, and being alone won't either, for solitude will also break you with its yearning. You have to love. You have to feel. It is the reason you are here on earth. You have to risk your heart. You are here to be swallowed up. And when it happens that you are broken, or betrayed, or left, or hurt, or death brushes too near, let yourself sit by an apple tree and listen to the apples falling all around you in heaps, wasting their sweetness. Tell yourself that you tasted as many as you could.

Louise Erdrich, The Painted Drum

Still in the Stream

Friday Ramble - The Measure of Our Days

Nearing the end of June, trees on the Two Hundred Acre Wood are gloriously leafed out, and vast swaths of woodland are as dark as night - the shadowed alcoves are several degrees cooler than the sunlit fields skirting them. Winding strands of wild clematis wrap around the old cedar rail fence by the main gate, and the silvery posts and rails give off a fine dry perfume.

The fields are wonders: orange and yellow hawkweeds, buttercups and clovers, daisies, tall rosy grasses and ripening milkweed, several species of goldenrod, trefoils and prickly violet bugloss - everything is moved by the arid summer wind and swaying in place. The open areas of waving greenery have an oceanic aspect, and I wouldn't be surprised to see the masts of tall ships poking up here and there.

And oh, the birds . . . red-tailed hawks circling overhead, swallows and kingfishers over the river, bluebirds on the fence, grosbeaks dancing from branch to branch in the overstory and caroling their pleasure in the day and the season. I can't see them for the trees, but mourning doves are cooing somewhere nearby.

Fritillaries and swallowtails flutter among the cottonwoods, never pausing in their exuberant flight or coming down to have their pictures taken. Dragonflies (mostly skimmers, clubtails and darners) spiral and swoop through the air, a few corporals among them for good measure.

I began this morning's post with the words "It is high summer". Then I remembered that the solstice has passed, and I went back and started again. And so it goes in the great round of time and the seasons. Many golden days are still to come, but we have stepped into the the languid waters that flow downhill to autumn.

Thursday Evening - Evening

The sky puts on the darkening blue coat

held for it by a row of ancient trees;

you watch: and the lands grow distant

in your sight, one journeying to

heaven and one that falls;

and leave you not at home in either one,

not quite so still and dark as the darkened

houses, not calling to eternity with

the passion of what becomes a star

each night, and rises;

and leave you (inexpressibly to unravel)

your life, with its immensity and fear,

so that, now bounded, now immeasurable,

it is alternately stone in you and star.

Rainer Maria Rilke

(translation by Stephen Mitchell)

Wordless Wednesday - Wild Bouquet

Flaming Amazement

Ah, these burnished summer days! In the eastern Ontario highlands, the rolling fields are studded with great round bales of hay. Shadows stretch long skinny fingers across cropped acreages at dusk, and deer and wild turkeys feed under the trees.

The evening sun flames amazement as it drops below the horizon. I've always loved the words "I flamed amazement", spoken by Ariel in William Shakespeare's The Tempest, (Act I, Scene 2). They seem just right for a balmy summer evening when the setting sun is putting on a blazing show, and there is magic in the air.

Shadows slanting across the landscape lengthen, grow sharper and deeper as days grow shorter. As if to compensate for waning daylight hours, northern sunsets light up the horizon in gold, inky blue and purple, perfect molten light and technicolor clouds. 

Beau and I lean against a fence at sunset, and my camera and lens can scarcely take in all the riches on offer. The setting sun dazzles our eyes, and the moon is as lustrous as a great cosmic pearl; she seems lit from within. I know the moon has no light of her own and borrows it from the sun, but it always seems otherwise at this time of the year. The fabulous sundown light is enough to make one swoon in delight.

Sequestered, Week 218 (CCXVIII)

Sunday, Saying Yes to the World

Touch is a reciprocal action, a gesture of exchange with the world. To make an impression is also to receive one, and the soles of our feet, shaped by the surfaces they press upon, are landscapes themselves with their own worn channels and roving lines. They perhaps most closely resemble the patterns of ridge and swirl revealed when a tide has ebbed over flat sand.

Robert Macfarlane, The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot

Seeing Through

Friday Ramble - For the Roses

One has to love creatures so exotic and lavishly endowed. Summer's roses are glorious  creatures, be their flowering an interval lasting a few days, or one lasting all season long. All artful curves, lush fragrance and velvety petals, the blooms are lavishly dappled with dew at first light, and they're a rare treat for these old eyes as the early sun moves across them. If we (Beau and I) are fortunate, there will be roses in our garden until late autumn, and we hold the thought close.

The word rose hails from the Old English rose, thence from the Latin rosa and the Greek rhoda. Predating these are the Aeolic wrodon and the Persian vrda-. At the beginning of our wordy adventure is the Proto-Indo-European (PIE) root form wrdho- meaning "thorn or bramble". There we have it - the loveliest and most fragrant of all flowers are named, not for their looks or perfume, but for their prickliness.

Most of the roses in our the garden have thorns to reckon with, but none more so than this morning's offering, a Canadian Explorer rose called "William Baffin". My thorny friend is a hybrid Kordesii developed at the Central Experimental Farm here in Ottawa during the seventies, and it is armed and dangerous. One of the most enduring climbers, it blooms until late autumn and is hardy as far north as zone 2b. 

Viewing this exquisite specimen from the bedroom window, I find myself falling in love with roses all over again, so lovely as they mature, so graceful as they fade and wither and dwindle, their petals falling away and fluttering to the earth like confetti. 

There's a bittersweet and poignant aspect to one's thoughts after the summer solstice, and I remember feeling the same way last year around this time. Here we are again, poised at the beginning of the dark half of the calendar year and readying ourselves to potter down the luscious golden slope to autumn and beyond. 

Bumbles love roses, and they spend their sunlight hours flying from one to another, burrowing into the hearts of the blooms for nectar and kicking their pollen bedecked legs in rapture. The air is filled with whirring wings and happy, buzzing music.

My pleasure in the season and a gentle melancholy seem to be all wrapped up together in falling rose petals and blissed out bumblebees. Such feelings are to be treasured—they are elemental expressions of wonder, rootedness and connection, the suchness of all things. How sweet it is, thorns and all.

Happy Litha (Midsummer)

Thursday Poem - Directions (Excerpt)

The best time is late afternoon
when the sun strobes through
the columns of trees as you are hiking up,
and when you find an agreeable rock
to sit on, you will be able to see
the light pouring down into the woods
and breaking into the shapes and tones
of things and you will hear nothing
but a sprig of birdsong or the leafy
falling of a cone or nut through the trees,
and if this is your day you might even
spot a hare or feel the wing-beats of geese
driving overhead toward some destination.

But it is hard to speak of these things
how the voices of light enter the body
and begin to recite their stories
how the earth holds us painfully against
its breast made of humus and brambles
how we who will soon be gone regard
the entities that continue to return
greener than ever, spring water flowing
through a meadow and the shadows

of clouds passing over the hills and

the ground where we stand in the

tremble of thought taking the vast

outside into ourselves.

Billy Collins, (from The Art of Drowning)

For Litha (Midsummer or the Summer Solstice)

This is the eve of Litha (Midsummer) or the Summer Solstice, and as with all the old festivals, the observance begins tonight at sunset. Tomorrow is the longest day of the calendar year, the Sun poised at its zenith or highest point and seeming to stand still for a fleeting interval before starting down the long slippery slope toward autumn, and beyond that to winter. Actually, it is we who are in motion and not the magnificent star at the center of our universe. Our sun stays right where it is.

This morning's image was taken by the front gate of our Two Hundred Acre Wood in the Lanark highlands some time ago, and it is one of my favorites. It captures the essence of midsummer beautifully with tall trees and hazy sky in the background, golden daisies, purple bugloss and silvery meadow grasses dancing front and center.

It seems as though summer has just arrived, but things are all downhill from here. After tomorrow,  days will shorten until Yule (December 21) when they begin to stretch out again. The ebbing is bittersweet, but longer nights go along on the cosmic ride during the last half of the calendar year, and that is something to celebrate for those of us who are moonhearts and ardent backyard astronomers. There are some fine stargazing nights ahead. The Old Wild Mother strews celestial wonders by generous handfuls as the year wanes, spinning luminous tapestries in the velvety darkness that grows deeper and longer with every twenty-four hour interval.

The eight festive spokes on the Wheel of the Year are associated with fire, but the summer solstice more than any other observance. Centuries ago, all Europe was alight on Midsummer eve, and ritual bonfires climbed high into the night from every village green. Long ago festivities included morris dancing, games of chance and storytelling, feasting and pageantry and candlelight processions after dark. Prosperity and abundance could be ensured by jumping over Midsummer fires, and its embers were charms against injury and bad weather at harvest time. Embers were placed at the edges of orchards and fields to ensure good harvests, and they were carried home to family hearths for protection. Doorways were decorated with swags and wreaths of birch, fennel, white lilies and St. John's Wort which is in bloom now.

Alas, my days of jumping midsummer bonfires are over. I try to be outside with a mug of Jerusalem Artichoke (or Earth Apple) tea and watch the sun rise. There's a candle on the old oak table and a lighted wand of Shiseido incense in a pottery bowl nearby. The afternoon holds a few hours of pottering in the village, a quiet festive meal with a dear friend, a little stargazing and moon watching later. We (Beau and I) cherish the simplicity of our small festive doings and the quiet pleasure of being surrounded by kindred spirits at such times. As always, we will think of my departed soulmate. This is our fifth Litha without Irv, and his passing still cuts like a knife. Some things cannot be tucked away or forgotten. They can only be carried.

Happy Litha (or Midsummer), however you choose to celebrate, or not to celebrate it tomorrow. May the sun light up your day from sunrise to sunset, and your night be filled with stars from here to there. May all good things come to you.

Wordless Wednesday - Coming to Light

Hotei in the Garden

Hotei sits in a sunny alcove in the garden under a canopy of old rose canes and buckthorn leaves. Birds serenade him in early morning, and rabbits visit him at nightfall. Bumbles and dragonflies buzz around him, spiders knit him into their webs, and sometimes butterflies land on him. There is a steady rain of grass clippings, also maple keys, leaf dust and pine needles from the trees over his head.

My old guy looks as though he is carved from stone, but he is made of some kind of resin, and he weighs only a pound or so. I found him in the window of a thrift shop many years ago and purchased him for a dollar. He presides over a leafy enclave in the garden from early April until late October when I tuck him away in the garden shed for the winter. He is not alone out there - a metal crane in a fetching shade of blue stands nearby. Perhaps they have conversations when no one is around?

The original Hotei was a wandering 10th-century Chinese Buddhist monk named Qici (契此) who came to be regarded as an incarnation of Maitreya, the Buddha still to come. In Asian cultures, he represents abundance and contentment, and he is the protector of children. For some strange reason, he is also the patron of bartenders. On his back, he carries a bottomless bag of food, drink and coins which he shares with those in need, and he is usually shown holding a mala (Buddhist rosary). One of these days, I would like to find a resin statue of Kuan Yin for the garden too. 

No matter what kind of day I am having, the old guy makes me smile, and that is something beyond price, thrift shop origins or no.

Sequestered, Week 217 (CCXVII)

Sunday, Saying Yes to the World

There is no mystery in this association of woods and other worlds, for as anyone who has walked the woods knows, they are places of correspondence, of call and answer. Visual affinities of color, relief and texture abound. A fallen branch echoes the deltoid form of a stream bed into which it has come to rest. Chrome yellow autumn elm leaves find their color rhyme in the eye-ring of the blackbird. Different aspects of the forest link unexpectedly with each other, and so it is that within the stories, different times and worlds can be joined.

Robert Macfarlane, The Wild Places

In the Heart of Perfection, Perfect

Friday Ramble - Kingfisher Days

In summer, I spend much time photographing butterflies, moths and dragonflies, bumbles and wasps, puddles, trees and weeds, orchids and wildflowers, poppies and lupins gone wild and doing their own untrammeled thing in roadside ditches.

The eastern Ontario highlands are a treasure trove of earthy abundance in all seasons, and I feel very fortunate to be here and taking it all in, but summer is short this far north, and it is poignant. I drink in the wonders around me, knowing their presence in my life is a fleeting thing. Everything seems to be taking in light and giving it back again, and such boundless gifts are not to be squandered.

Happy hours are spent crawling about in the woods on all fours with a macro lens on the camera “doing” ferns, mosses, lichens and little green frogs. Every tump, stump, leafy alcove, creek and stone has wonders to share. Is it difficult to lurch back to a standing position afterward? Oh yes, but it is worth it.

Other time is spent hanging out on the shore at the lake, capturing loons floating on its calm waters as the sun goes down, great herons standing erect and still in the shallows, kingfishers hunting the last small meal of the day. Once in a while, an otter cruises by and perches on a rock, yawning and displaying the bright red inside of its mouth and a set of wicked teeth.

Otters are making a comeback in the Lanark highlands, and it is common to see them swimming along the lake and in nearby rivers. They are fabulous creatures, and I greet them all as "Portly", after the wandering otter child in chapter seven of Kenneth Graham's incandescent creation, The Wind in the Willows. The Piper at the Gates of Dawn has to be one of my favorite chapters in anything ever written. Period.

Loons, herons, kingfishers and otters - there is always something to see, and it's all good. These are kingfisher days, times out of time, full of magic and an elusive something else, something I am always reaching toward and can't quite find a word for. When I arrive home, grubby, sweaty and speckled with leaf dust, the day’s images are uploaded and archived. I look at everything, of course, but at first glance, the images make me groan, so I file the DVD and think no more of it.

Years later while searching for an image, I pull out a DVD from long ago and discover it contains treasures. Wonder of wonders, I have already taken the swallowtail, loon or heron, the wildflower or rain dappled moss shot I need. Looking at the image, I remember when and where it was taken, my departed soulmate and Beau (or Cassie or Spencer) and I out in the woods together, chewed by bugs and as happy as clams.

Apologies to Canadian actress, writer, and playwright Susan Coyne for borrowing the title of her delightful childhood memoir (Kingfisher Days) for this morning's post. I have always loved the book, and I will be reading it again this summer.

Thursday Poem - How the Trees On Summer Nights

How the trees on summer nights turn into

a dark river, how you can never reach it,

no matter how hard you try, walking as fast

as you can, but getting nowhere, arms and

legs pumping, sweat drizzling in rivulets;

each year, a little slower, more creaks

and aches, less breath. Ah, but these soft

nights, air like a warm bath, the dusky wings

of bats careening crazily overhead, and

you’d think the road goes on forever.

Apollinaire wrote, “What isn’t given to love

is so much wasted,” and I wonder what

I haven’t given yet. A thin comma moon

rises orange, a skinny slice of melon, so

delicious I could drown in its sweetness.

Or eat the whole thing, down to the rind.

Always, this hunger for more.

Barbara Crooker, (from More)

Wordless Wednesday - On the Fence

In My Cups and Loving It

Rain on the windows etches linenfold panels on the glass panes and splatter paints the umbrella out on the deck. The garden and old trees beyond are barely visible in the downpour and the murk. Water hitting the roof tiles, running through the eaves and downspout and gushing into the rain barrel at the corner of the house is a pleasing sound. We are a long way from the Bay of Bengal for such seasonal weather phenomena, but this day has a monsoon vibe, and no mistake.

One of my great aunties, I can't remember which one, used to refer to spells of uncontrolled weeping and wailing as "having monsoons", and the phrase has stayed with me since I heard it years ago. Having monsoons is surely a more graceful way of describing unsightly displays of whining, caterwauling and waterworks.

On this side of the windows is a stack of journals, mostly blank because they are too lovely for my scrawling and hen scratching. There too are pens, a candle in a jar and a beaker holding a fragrant lagoon of Darjeeling, also a couple of tarot/oracle decks. The art glass chandelier above the table turns everything on its surface into tiles and tesserae and little squares of light. Looking at it, I am off and thinking of mosaics.

Gardening in such weather is out of the question, and I have to do something. This is a good day for reorganizing bookshelves, art and stationery cupboards, for reordering the multitudinous folders on this computer. It is also grand day for drinking tea and reading, for rocking gently along with Scarlatti's keyboard sonatas, the Mozart horn concertos, the Bach preludes and  anything at all by Antonio Vivaldi. Also, the Mediaeval Baebes and the Kingsfold Suite.

Tucked somewhere in the midst of such lovely pursuits are bowls of fresh strawberries and peaches, a batch of molasses cookies, scones and a loaf of sourdough. Having a day like this once in a while is no' a bad thing.

Sequestered, Week 216 (CCXVI)

Sunday, Saying Yes to the World

We tend to think of landscapes as affecting us most strongly when we are in them or on them, when they offer us the primary sensations of touch and sight. But there are also the landscapes we bear with us in absentia, those places that live on in memory long after they have withdrawn in actuality, and such places – retreated to most often when we are most remote from them – are among the most important landscapes we possess. Adam Nicolson has written of the ‘powerful absence[s]’ that remembered landscapes exert upon us, but they exist as powerful presences too, with which we maintain deep and abiding attachments. These, perhaps, are the landscapes in which we live the longest, warped though they are by time and abraded though they are by distance. The consolation of recollected places finds its expression frequently in the accounts of those – exiles, prisoners, the ill, the elderly – who can no longer reach the places that sustain them.

Robert Macfarlane, The Old Ways: A Journey On Foot

Lupins and Early Light

Friday Ramble - Golden

Large Yellow Lady Slipper

(Cypripedium parviflorum var pubescens)

I sign on here in the morning, look at my photographic efforts, utter a silent "meh" and decide to say (or write) as little as possible. That is happening more often than it used to, a lot more often. There are times when I post an image or two and don't scribble any words at all, just letting the images speak for themselves.

Plunking myself down in front of the computer with a mug of something or other, I skim the early news, and I cringe. I think about what is happening in the great wide world and am left speechless by the hatred, barbaric acts and deliberate cruelty of recent human doings. How can we be doing this to each other? I can't find words for what is going on, or at least not the right words. I finish my mug of hot stuff and go out to the garden. Luckily, the bee sisters are good listeners. They offer wise words when I need them. They uplift my spirits and gladden my heart.

As I write this, lady slippers are blooming in the Lanark highlands, as they have for time out of mind. In their flickering alcoves on the Two Hundred Acre Wood, they sing a capella in their own lilting voices, a testament to wildness and belonging and community. Whole hillsides of nodding beauty express the indwelling incandescent spirit of the living earth without any help at all from This Old Thing.

My departed soulmate and I watched over our wild orchid colony for years, protecting them from being eaten by deer and trampled by bears. Every year, I stretched out in the grass when they were blooming and marveled at their perfection, captured them with my lens and had long conversations with them. Now it is just Beau and I hanging out with the orchids, and we still do that, every year. In the midst of greed, global disease and human brutality, here they are again. Here too are we.

Events on the world stage are breaking many of us wide open, and we are confronting aspects of our humanity (or inhumanity) that we would rather not acknowledge, let alone address. My wild golden orchids are a powerful reminder of what it means to be alive in this beautiful world, and I am grateful for their counsel. 

Thursday Poem - The Other Kingdoms

Consider the other kingdoms, The
trees, for example, with their mellow-sounding
titles: oak, aspen, willow.
Or the snow, for which peoples of the north
have dozens of words to describe its
different arrivals. Or the creatures, with their
thick fur, their shy and wordless gaze. Their
infallible sense of what their lives
are meant to be. Thus the world
grows rich, grows wild, and you too,
grow rich, grow sweetly wild, as you too
were born to be.

Mary Oliver

Wordless Wednesday - By the Pond

Let There Be Red

June would not be June without clay pots and cauldrons and planters of red geraniums (cranesbills) blooming on the thresholds of houses in the village, and today is the fourth day of the quintessential summer month. How can it be? The season has just arrived, but the midsummer solstice is only three weeks away.

Beau and I have noticed on early morning walks that many of this year's geranium offerings are accompanied 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". Whatever I add this time around, it has to be something the little bee sisters will love. 

A big pot of geraniums on our threshold is a long standing summer tradition. Every year I think of their ancestors, the jubilant foremothers who graced our threshold for decades and welcomed everyone who came to the red (Benjamin Moore 2080-10 Raspberry Truffle) front door. I remember their shape, their color, their texture, their green and rather peppery fragrance, their unfettered, ecstatic flowering. They were perfect expressions of summer, and I always thanked them, each and every one. 

Happy June! May there be joyous blooming in your own precious life.

Sequestered, Week 215 (CCXV)

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

The Jester's Cap and Bells

Columbine (Aquilegia canadensis)