On the Last Day of the Year

It seems right to begin the last blog entry of the calendar year with sunlight shining through a fog over the Clyde river on a late December morning. The river meanders through woodlands, valleys and farm fields in the eastern Ontario highlands, crafting deeper channels wherever she pleases and loving every winding turn she makes along her way. A crone among waterways, she mutters, grumbles and roars as she journeys south to merge with the Mississippi river in Bathurst township. In some places the river is shallow and not much wider than a creek, but she is a wild thing, and she has serious attitude from her birthplace in Clyde Lake to her journey's end. 

During winter trips to the Lanark highlands, I liked to find a perch on the bank and listen as the river sang under the ice. Sometimes, she seemed to be performing a duet with the wind, and there was a kind of Zen counterpoint at work, two unbridled entities utterly independent in their contours and rhythm, but meticulously interwoven and seamless in their harmonies.

Putting all notions of complex orchestration and conventional choreography aside, there's lovely music in the air on icy winter days. The sound of moving water has always been a leitmotif for me, and I often think that my existence can be measured in rivers, currents and intermittent streams rather than cocktails, jewelry, pairs of shoes and coffee spoons.

In springtime, I watched as willows on the far shore leafed out and turned silvery green, then looked on a few weeks later as the river overflowed her banks and asserted her claim to the fertile fields on both sides. In summer, I counted bales of hay and captured images of deer and wild turkeys feeding nearby at dusk. In autumn, the sun went down over the same willows, so golden of leaf and limb that they seemed to be spun out of sunlight or stars. In the now, snow frosts every tree and branch, and the glorious light shining through them dazzles my eyes.

Thank you for coming along with me on Friday rambles this year. May there be many happy rambles in the shiny new year that is waiting for us just beyond the horizon. May there be abundance and healing and light for all of us.