Sequestered - Week 149 (CXLIX)

Sunday, Saying Yes to the world

What a wild ride this is. Spinning at six thousand miles per hour on a minuscule ball in a field of stars that stretches into millions of galaxies. Seriously, this is WILD.

Ralph Benmergui, from I Thought He Was Dead
(With thanks to Kate at Stubblejumpers Café)

An Unexpected Guest

Barred Owl (Strix varia)

Friday Ramble - How Sweet It is

This is one of my favorite intervals in the whole turning year - the cluster of sunny days and cold nights in late winter or early springtime when the eastern Ontario highlands gear up for the maple syrup season.

In the woods, the sugar bird (saw-whet owl) sings its courtship songs, and local lore says that when it does, the time has come to tap the maples. Clouds of smoke and steam rise from wooden sugar shacks tucked in among the old trees, and the enchanting fragrance of boiling maple sap is everywhere. Magic is afoot, and no mistake.

The sylvan alchemy in progress is wild and sweet, and the homely metaphor of the maple syrup cauldron has profound resonance for me. I still have the battered cast iron Dutch oven I carried when I rambled the continent many years ago, stirring soups, potions and stews by starlight and watching as sparks went spiraling into the inky sky over the rim of my old pot. The motes of light rising from its depths were stars too, perfect counterpoint to the constellations dancing over my head.

At home, there is usually a stockpot bubbling away on the stove in my kitchen. There are cast iron skillets and pots, bean crocks in assorted sizes and a slow cooker or two. Squirreled away in the cupboard are enameled cookware by Staub and Le Creuset in bright red and unglazed earthenware tagines. One can never have too many cooking vessels, and I can always be tempted into acquiring others. A small three-legged incense bowl rests on the table in my study, and I use it every day. 

Out in the Lanark woods, there are the sugar camps of friends with miles of collecting hose in confetti colors strung from maple to maple. Modern evaporators are used these days, but in some camps, antique syrup cauldrons boil over open fires to show how maple syrup was made in times past. Claudia Smith's book, When the Sugar Bird Sings: A History of Maple Syrup in Lanark County, is an excellent history of syrup craft in my favorite part of the great wide world, and it is a fine read. While no longer in print, it can often be found in used bookshops and online secondhand book sites.

The word cauldron comes from the Middle English cauderon, thence from the Anglo-Norman caudiere and the Latin caldāria, the latter meaning “cooking pot” and rooted in the adjective calidus meaning warm or “suitable for warming”. At the end of the trail is the Proto-Indo-European (PIE) root kelə meaning simply “warm”. Calendar, calorie, chafe, chiaroscuro, claim, clamor, class, clear, council, hale, haul and lee are kin. So is caldera, the term geologists use to describe the massive crater formed when a volcano's magma chamber is emptied by a massive eruption or its roof collapses. The biggest caldera on earth is the Apolaki Caldera located in the Pacific ocean off the Philippine islands, and the most active is probably the La Garita Caldera in southwestern Colorado. Of course, Wyoming's magnificent Yellowstone Caldera is in a class all by itself.

The night that gifts us with stars and enfolds us gently when the sun goes down is a vast cauldron or bowl. Somewhere in the darkness up there, Cerridwen is stirring her heady cosmic brew of knowledge, creativity and rebirth, her magical kettle simmering over a mystic cook fire. From her vessel, the bard Taliesin once partook of a single drop and awakened into wisdom and song. We're all vessels, and one of the best motifs for this old life is surely a pot or cauldron, one battered, dented and well traveled, but useful and happy to be so, bubbling and crackling away in the background (sometimes in the foreground), making happy musics and occasionally sending bright motes up into the air.

And so it is with this old hen when her favorite wild places begin to awaken again. Notions of alchemy bubble away gently. Sparks fly upward; images of pots and cauldrons cosmic and domestic whirl about in her thoughts. She could not (and would not) be anywhere else in the great wide world. Is she a wild thing herself? Oh, yes.

A repeat performance (slightly edited, with a few additions and rewordings) but this remains one of my favorite bloggy offerings ever.

Thursday Poem - Mind Wanting More

Only a beige slat of sun
above the horizon, like a shade pulled
not quite down. Otherwise,
clouds. Sea rippled here and
there. Birds reluctant to fly.

The mind wants a shaft of sun to
stir the grey porridge of clouds,
an osprey to stitch sea to sky
with its barred wings, some dramatic
music: a symphony, perhaps
a Chinese gong.

But the mind always
wants more than it has—
one more bright day of sun,
one more clear night in bed
with the moon; one more hour
to get the words right; one
more chance for the heart in hiding
to emerge from its thicket
in dried grasses—as if this quiet day
with its tentative light weren't enough,
as if joy weren't strewn all around.

Holly Hughes from American Zen: A Gathering of Poets

Wordless Wednesday - Emergence

A Little Melting Going On

A little melting has been going on in the village in recent days, and suddenly there were vivid colors and wild musics everywhere. Cardinals and redpolls cavorted in the garden, and the bells in the old crabapple tree oscillated back and forth with abandon. A murder of jubilant crows awakened us around four-thirty every morning with their raucous antics and ribald ditties. Puddles in the street were fringed with melting ice, reflecting rooflines, buildings and parked vehicles, buildings, blue sky and clouds. On our early walks, sunlight, blue slush and old bricks made fetching visual arrangements.

Snow relocated by village plows and my snow blower this winter was several feet high a few days ago but has dwindled and is down a foot or two. Snow on the sundeck was too heavy for me to dislodge with fulcrum and shovel last week, but the white stuff has disappeared completely, and I can see bare boards through the kitchen window.

Imbolc has come and gone, and springtime is certainly happening in some parts of the world, but it won't be making an appearance here for some long time. Old Man Winter is already rattling his icy talons again, roaring through bare trees in the garden, chilling us to the bone and delighting in our glum expressions.

In such weathers, I feel cauldrons of soup, turkey meatloaf, casseroles and sourdough bread coming on, also molasses cookies and scones. Stirring up such things is comforting when temperatures plummet, the wind howls in the rafters, and one can't see her neighbor's veranda for wind and tumbling snow.

The teapot is warming, the kettle is burbling, and my favorite mug awaits. Time to break out Sarah Leah Chase's New England Open-House Cookbook and hatch a few culinary plots, also Alexandra Stafford's Bread Toast Crumbs and The Art of Simple Food (I & II) by Alice Waters. Yum, we can do this.

Sequestered - Week 148 (CXLVIII)

Sunday, Saying Yes to the World

I build a platform, and live upon it, and think my thoughts, and aim high. To rise, I must have a field to rise from. To deepen, I must have bedrock from which to descend. The constancy of the physical world, under its green and blue dyes, draws me toward a better, richer self, call it elevation (there is hardly an adequate word), where I might ascend a little -- where a gloss of spirit would mirror itself in worldly action. I don't mean just mild goodness. I mean feistiness too, the fires of human energy stoked; I mean a gladness vivacious enough to disarrange the sorrows of the world into something better.

It is one of the great perils of our so-called civilized age that we do not acknowledge enough, or cherish enough, this connection between soul and landscape—between our own best possibilities, and the view from our own windows. We need the world as much as it needs us, and we need it in privacy, intimacy, and surety.

Mary Oliver, Long Life: Essays and Other Writings

Another Snow Day

Friday Ramble - Birch Mother in the WInd

paper birch (also called canoe birch, silver birch or white birch)

(Betula papyrifera)

Here we are on the cusp between winter and springtime, weary of ice and snowdrifts, craving light and warmth. It is still below freezing much of the time, rhe north wind scouring bare trees and making the branches ring like old iron bells.

Springtime is a puckish wight this far north, and after appearing, she sometimes disappears for days and weeks at a time. After several days of milder weather and dwindling snowdrifts, temperatures dropped at sunset yesterday, and several inches of heavy wet snow fell overnight. The squall continues this morning, and white stuff will fall all day. Winter (alas) is not over yet, here at least.

For all the seasonal toings and froings, late winter days spent in the woods have a wonderful way of quieting one's thoughts and breathing patterns, bringing her back to a still and reflective space in the heart of the living world.

I sat on a log for a while this week, watching as tattered scraps of birch bark fluttered back and forth in the wind. When the morning sun slipped out from behind the clouds, beams of sunlight passed through the blowing strands and turned them golden and translucent, for all the world like elemental stained glass.

When I touched the old tree in greeting, my fingers came away with a dry springtime sweetness on them that lingered for hours. I tucked a thin folio of bark in the pocket of my parka and inhaled its fragrance all the way home.

Why are there so few words for snow in the English language? 

Thursday Poem - Wage Peace

Wage peace with your breath.

Breathe in firemen and rubble,

breathe out whole buildings and flocks of

red wing blackbirds.

Breathe in terrorists

and breathe out sleeping children and 

freshly mown fields.

 Breathe in confusion and breathe out
maple trees.

Breathe in the fallen and breathe out
lifelong friendships intact.

Wage peace with your listening: hearing

sirens, pray loud.

Remember your tools: flower seeds, 

clothes pins, clean rivers.

Make soup.

 Play music, memorize the words for
thank you in three languages.

Learn to knit, and make a hat.

 Think of chaos as dancing raspberries,
imagine grief
as the outbreath of beauty
or the gesture of fish.

Swim for the other side.

Wage peace.

Never has the world seemed so fresh and
precious:

Have a cup of tea... and rejoice.

Act as if armistice has already arrived.

Celebrate today.

Judyth Hill

Wordless Wednesday - Evergreen

A Little Love for Valentine's Day

trust your heart 

if the seas catch fire

(and live by love

though the stars walk backward)

e.e. cummings

My soulmate and I usually didn't do anything lavish or opulent for Valentine's Day, and that was just fine with us. I made a card for him with one of my photos or graphic designs, and as awful as some of my efforts were, he cherished them—after he passed away, I discovered he had saved them all, every single one. I saved the valentines he gave me too, and the last one is still on my bureau.

A special pot of tea was brewed, tiny cookies were made in heart shapes, and a token was sometimes carved into a piece of fruit: a smile, a kiss, a heart, a dove, a lover's knot. We shared a single piece of scrumptious dark chocolate (usually Läderach or Godiva) and went for a long walk in the woods with our canine companions, first Cassie, then Spencer, then (and now) Beau.

There were no special declarations of love and devotion on February 14th, and there was no need for them.  We told each other how we felt every day, and we were content with the way this day unfolded, no frilly gestures and lovey-dovey professions needed. We knew how much we loved each other, how good we were together, how fortunate we were to find each other so many years ago and walk this earth hand in hand.

This year, there is a handmade card on my soulmate's bureau, and I drew a heart in the snow in the garden. There is a mug of tea (Earl Grey) and a plate of his favorite oatmeal cookies on the old oak table in the dining room. Beau and I will walk in the woods this afternoon, and my beloved will be with us in spirit, tucked safe and warm in the pocket of my parka. We will tell him we love him as we did every day when he was here on earth, and as we still do, every single day. Wishing you deep and abiding love too.

Sequestered - Week 147 (CXLVII)

Sunday, Saying Yes to the World

There are ways in, journeys to the center of life, through time; through air, matter, dream and thought. The ways are not always mapped or charted, but sometimes being lost, if there is such a thing, is the sweetest place to be. And always, in this search, a person might find that she is already there, at the center of the world. It may be a broken world, but it is glorious nonetheless.

Linda Hogan, The Woman Who Watches Over the World: A Native Memoir

Slow Melting, Worlds Within

Friday Ramble - In My Cups

It is still dark outside, and through the window comes the clatter of the north wind, across the roof with its freight of frozen twigs and pine needles, over the eaves and down into the sleeping garden. Here in the kitchen, there is the burble and hiss of the De'Longhi espresso machine, the rattle and hum of the refrigerator in the corner.

By rights, there should be the sound of a toaster too, but it will be an hour or so before I can even think about toast. This is a "bang up" month for migraines, and I have awakened with a whopper - thought about doing prescription meds when I opened my eyes but opted for a beaker of industrial strength espresso instead.

The stuff in my cup approaches the consistency of solid propellant rocket fuel and could be dispatched with a fork. Steam rises in arty curls from the surface, and a splendid darker froth rings its shores. The fragrance of freshly ground Logdriver Espresso (fair trade, organic) from the Bridgehead Roastery is ambrosial. So were the beans in their canister when I fumbled it out of the pantry. The coffee wizards at the beanery describe the blend as hardworking and nimble with hints of cocoa and caramel, and if that isn't poetry, I don't know what is. Just look at that heavenly crema. Yup, I can do this.

My thoughts always turn to Paris when the weather is like this. With badass beaker in hand, I am looking through my rainy day "stash" of Cavallini rubber stamps, vintage postcards, stickers and notebooks - the little ones with maps of France, old French postage stamps or the Eiffel tower gracing their covers.

Whatever the weather, this will be a grand day. When the migraine has drowned in my espresso sea, I will curl up in a corner somewhere and read something in French, perhaps the latest Fred Vargas.  Why didn't I order croissants?

Thursday Poem - Don't wait for something beautiful to find you.

Go out into the weather-beaten world
where straw men lean on frozen fields
and find the cardinal's scarlet flash of wing,
a winter heart, a feathered hope.

Without a camera or a memory,
we travel these old country roads,
turn corners like the pages of a book,
enchanted by the ordinary life

of fields and rocks and woods,
of small wild creatures stirring in the brush.
We take home pockets full of myths
and wonders seldom seen.

We will not give up easily.
Across the breakfast table
in our precarious nest,
we make those promises keep on going

that no one ever keeps. And yet...
there is the cardinal again,
a finial on our old gray fence.
Red is for Valentines.

Dolores Stewart (Riccio)

This morning's poem is reprinted from the late Dolores Stewart Riccio's exquisite volume of poetry, The Nature of Things, and it is a perfect description of the many happy years of rural ramblings I enjoyed with my departed soulmate. We both loved country roads, and we could never resist turning our wheels toward one we had just discovered. I love you, Irv, from the bottom of my heart, now and always.

Wordless Wednesday - A Winter Blooming

February's Little Thaw

The late winter thaw lasts for only a few days in eastern Ontario, and we are all richer for its visitation. Winters are long this far north, and some of us (myself included) are inclined to behave foolishly. We take photos with cameras and cell phones, send texts to friends, write seasonal haiku and gaze out the window for hours on end, wax euphoric about the light and lurch about with dazed expressions.

We think about things like snowdrops and crocuses, dream about confetti-colored rain boots, slickers and umbrellas, think about planting gardens and pruning roses. We imagine ourselves in lawn chairs wearing floppy hats and sandals and holding tall glasses with dear little paper parasols and mojito mint leaves in them. Just about the time we realize how silly we are behaving, our thaw ends, and the world freezes up again.

Little rivers in the Lanark highlands run free for a brief interval, and they take on the color and glossy texture of quicksilver. On sunny days, the liberated streams sing like birds, and they are filled, one and all, with buttery light, wispy clouds and breathtaking blue sky. There is beauty beyond description, and the sunlight feels like a benediction.

This week, we can almost hear springtime breathing softly around the bend, but that is just wishful thinking on our part. Alas, we (and Flora, goddess of spring) still have a long way to go. Snow storms and deep cold are already on their way, and they will be here in a few days. If only we could keep this glorious light for a little longer...

Sequestered - Week 146 (CXLVI)

Sunday, Saying Yes to the World

What hope is there for individual reality or authenticity, when the forces of violence and orthodoxy, the earthly powers of guns and bombs and manipulated public opinion make it impossible for us to be authentic and fulfilled human beings? The only hope is in the creation of alternative values, alternative realities. The only hope is in daring to re dream one's place in the world -- a beautiful act of imagination, and a sustained act of self becoming. Which is to say that in some way or another we breach and confound the accepted frontiers of things.

Ben Okri, from A Way of Being Free

On the Edge

Friday Ramble - Little Blue

Weary of deep snow and icy cold, I am even a little tired of the color blue at times, no matter how intensely blue the sky, snowdrifts, spruce trees, icicles or the cast iron crane in the garden. The bird's migratory kin have been gone for months, but it is frozen in place, well and truly stuck until springtime rolls around. The figurine has been engulfed by recent deep snows, and now only the tip of its beak can be seen.

There are some lovely words for blue in the English language: azure, beryl, cerulean, cobalt, indigo, lapis lazuli, royal, sapphire, turquoise, ultramarine, to name just a few. I recite them like a litany under my breath as I look out at our sleeping garden with mug in hand or break a trail into the woods.

Just when I am feeling all wintered out and not inclined to capture another photo, another breathtaking composition presents itself to my wandering eyes. Something amazing shows up unannounced (out of the blue?) and pleads for rapt and focused attention. Glossy bubbles dance in the icicles above my frozen creek in the Lanark highlands. On morning walks, ice crystals adorn the evergreens along the trail and they sparkle like diamonds. I peer out the kitchen window, and the snow on the roof of the garden shed is so bright it dazzles the eyes. OK Mama, I get the message.

As we (Beau and I) lurch along, faded and tattered oak leaves flutter down to lie on the trail at our feet. Pine and spruce cones cast vivid blue shadows in pools of early morning sunlight. Is there anything on the planet as fine as the scent of snowy blue spruce boughs in February? Look closely, and every needle is wearing stars.

Small and perfect, complete within themselves, such encounters convey equilibrium, lower the blood pressure and slow one's breathing, return eyes and focus to simplicity and grace and just plain old being here. Hallelujah, the world is full of wonder again. No wait, the world is always full of wonder. It's just that I forget sometimes.

There are worlds great and small everywhere, worlds within and worlds without. Every one is a wonder to behold, to commit to memory, to love with one's eyes and patient recording lens. Surely, we can do this for a little while longer.

Happy Imbolc/Candlemas

Wordless Wednesday - Imbolc Light

For Imbolc (Candlemas)

Here we are on the last day of January, nearing the eve of Candlemas or Imbolc which falls on February 2nd and begins tomorrow at sundown. Strange to relate, this festival day in the depths of winter celebrates light and warmth, the stirring of green things within the earth, the burgeoning of new life and the beginning of springtime.

In many French speaking countries, the second day of February is La Chandeleur, a Christian feast commemorating the presentation of the infant Jesus Christ in the temple and the purification of his mother, the Blessed Virgin Mary forty days after giving birth. The occasion is marked by the blessing of candles and by dining on festive crepes which represent the sun and the return of the light to the northern hemisphere.  

For those of us of Celtic lineage, the day is Imbolc or Candlemas, sometimes the Féile Bride (Festival of St. Brigid) or "Bride's Day", consecrated to Brigid, honored as an Irish saint in modern times, but hallowed as a Tuatha Dé Danann goddess long centuries ago. She is a deity of fire and creativity, wisdom, eloquence and craftsmanship, patroness of the forge and the smithy, poetry, fertility and the healing arts, especially midwifery. Light is her special province, and hers are the candle, the hearth and the blacksmith's shop.

There are a few small festival observances of my own, and I cherish them. Food is prepared using ingredients associated with sunlight, sweetness and abundance: eggs, butter, saffron and honey. Since such things often feature in my culinary efforts anyway, perhaps there is a ritual element in my kitchen doings all year long, and I like to think so. There will be a festive lunch with a dear friend, and small gifts will be exchanged. I will light a candle at nightfall and nest it in a snowdrift in the garden. We are up to our eyebrows in white stuff this year, so clambering up on a snowdrift with a candle and matches will be good fun.

We are made of light ourselves, and that makes us Brigid's unruly  children - creatures forged from the dust of stars which once lighted the heavens, went super nova  and ceased to exist billions of years ago. Within the radiant motes of our being are encoded the wisdoms of the ancient earth and all its cultures, the star knowledge of unknown constellations and "The Big Bang" which created not just our own precious world, but the whole cosmic sea in which it floats.

We are recycled matter, our dancing particles having assembled into diverse life forms over and over again, lived and expired as those life forms, then dissolved back into the stream of existence. In our time, “we” have been many things, worn many shapes and answered to many names. In this lifetime I exist as a tatterdemalion, specific and perhaps unique collection of wandering molecules called Catherine or Cate, but in previous incarnations, I was someone or something altogether different.

Buddhist teacher and deep ecologist Joanna Macy has written that since every particle in our being goes back to the first flaring of space and time, we are as old as the universe itself, about fifteen billion years. In other words, we are the universe, and it is us.

Happy February, everyone! Happy Imbolc to you and your clan, happy Candlemas and St. Brigid's Day. May warmth and the manifold blessings of Light be yours.

Eyes on the Sparrows

Alas, most of the last week has been spent clearing countless cubic meters of white stuff from around the little blue house in the village. At times, the threshold, cobblestones, driveway, sundeck and steps have disappeared from view completely, and getting out and about to do anything at all has been quite an exercise.

In winter, I shovel a circular track around the garden for Beau, but recent heavy snowfalls filled it in over and over again, and it has been dredged out several times this week. Himself has often been up to his houndy ears in icy snow, and he is not amused.

After waiting out high winds and heavy snowfall in the cedar hedge, village birds are hungry, and first thing in the morning, the garden is filled with clamorous fluttery folk waiting for their breakfast. Before anything else is done, bird feeders are cleaned and refilled, and a few handfuls of seed are scattered on the deck for ground noshers. 

Cardinals, chickadees,  blue jays, nuthatches, woodpeckers and winter finches (pine siskins, redpolls, crossbills) visit often, but sparrows and juncos are always about. How can one not feel affection for the tiny feathered spirits who visit every day and chirrup appreciatively when food is put out for them, even in the most inclement weather? I keep hoping that grosbeaks will turn up, but so far they have not put in an appearance, preferring rural and suburban areas and only showing up here when desperate.

Juncos and sparrows are always welcome. I once wrote here about an icy morning when a sparrow flew into the house, made himself comfortable in the sunlit dining room for several minutes and sang joyously, then flew back out into the garden when he had warmed up a bit and had something to eat. Sparrows are as numerous here in winter as they are in most urban areas, but it is always a pleasure to spend time with the little passerines when other bird kin have migrated to warmer climes.

Depths is an appropriate word in these circumstances. We are almost drowning in snow, and village snow plows are fast running out of places to put it.

Sequestered - Week 145 (CXLV)