Drinking In Morning Light (For Valentine's Day)

"In our life there is a single color, as on an artist's palette, which provides the meaning of life and art. It is the color of love."
Marc Chagall

Morning light comes slowly on these middling pages in February days, beginning with a diffused blush on the horizon, then an intensely magenta sky and rosy clouds high over the bare trees.  Flamboyant coppery gold dances through everything, the burnished glow flowing like honey over the village. Frosted trees, chimneys and snowy rooflines are silhouetted against the early radiance, and they contribute their own, more rooted glow to the day that is just coming into being.

These are my "stained glass hours", and they have illustrious crafted kindred; the rose window of Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris, the panels of Edward Burne-Jones and William Morris, the work of Louis Comfort Tiffany.  Then there are the glorious creations of Marc Chagall: his paintings of the biblical Song of Songs, the windows (especially the Reuben window) depicting the Twelve Tribes of Israel he designed for the synagogue of Jerusalem's Hadassah Medical Centre, the commemorative windows he created as a memorial for young Sarah d'Avigdor-Goldsmith in tiny All Saints Church, Tudeley, Kent.

Compelled for some reason to be up and about before the light show starts, I find a seat by the window and partake of the abundance. I bring a mug of tea, a heavy shawl and the camera.  Chagall often seemed to be seeing the beauty of the earth through stained glass, and wrapped up in morning's jeweled colors, I seem to be doing something similar.  Mother Nature and Chagall are true artists though - I am just a doddering observer, training my lens on the high perfect light of morning and floundering for words to describe it all.  How many lifetimes does it take to get this "stuph" right?

 Happy Valentine's Day everyone!

Just a Little Snow

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 redream 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, A Way of Being Free

The Hunger Moon of February

Usually the second moon of the calendar year, February's full lunar round is an icy one, framed by the vague shapes of snowy evergreens and attended by faint faraway stars. Capturing this moon with one's lens and a slender scrip of words is an uncomfortable business, but we wrap up warmly and go outside with tripod and camera. It is our way of "saying yes to the world", to the innate wildness of life in the Great Round of time, to grandeur in the starry, starry night over our heads.

This month's lunar cycle has to be about owls.  In February, the Great Horned Owl (Bubo virginianus), claims a nest somewhere in the woods with its lifelong mate and settles down to the arduous business of raising another unruly brood. The great "hornies" are among my favorite birds, and it's enchanting to hear a couple calling companionably to each other cross the snowy woods in winter.  Northern residents to the core, the great owls thrive in cold climates, and the further one travels toward the Arctic, the bigger they grow. The Saw-whet Owl or sugar bird (Aegolius acadicus) is not far behind in its own courtship rituals, and neither are the other owls of the Lanark highlands. There is love and fertility in the air, among northern owls anyway. The rest of us are just trying to stay warm.

Life can be stressful for those who lack feathers and dine not on mice and voles. The Wolf Moon made its appearance in January, but wolves and coyotes howl plaintively at the gates in February., and hunger is a beast well known in wild and snowbound places.  If we can just manage to hang on for a few weeks longer, there are better times ahead.  March promises slightly milder temperatures, relief and sweetness; the splendid sylvan alchemy of the maple syrup season will be in full swing when the next full moon makes its appearance.

We also know this moon as the: Ash Moon, Big Winter Moon, Bone Moon, Bony Moon, Budding Moon, Chestnuts Moon, Cold Winds Moon, Coyotes Frighten Moon, Crow Moon, Dark Red Calves Moon, Death Moon, Eagle Moon, Fish Running Moon, Frost Sparkling in the Sun Moon, Gray Moon, Horning Moon, Ice in River Is Gone Moon, Ice Moon, Index Finger Moon, Little Bud Moon, Long Dry Moon, Makes Branches Fall in Pieces Moon, Mimosa Moon, Moon of Ice, Moon of Purification and Renewal, Moon of Rabbit Conception, Moon of the Cedar Dust Wind, Moon of the Raccoon, Moon of the Frog, Moon, When Geese Come Home, Moon When Bear Cubs are Born, Moon When Spruce Tips Fall, Moon When Trees Pop, Moon When Trees Are Bare and Vegetation Is Scarce, Narcissus Moon, No Snow in Trails Moon, Owl Moon, Peach Blossom Moon, Pink Moon, Plum Blossom Moon, Primrose Moon, Quickening Moon, Raccoon Moon, Rain and Dancing Moon , Red and Cleansing Moon, Second Moon, Snow Crust Moon, Snow Moon, Solmonath (Sun Moon), Squint Rock Moon, Staying Home Moon, Storing Moon, Storm Moon, Sucker Fish Moon, Sucker Moon, Trapper’s Moon, Treacherous Moon, Violet Moon, Wexes Moon, Wild Moon, Wind Moon, Wind Tossed Moon, Winter Moon

As far as February's moon names go, I am fond of Quickening Moon, Wild Moon and Owl Moon, but from now on, this will always be Penny's Moon.

Friday Ramble - Silence

This week's word comes to us through the Old English swige and Old French silence, thence the Latin silentium and silere meaning "to be still and (or) tranquil". I could happily have traced the origins of the word all the way back to the beginning times, but found myself pausing and wondering at silere, still curious about the word's roots, but engaged by its easy kinship with rest and repose.

As a species, we are nourished by notions of stillness and tranquility. Examined in their entirety, our songs and stories are eloquent expressions of our tribal wanderings, but other things come to light when we look closely at individual words and the spaces between the words. Both are little works of art or theater, tiny plays or compositions descriptive of a moment or feeling, a physical sensation, and encounter, a dialogue with other beings or with existence itself.  Spaces don't separate words - they join the words like lacquered spacers connecting the beads on a silken cord.

Silence and mythology are closely interwoven - the word mythology has its roots in the Greek mythos, meaning to speak or to relate something - and not just in the written or spoken sense. The etymological roots of the word mythology are shared with other words connoting silence, wordlessness and the inability to speak. In other words, what we are not hearing or saying is as important as what we are hearing or saying. Silences are as meaningful and as expressive as conversations, and often more so, the spaces between as vibrant and eloquent as the bookending words themselves can ever be.  There is a profound causal relationship between what we communicate in words and what we do not (or cannot) communicate in words.

Silences are complete within themselves, liminal and transforming.There is silence between one gust of wind and the next, between icicles and the rising sun.  There is silence in incandescent intervals at sunset when the falling light illuminates melt pools in the park, turning water and reflected trees to gold as one stands nearby, breathless and staring.  There are the sunless winter days I sometimes write about when I can hear snow falling among the trees or coming to rest on the old Buddha out on the deck.  All silences are interstitial - the eloquent distances between one bead on a mala and the next, the spaces between two words in a tale or narrative, the mindful expanse between the opening chime of the meditation bell and that which closes our fumbling meditations.

Sometimes, we need to be able to hear ourselves think—or better still, not think—just show up and BE right there. In our small intentional silences, we dwell (however briefly) in mindfulness, connection and infinite possibility. It's all good, and one of these days, I am going to put those words on a t-shirt.

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.

This morning's poem is reprinted with permission from Dolores Stewart's gorgeous volume of poetry, The Nature of Things.

Wordless Wednesday - Sunset and Frozen Pond

The Sisterhood of Wandering Eye and Dancing Leaf

Little things leave you feeling restless in February. You ramble through stacks of gardening catalogues, plotting another heritage rose or three, new plots of herbs and heirloom veggies. You spend hours in the kitchen summoning old Helios with cilantro, fragrant olive oils and recipes straight from Tuscany. You brew endless pots of herbal tea, sunlight dancing in every china mug.

You play with filters, apertures and shutter speeds, entranced (and occasionally very irritated) with the surprising transformations wrought by your madcap gypsy tinkerings. Camera in hand or around your neck, you haunt the woods, peering into trees and searching for a leaf somewhere, even a single bare leaf. You scan the cloudy evening skies, desperately hoping to see the moon, and you calculate the weeks remaining until the geese, the herons and the loons come home again.

It may not seem like it, but change is already on its way.  The great horned owls who live on the Two Hundred Acre Wood are now building their nest in an old oak tree about a mile back in the forest and getting ready to raise another comely brood.  It makes me happy to think it is happening again.

This morning, a single delicately frosted leaf was teased into brief flight by the north wind, and it came to rest in the birdbath in the garden, bearing in its poignant wabi sabi simplicity an often and much needed reminder. This is the sisterhood of fur and feather, snowy earth and clouded sky, wandering eye and dancing leaf.  Out of small and frost-rimed doings, a mindful life is made.

My friend Penny had an infectious grin and a dry sense of humor, a passion for crows and ravens, for organic food and fair trade coffee. She adored her cat, McBain, and she loved indie book shops.  She gave wonderful hugs, and she enjoyed getting them. She was a livelong member of the Sisterhood of Wandering Eye and Dancing Leaf, and when spring arrives, I will plant a tree for her, not far from where the owls are nesting now.  Wild soul that she was (and still is), she will love it.

A Lamp for Penny

(wherever she may journey in her next life)