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Joanna Macy writes that until we can grieve for our planet we cannot love it—grieving is a sign of spiritual health. But it is not enough to weep for our lost landscapes; we have to put our hands in the earth to make ourselves whole again. Even a wounded world is feeding us. Even a wounded world holds us, giving us moments of wonder and joy. I choose joy over despair. Not because I have my head in the sand, but because joy is what the earth gives me daily and I must return the gift.

Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific
Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants

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Let there be light and abundance.

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How swiftly summer days pass.  Here we are again at the end of July and the eve of Lammas, sometimes called Lughnsadh, Lúnasa, Calan Awst, "First Harvest" or "Loaf Mass". Tomorrow's festival celebrates summer, farming and harvesting, particularly the gathering, milling and putting by of grains and cereals.

Humans have gathered and consumed wild grains since Neolithic times, and the beginning of domestic grain cultivation is an important moment in our evolution. It marks the transition from an ancient, nomadic lifestyle of hunting and gathering to one of farming and settlement. Sickles, sheaves, stooks, mill wheels and grinding stones are common motifs in almost every culture on island earth.

Gods and goddesses?  Oh yes, our festival has a veritable throng of harvesty gods: Lugh, Tammuz, Osiris, Adonis and Attis to name a few. Then there is Dionysus or Bacchus—the grapey god is in a class all by himself, He is the deity of vineyards and harvesting, the patron of wine making, drunken revelry and ritual madness.  He stands at the gate between summer and autumn, and his magical tavern with its ever turning mill wheel and rapture inducing brews is the stuff of legend. According to folk tales, its doorway can be entered from any street in the great wide world if one is in the right frame of mind.

According to Irish mythology, the festival was created by Lugh in honor of his foster mother who perished from exhaustion after clearing the plains of Ireland for cultivation. August 1 is associated with other harvest goddesses like Demeter, Persephone, Ceres, Bridget, the Cailleach, Selu, Nokomis (the Corn Mother) and Freya, who is sometimes known as the Lady of the Loaf.

In the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, the first day of August is called "the feast of first fruits". Loaves were once baked with grain from the first harvest and placed on church altars, later to be used in simple charms and rustic enchantments.  Tenant farmers presented grain to their landlords, and a tithe (one tenth of a farm's yield) was given to the local church. Farmers delivered their portion to parish tithe barns, and a number of the elegant brick and stone structures survive today.

Tim Powers' fabulous The Drawing of the Dark always comes to mind around this time of year. The book is full of harvest and brewing metaphors, and it's a rollicking good read. The main characters are King Arthur (reborn as an aging Irish mercenary named Brian Duffy), a sorcerer called Aurelius Aurelianus (the legendary Merlin himself), and the Fisher King. Dionysus and his magical tavern put in an appearance, and they're in good  company - the woodland god Pan, Gambrinus (medieval King of Beer), Finn MacCool, Guinevere, Morgan le Fay, Odin, Thor and Hercules also show up. There's a whole shipload of Vikings sworn to defend the ancient brewery at the heart of the story and stave off Ragnarok and other mythical creatures too numerous to mention. For some time, the book was only available in paperback, but a hardcover edition was published a few years ago, and one of these days, I shall treat myself to a copy.

The first day of August marked the beginning of the harvest season for the ancients, but it also marked summer's end, and so it is for moderns. There are still many warm and sunny weeks before us, and it is difficult to believe that summer is waning, but it is doing just that. Our days are growing shorter.  

We've come a long way from our early "hunting and gathering" days, but traces of old seasonal rites remain here and there. When I arrived in Lanark county years ago, I learned that Lughnasadh festivities are alive and well in the eastern Ontario highlands. They are called céilidhs or "field parties", and the attendees are unaware of the origins for the most part, but all the festival trappings are there: bonfires, corn, grilled munchies and fresh baked bread, wine and beer, music, storytelling, dancing and merrymaking in abundance, once in a while even a formal harvest observance.

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Thursday Poem - For This One Day

Let fall from our hands
the busy pages and works.
Walk in the sunlight
and read the holy book of earth
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Listen by moonlight
to wind and cricket, owl and wolf.
In the smooth skin of stones,
in the flowing heart of trees,
in the gathering ocean,
we will know each other again
for the first time.

Dolores Stewart Riccio

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Wordless Wednesday - Looking West

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Kindred Spirits

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There have not been many Monarch butterflies about this year so far, and I did a spirited, wobbly dance a day or two ago when a single glorious specimen flew past my freckled nose and alighted in a clump of purple echinacea nearby - in my excitement, I almost forgot to capture a photo.

A few minutes later, a single cicada started to broadcast its call for a mate from somewhere high in the trees, then came another and another and another. Again and again, the unseen tymbal muscles contracted and relaxed, the sonorous vibrations resulting in what is, to me anyway, summer's most resonant and engaging musical score.  Time stood still as Beau and I stopped and listened to that poignant and hopeful chorus for a while.

There are moments one remembers in the depths of winter, and this was one of those moments.  How wonderful it was (in the original sense of that word) to listen to annual cicadas rasp and chirr their ardent mating ballads in the trees over our heads, to watch a small joyous wonder flutter and swoop through the garden on stained glass wings. Life simply doesn't get any better than this, and it doesn't get any wilder either. For a moment I wished my soulmate was here to watch the Monarch's flight with us, then I knew beyond all doubt that he is here with us, and that he could see it. The three of us, together as always.

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Sequestered (XIX)

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One human life is deeper than the ocean. Strange fishes and sea-monsters and mighty plants live in the rock-bed of our spirits. The whole of human history is an undiscovered continent deep in our souls. There are dolphins, plants that dream, magic birds inside us. The sky is inside us. The earth is in us.
Ben Okri, The Famished Road

Saturday, July 25, 2024

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Friday, July 24, 2024

Friday Ramble - In the Great Blue Bowl of Morning

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I awaken to skies that would make an impressionist painter feel like dancing, to Canada geese singing in unison as they fly up from the river and out into farm fields to feed. This year's progeny sing loudest up there in the great blue bowl of morning. Their pleasure in being alive and aloft mirrors my own as I watch them with a mug of tea, eyes shielded from the rising sun with a sleepy hand.

Below the sweeping strokes of vibrant color painted across the eastern sky are trees, hydro poles, rooflines and village streets, trucks and cars in rumbling motion, early runners in the park, commuters with lunch bags, bento boxes and briefcases headed downtown to another day at their desks.

On a recent early morning walk, Beau and I paused for a while by a neighbor's fish pond to watch the white and scarlet koi finning their way around in circles, and while there, we noticed that the first fallen maple leaves of the season had already drifted into the pool, making eddies and swirls and perfect round spirals on the glossy surface. No need to panic, it's not an early autumn, just this summer's dry heat setting a few leaf people free to ramble.

If only I could actually paint skies as magnificent as these... I can't, and the camera will have to do, but what my lens "sees" is absolutely sumptuous, and I am content with my morning opus. Sky blue, rose, gold, violet and scarlet lodge in my wandering thoughts, and on the way home, I think about throwing a bunch of clay bowls and glazing them in perfect sunrise colors. Emaho!

Thursday, July 23, 2024

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The world does not need words. It articulates itself
in sunlight, leaves, and shadows. The stones on the path
are no less real for lying uncatalogued and uncounted.
The fluent leaves speak only the dialect of pure being.
The kiss is still fully itself though no words were spoken.

And one word transforms it into something less or other—
illicit, chaste, perfunctory, conjugal, covert.
Even calling it a kiss betrays the fluster of hands
glancing the skin or gripping a shoulder, the slow
arching of neck or knee, the silent touching of tongues.

Yet the stones remain less real to those who cannot
name them, or read the mute syllables graven in silica.
To see a red stone is less than seeing it as jasper—
metamorphic quartz, cousin to the flint the Kiowa
carved as arrowheads. To name is to know and remember.

The sunlight needs no praise piercing the rainclouds,
painting the rocks and leaves with light, then dissolving
each lucent droplet back into the clouds that engendered it.
The daylight needs no praise, and so we praise it always—
greater than ourselves and all the airy words we summon.

Dana Gioia from Interrogations at Noon

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Wordless Wednesday - O Dappled Stream

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Tuesday, July 21, 2024

Golden Daughters of the Sun

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 Jerusalem Artichoke or Earth Apple
(Helianthus tuberosus)

Monday, July 20, 2024

Sequestered (XVIII)

Sunday, July 19, 2024

Sunday - Saying Yes to the World

You really don't have to lose everything and travel to a remote valley to discover that the world is always rushing forward to teach us, and that the greatest thing we can do is stand there, open and available, and be taught by it. There is no limit to what this cracked and broken and achingly beautiful world can offer, and there is equally no limit to our ability to meet it.

Each day, the sun rises and we get out of bed. Another day has begun and bravely, almost recklessly, we stagger into it not knowing what it will bring to us. How will we meet this unpredictable, untamable human life? How will we answer its many questions and challenges and delights? What will we do when we find ourselves, stumble over ourselves, encounter ourselves, once again, in the kitchen?

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How the Trees Love Summer Light

Friday, July 17, 2024

Friday Ramble - On the Edge of an Inland Sea

The lake is a wild and elemental place at sunset, mist floating on the water and draping the shoreline, here and there the call of a loon, the susurrus of a heron striding the reedy shallows, the languid ripple of pike or perch rising to the surface and then falling back into the depths in slow motion.

Old boats, bridges and wooden jetties, rafts, pylons and buoys — all are human creations, and in ordinary terms, they are anything except mysterious. At the end of day, they are transformed by light, clouds and water, and they take on the fey trappings worn by all things resident on foggy inland seas at sunset. Is it magical? For sure, and if the stuff could be bottled, it would retail for a small fortune. It  cannot, however, be captured or sold.

When the scribe arrives home, she is still dazzled by her sojourn on the shore, and she is, herself, a bit fey. Sundown dances behind her eyelids, and the light is votive in its shimmering intensity. She still hears waves lapping the shore, and the sound is as peaceful as a bell calling her to church or temple or meditation.

How long has she been coming here at this hour of the day. It's an incandescent experience, each and every time. Everything she needs, almost everything in the world that matters, is right here on the shore, and she returns whenever she can. In the words of Ursula K. Le Guin, she is always coming home.

Thursday, July 16, 2024

Thursday Poem - At Dawn

at dawn this summer morning,
a waning moon floating high in the cloudless
blue consecrates a perfect summer day,
one that will never come again in all
its sweetness and its fey perfume.

slow walkers in the early hours, we go along
together, paw and paw, through fragrant summer
yieldings of chicory, clover and golden daisies,
attended on our rambles by rhyming crickets,
by humming bees and dancing leaves

while all around us, unseen but deeply felt
and loved, the world is breathing softly
in and out, our many voices falling together
into seamless light and tune and time.

Cate (me)

Wednesday, July 15, 2024

Wordless Wednesday - What Falls Away

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Tuesday, July 14, 2024

Summer's Golden Coin

Monday, July 13, 2024

Sequestered - XVII

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Sunday - Saying Yes to the World

When I was young, and even more foolish than I am today, I believed that one had to travel far and wide in order to seek truth, divine reality, or whatever you call it. I believed that truth would most likely be found in the world’s so-called sacred places. Yet the fact is that truth is everywhere; it knows no religious, cultural, temporal, or ethnic bounds. Truth is the perfect circle. Its center is everywhere; its circumference stretches into infinite space. The land on which we stand is sacred, no matter where we stand.
Lama Surya Das, Awakening to the Sacred

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Little Sister in the Gold

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Friday, July 10, 2024

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Somewhere in the dusty recesses of my noggin, the passage of these sultry summer days is being marked, and ever so wistfully.  The clock of the seasons is ticking away in the background, and hearing it, I find myself pondering the lessons held out by this golden interval that is passing away all too swiftly.  The other three seasons of a northern calendar year are splendid of course, and there are surely other fine summers ahead, but this summer is waning, and its days are numbered. The summer solstice has come and gone, and we are sliding gently down the hill toward autumn, shorter days and longer nights.

Thoughts of coming and going are ever inscribed on summer's middling pages, and they're unsettling notions, making for restlessness and vague discontent, a gentle melancholy concerning the nature of time, what is falling away and the transience of all earthly things.  A heightened awareness of suchness (or tathata) is a middle-of-the-summer thing for sure. For the most part, one goes gently along with the flow, breathing in and out, trying to rest in the moment and do the gardeny things that need doing.

Old garden roses are a perfect metaphor for the season. Most bloom once in a calendar year, but what a show they put on when they do.  Their unruly tangles of wickedly thorny canes and blue-green leaves wear delicate pink (for the most part) blooms with crinkled petals and golden hearts.  Each rose is unique, and each is exquisite from budding until its faded petals flutter to earth like snowflakes. For several weeks after Midsummer, fragrance lingers in every corner of the garden, and every year I fall in love with old roses all over again. It is nothing short of a miracle that creatures so beautiful and fragile thrive this far north.

Once in a while, I catch a glimpse of the Great Mystery while I am hanging out in the garden, and that is surely what this old life is all about.  I wish I did a better job of remembering that and keeping everything in perspective, but forgetting now and then is quite all right - the roses in my garden remind me.

Thursday, July 09, 2024

Thursday Poem - Daily

These shriveled seeds we plant,
corn kernel, dried bean,
poke into loosened soil,
cover over with measured fingertips

These T-shirts we fold into
perfect white squares

These tortillas we slice and fry to crisp strips
This rich egg scrambled in a gray clay bowl

This bed whose covers I straighten
smoothing edges till blue quilt fits brown blanket
and nothing hangs out

This envelope I address
so the name balances like a cloud
in the center of sky

This page I type and retype
This table I dust till the scarred wood shines
This bundle of clothes I wash and hang and wash again
like flags we share, a country so close
no one needs to name it

The days are nouns: touch them
The hands are churches that worship the world

Naomi Shihab Nye, 
(from The Words Under the Words: Selected Poems)

Wednesday, July 08, 2024

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Tuesday, July 07, 2024

Lilies of the Day

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Orange daylily  (Hemerocallis fulva)

Monday, July 06, 2024

Sequestered - XVI

Sunday, July 05, 2024

Sunday - Saying Yes to the world

I am a child of the Milky Way. The night is my mother. I am made of the dust of stars. Every atom in my body was forged in a star. When the universe exploded into being, already the bird longed for the wood and the fish for the pool. When the first galaxies fell into luminous clumps, already matter was struggling toward consciousness. The star clouds of Sagittarius are a burning bush. If there is a voice in Sagittarius, I’d be a fool not to listen. If God’s voice in the night is a scrawny cry, then I’ll prick up my ears. If night’s faint lights fail to knock me off my feet, then I’ll sit back on a dark hillside and wait and watch. A hint here and a trait there. Listening and watching. Waiting, always waiting, for the tingle in the spine.

Chet Raymo, The Soul of the Night: An Astronomical Pilgrimage
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