The Quiet Warrior

A good life and a tale for sharing . . .

In life, Roberta Langtry was a school teacher in the city of Toronto, Ontario. She became a teacher at the age of sixteen and remained a teacher with the Toronto School Board for more than fifty years teaching many generations of children and devoting much time and energy to working with autistic children and their speaking difficulties.

She was quietly passionate about nature, conservation and the environment and an ardent defender of biodiversity, believing that we must preserve the wild places for our children and their children - during her lifetime, she contributed generously to the Green Party, the Nature Conservancy of Canada, The Campaign for Conservation, the Council of Canadians and a multitude of other charitable organizations dedicated to environmental causes.

She lived simply, frugally and without ostentation, and those who were fortunate in knowing her had no idea how affluent she was, but when this charming thoughtful woman died late last year at almost ninety years of age, she willed over four million dollars to the Nature Conservancy of Canada for the purchase and guardianship of fragile wild places and the preservation of natural wonders such as the Great Bear Rainforest and the vast Canadian boreal forest which I love so much.

Roberta Langtry was ahead of her time, and we are poorer for her journey beyond the fields we know. She walked lightly on this earth, and she departed it quietly with no fuss and fanfare, just as she had lived - within this gentle woman lived a fierce and indomitable heart, boundless generosity, radical acceptance and the spirit of a Shambhala warrior. You may read more about her here.

Mama Says Om - Balance

In early morning, mind and body curl themselves into the only form of the lotus position they can cope with at this late time in life and slide carefully into a breathing meditation. The physical position taken is precarious, ache inducing and anything but balanced, the mind equally precarious, unbalanced and ever inclined to wander, over the hills and far away.

"Cultivate balance and be like the stones", I say to myself. "Be like the inukshuk standing serenely in the Arctic landscape, the elegant stone cairn resting amid raked sand spirals in a Zen garden. Just let go and breathe. Take no thought of your aching bones and ignore your wandering thoughts. Settle down here, Cate, balance and come back to your breath, a hundred times, a thousand times, whatever it takes."

I think fondly of the long limbed creature in her forties who scrambled easily up steep hillsides, down treacherous gorges and across soggy beaver dams in search of something, she knew not what. That younger woman was always searching for something, the sunlight falling across a wild orchid in the bog, the wind whistling through a crevice, the sound of a stream beyond the hill, a perfect fleeting moment at the top of a cliff. When younger self was engaged in these undertakings, she was in balance, and she knew it not.

Things are different now. Chances are that I spilled coffee on the counter in the kitchen this morning at first light or dropped a mug and shattered it on the tile floor. This afternoon, my stiff fingers may be unable to grasp inkstone or paint brush firmly, and the physical metabolism protests vigorously when I try to compel it to do anything at all. Balance is an elusive state glimpsed briefly now and then, but she always seems to be disappearing around the next corner in a graceful swirl of silken garments and tinkling bells. Sometimes I think I can hear her laughing at me as she moves away, amused by the longing of this eldering being for clarity, grace, balance and equilibrium.

The artless suspension of the trout in its watery medium, the grace of the fallen leaf resting in the loving arms of a tree in September, the stones resting easy by the pond and its calm waters — these are the essence of balance. Each and every trout, leaf, stone and restless being in the great wide world is already in balance, and there is no need for one to pile up the stones of her life into an inukshuk, a trail mark or a cairn — one may grow and bloom wherever she is planted.

When I enter the landscape in a spirit of openness, simplicity and reciprocity, I find myself in the heart of things - I am in balance, part of the great balance, and I usually know it not.

Poetry Thursday - Seven of Pentacles

Under a sky the color of pea soup
she is looking at her work growing away there
actively, thickly like grapevines or pole beans
as things grow in the real world, slowly enough.
If you tend them properly, if you mulch, if you water,
if you provide birds that eat insects a home and winter food,
if the sun shines and you pick off caterpillars,
if the praying mantis comes and the ladybugs and the bees,
then the plants flourish, but at their own internal clock.

Connections are made slowly, sometimes they grow underground.
You cannot tell always by looking what is happening.
More than half the tree is spread out in the soil under your feet.
Penetrate quietly as the earthworm that blows no trumpet.
Fight persistently as the creeper that brings down the tree.
Spread like the squash plant that overruns the garden.
Gnaw in the dark and use the sun to make sugar.

Weave real connections, create real nodes, build real houses.
Live a life you can endure: Make love that is loving.
Keep tangling and interweaving and taking more in,
a thicket and bramble wilderness to the outside but to us
interconnected with rabbit runs and burrows and lairs.

Live as if you liked yourself, and it may happen:
reach out, keep reaching out, keep bringing in.
This is how we are going to live for a long time: not always,
for every gardener knows that after the digging, after
the planting, after the long season of tending and growth,
the harvest comes.

Marge Piercy (Seven of Pentacles)

There is an original Thursday offering here.

Sun Coming Up

The sun is just coming up, rising slowly over the old ash trees in the garden. The day promises to be sunny but very cool — there is a brisk wind, and the entire garden around me seems to be in motion. If I close my eyes and listen, rather than just watching the days cruise on by, there is poignant sighing everywhere around me, a tacit admission that autumn has arrived and the time of the long nights is not far off.

The last rainfall created splendid collages of raindrops, weeds and spider webs, and it crafted a rosy silence that echoed the tint of the falling maple leaves everywhere. Much as I love working in collage, I could not have equalled yesterday's natural creations if I had tried to do so.

Life here is something of an riparian undertaking in autumn, and I sometimes feel as though I am living on the banks of a great river. September rains turn the driveway of the little blue house in the village into a richly textured molten river flowing bronze, pink, blue and gold. The rivers go dancing through the gutters and they sing a burnished song as they go.

From time to time, I have a deep craving for silence in autumn, a passionate need to entertain stillness and listen to what the days and the season are telling me — yesterday was certainly one of those days. I said little, raked oceans of leaves, readied the garden for winter, listened to the wind in the eaves and watched the leaves in motion. Enfolded in such quiet days and Gaia's ever changing patterns, one can sometimes sense great events in motion, but these small happenings are wonders in their own right.

Web, Weeds, Rain and Silence

Purple Daisies

Michaelmas Daisy or New York Aster
(Symphyotrichum novi-belgii or Aster novi-belgii)

Oh, what a feast of colour for northern eyes in September! Our Michaelmas Daisies (or New York Asters) have just come into bloom, and they are another one of my markers of the changing season. As we drove along the gravel roads in Lanark this weekend, we could see their tall enthusiastically waving plumes everywhere in hedgerows, fields and thickets, adorning every roadside and concealing fences and culverts alike with their bright colours and their impetuous windy movement.

I cherish these autumn daisies (or asters) because they are vivid purple (my favourite colour), and because they have hearts of pure lustrous gold. The blooms are arrayed in vivid, almost incandescent colours at a time of the year when everything else in northern gardens is fading away, and they are truly impressive in their stature, often reaching six feet in height.

On this side of the Atlantic, these resplendent entities are called New York Asters. The name was given to them by the eighteenth century Belgian botanist Hermann, who named them for the place where he encountered them for the first time, the Dutch new world colony of New Amsterdam. In Britain, the flower is called the Michaelmas Daisy in honour of St. Michael the Archangel whose feast (Michaelmas) falls on September 29th - there is a wealth of lore on the feast of Michaelmas and every other day of the turning year at Wilson's Almanac online, and it is all wonderful reading.

The usual Monday morning haiku offering is here.

Migrations of Spirit

And this our life, exempt from public haunt,
Finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks,
Sermons in stones, and good in everything.
William Shakespeare, (As You Like It)

The sun rises later these days, and my early morning observance is also later now, falling around seven o'clock rather than well before six as it did all summer long. This is the autumn turning of the great wheel, a time when the early sunlight is paler and cooler, when shadows and reflections across the beaver pond are longer and more mysterious. In the early morning light, the bullrushes seem to be spun of burgundy rather than gold, and there is a clear sense of waiting, here by the water.

Earlier in the year, the pond was full of ducks and geese, and their melodious cacophony filled the air for miles around. There were always bullfrogs in chorus here at sunrise, rows of mud turtles and snappers sunning themselves on the floating remnants of the beaver chewings, herons prowling the shoreline majestically and making nary a ripple as they moved through the shallows.

It is always a great pleasure to come here alone at dawn, curl up on a rock near the water, watch the sun come up and the al fresco marketplace throw its shutters wide and open up for business. This weekend, everything is quiet - there will certainly be ducks, geese and herons about later and hawks circling overhead, but like me, the wild creatures of the Two Hundred Acre Wood are awakening a little later these days, and those who are not preparing themselves for migration are stuffing their larders for winter.

I do not hail from a migratory species, and there is no need to stuff a larder for winter, but in my own quiet way, I am battening down the hatches and making ready for the long nights time. My real preparations are within, and I need this stillness, these quiet morning intervals by the pond. I could not function without them.

Autumn Equinox Red

Virginia Creeper (Parthenocissus quinquefolia)

This is the day of the autumn equinox, one of the two days in the whole turning year when day and night are balanced and equal in length. From now until Yuletide, on or around December 21, the light will wane and days will rapidly grow shorter, at least for those of us who live in the northern hemisphere. Our equinox is a wet one this year as it was last year and the year before that according to my journals.

These Virgina Creepers grow in abundance at the edge of the forest on our property in Lanark, and they wind their way exuberantly around (and up) the woodland trees with their small forked tendrils tipped with obdurately clinging adhesive fingers. Although its small greenish springtime flowers are singularly uninspiring, the leaves of this prolific climber turn brilliant red around the time of the autumn equinox, and the vine has always been one of my markers of both the equinox and the season.

The dark blue berries of the Virginia Creeper contain oxalic acid which is poisonous to humans and most other mammals, but wild birds love them as they are an important source of nourishment in autumn and winter. This week, the creepers at the Two Hundred Acre Wood are full of feasting birds.

A very happy Autumn Equinox, Harvest Home, Mabon, Alban Elfed or Winter Finding to you.

Mama Says Om - Clear

Clear is simplicity and balance. Clear is what remains when one pares away the dross of mundane living and the detritus of empire and subscribes instead to "enoughness", to that which is lean and supple and spare.

Clear is going into the uncharted territories which lie ahead, going unencumbered and carrying only the bare essentials for the journey, but trusting that it will always be enough, that there will be bridges for crossing, trees for shade, water to ease one's thirst and stars overhead to light the way. Clear is walking that path with a tranquil expression, an easy stride (or a lurch or a hobble) and a light heart.

Clear is being truly present in this place and time in which I find myself, counting my breaths and just letting go of all the outward rattle and hum.

Clear is seeing my reflection in a window, a pond or a pool of rainwater and not turning away from that gnarly old creature in dismay and loathing, but embracing her and welcoming her home.

Clear is the rocky bones and contours of the land revealed in autumn. Clear is treading the gate. Clear is the commonwealth I am journeying toward, sometimes on foot and sometimes paddling.

Poetry Thursday - Late September

Tang of fruitage in the air;
Red boughs bursting everywhere;
Shimmering of seeded grass;
Hooded gentians all a'mass.
Warmth of earth, and cloudless wind
Tearing off the husky rind,
Blowing feathered seeds to fall
By the sun-baked, sheltering wall.
Beech trees in a golden haze;
Hardy sumachs all ablaze,
Glowing through the silver birches.
How that pine tree shouts and lurches!
From the sunny door-jamb high,
Swings the shell of a butterfly.
Scrape of insect violins
Through the stubble shrilly dins.
Every blade's a minaret
Where a small muezzin's set,
Loudly calling us to pray
At the miracle of day.
Then the purple-lidded night
Westering comes, her footsteps light
Guided by the radiant boon
Of a sickle-shaped new moon.

Amy Lowell, Late September

There is (as always) an original Thursday offering here.

Rainy Offerings

This is the second morning of the September rains and another grey day lies before us. When the sun rose over the ash trees in the garden a while ago, it was so obscured by darkling cloud that one could not see it, and it seems that this will be another day of endless twilight and drenching precipitation. The leaves of the Manitoba Maple in the garden are in constant flight this morning, and they lie on the deck and the grass with almost every shade of yellow, russet and gold in the spectrum on display. In the gloom of the day, the leaves are almost neon in their intensity.

Yesterday with its umbrella, oilskins, wellies and drooping garden foliage brought one of those small incandescent gifts which I have come to cherish in my retirement and cronish pottering, and it is interesting how often such gifts seem to turn up on dank days.

During the first week of June, I posted a poem here by Patti Tana called Post Humus, one I have loved since I read it for the first time three years ago. There is a copy of the poem pinned to the bulletin board in this tiny (about the size of a closet) study in the little blue house in the village, and reading it again is always a happy and uplifting experience, particularly if one is a gardener. Patti wrote me a delightful message this week, and I discovered that she has a web site where one may learn more about her exquisite poetry and listen to her reading her poems aloud, including the lovely Post Humus. Thank you Patti. . . .

Rain, rain. . .

It is raining here this morning, and according to the weather pundits, it will rain for several days and well into next week - the September rains have arrived, and they will be with us for some time to come.

What does one do on a day like this? I rise early (as usual), make coffee and watch the subdued sun coming up over the ash trees in the garden behind the little blue house in the village. I spend some time (as usual) in meditation, and my slow deep breathing is punctuated by the metronome of falling rain outside the window. I just breathe in and out and relish the small rites and observations with which the day always begins, rain or shine. After the usual morning "stuff", I trot out to the garden clad in wellies and oilskins, top up the bird feeders and look closely at what is happening in the outer realms: the wind moving the trees about, the bronze chrysanthemums bowed down under the weight of the wet day, raindrops sparkling on the leaves, the intricate spiderwebs hung with liquid jewels and fallen leaves everywhere on the soggy grass.

On the greyest of autumn days, there is colour in the garden, and there is always much to look at and think about. The garden is a fine teacher, and it is a roshi of the finest kind (and very few words). I am always tempted to say (or write) "my garden" here, but it really isn't my garden at all - I am merely its celebrant and custodian in this particular time and place, and the same may be said of the day. There is little or no excitement here this morning, just peace and quiet and a lovely pearly grey light falling across everything.

Thinking Place in the Woods

No words are needed to describe my thinking place by the stream in the woods, but if I were to attempt to describe it, the result would be something like the haiku here, verse that is lean and spare and sculptural.

Smaller Focus

Craving colour, texture and a kind of rustling music, I went out twittening among the leaves in the woods yesterday and focused on small things for an hour or two, no grandeur, wide vistas or rolling hills, just the leaves beneath my feet, flickering sunlight and the wind in the trees.

In the greater scheme of things, mine was a small and insignificant undertaking, and the carpet of leaves by the spring in the woods was a small and insignificant undertaking too, but we were both exactly where we should be, and we were both where we needed to be yesterday.

I returned home late in the day having found my wild roots again, feeling quiet and refreshed and knowing beyond any doubt that great things dwell effortlessly and with boundless grace within that which is small and insignificant. Why then do we human creatures spend so much of our time on earth trying to cram a whole quart into a pint pot?

Sunrise in a Favourite Place

The earth was warm and the early morning air above the stream by the beaver pond was cold. A dense fog lay over everything, and the sun came up through the tendrils of fog in a way that was downright magical, in spite of the temperature, the wind and the dampness.

On such a morning last year, there were at least a dozen migrating herons standing patiently here in the fog at sunrise, and they appeared one by one in regal profile as I squelched my way along the boggy verges, camera in hand. I was hoping for a heron or two this week, but (alas) there were no herons to be seen at sunrise.

Mama Says Om - Beauty

The theme at Mama Says Om this week is "beauty".

In September, northern beauty is the trees and their tumbling fiery leaves, the contours of the woodland coming into view as the leaves swoop and fall. Beauty is the grain harvest, cornfields and pumpkin patches, wild geese in flight against the golden moon and brightly coloured produce appearing at farm gates and open air markets. It is the last roses of the season now blooming in my garden.

I often think that the roses of September are the most beautiful roses of the whole turning year, magnificent in their deep cupped shape, vibrant colours, velvety texture and heady fragrance - it always seems to me that their splendid fragrance is even richer and more exotic in the cool crisp air of autumn. The roses of September are a gift.

Poetry Thursday - The Greatest Grandeur

Some say it’s in the reptilian dance
of the purple-tongued sand goanna,
for there the magnificent translation
of tenacity into bone and grace occurs.

And some declare it to be an expansive
desert — solid rust-orange rock
like dusk captured on earth in stone —
simply for the perfect contrast it provides
to the blue-grey ridge of rain
in the distant hills.

Some claim the harmonics of shifting
electron rings to be most rare and some
the complex motion of seven sandpipers
bisecting the arcs and pitches
of come and retreat over the mounting
hayfield.

Others, for grandeur, choose the terror
of lightning peals on prairies or the tall
collapsing cathedrals of stormy seas,
because there they feel dwarfed
and appropriately helpless; others select
the serenity of that ceiling/cellar
of stars they see at night on placid lakes,
because there they feel assured
and universally magnanimous.

But it is the dark emptiness contained
in every next moment that seems to me
the most singularly glorious gift,
that void which one is free to fill
with processions of men bearing burning
cedar knots or with parades of blue horses,
belled and ribboned and stepping sideways,
with tumbling white-faced mimes or companies
of black-robed choristers; to fill simply
with hammered silver teapots or kiln-dried
crockery, tangerine and almond custards,
polonaises, polkas, whittling sticks, wailing
walls; that space large enough to hold all
invented blasphemies and pieties, 10,000
definitions of god and more, never fully
filled, never.

Pattiann Rogers (from Firekeeper)

There is an original Thursday offering here.

View From the Hill

This is a view from my hill in Lanark, looking out from my favourite old rail fence, over the valley and down to the lake and the river. On a clear day, one can see forever from this high place and the view is ever changing - in a week or two, there will be red and gold and russet as far as the eye can see. The transformation has already begun.

By the Lake

The cottages tucked into the trees along the lake have all been closed up for the year, and their blithe residents have headed back to work and school in far flung places, so the lake was quiet this past weekend. The loons have already departed for the Gulf of Mexico, and I heard them calling goodbye as they flew overhead a few days ago on their way south. The lake seems empty now, resigned, serene and waiting for fall to make its official appearance on the twenty-first day of this month.

For some reason my mind persists in revisiting summer sounds, sights and scents: the call of the loons in early morning, children and their laughter on the beaches, the sounds of canoe paddles dipping slowly into the lake, great herons fishing in the shallows, flocks of mergansers in flight over the water. In previous years, there were the sounds of fishing lines and tackle arching into the lake, but it (the lake) has been designated a fish sanctuary, and there was no fishing on it this year.

There were no wood fires burning in the fireplaces of the cottages along the lakeshore this weekend, but I breathed in the fine remembered fragrance of last autumn's woodsmoke and this year's meadowsweet gone to seed, and I felt summer's vanished warmth on my skin again. Revisiting summer memories at this time of year is bittersweet and poignant, but it is a splendid thing.

The last week has been traumatic and troubling for many reasons, but standing there on the shore with my collar turned up against the wind, my hands in my pockets and Cassie by my side, I felt calm and centred and thought that I simply could not live anywhere else. As long as I can journey into these wild places and spend a few minutes now and then, I shall be able to cope with anything that comes my way.

The Artful Builder

Yesterday's brief walk in the woods yielded this small wonder which took me right out of my doldrums for a while, a delicate vireo's nest suspended from the slender forked twigs of a small maple tree at the edge of the trail.

The nest was so skillfully placed among the branches that I didn't notice it for some time, discovering it only when a young grouse exploded out of the path in front of me in a flurry of wings and agitation and launched itself skyward with considerable difficulty. The bird had been feeding in the fermented grapes nearby and was more than a trifle intoxicated, careening off several trees, thrashing about in the undergrowth and shrieking hysterically before it finally managed to become airborne and settled tipsily in a tall cedar nearby.

The upper edge of the vireo's hanging basket nest was carefully secured to the maple twigs with all sorts of things, bits of hair, grape vine fibres, gossamer spider webs and what looked like the silk from caterpillar cocoons. The inside of the nest was filled with down, and woven artfully into the outside structure of the nest were birch bark, leaves, lichens, fur, mosses, bits of goatsbeard fluff and even small wild turkey feathers.

An Algonquin basket maker would have been proud to claim the vireo's nest, which is organic architecture of the highest order, and I doubt even Antonio Gaudí could have produced a structure more functional and pleasing to the eye. He would, however, been delighted by the concatenary arrangement of its elements.

The woodland was quiet yesterday, and the trees along the edge of the western hill are starting to turn gloriously, enfolded in the sunny days and cold nights which engender the brightest and most colourful autumns here in the north. Out of such small gifts come clarity, stillness and resolution.

Sunday Morning Leaves

This morning, fallen leaves lie deep along the dewy trail, drifting down from high places to gift themselves to the early wanderer and the patient observer in the park. No two leaves are alike in the pale sunlight and cool September wind, but they are a community for all that, a community of the errant, the wayward and the fallen.

The leaves are dancing in their places, and they ripple and billow like the sails of an old barge going carefully up the river at twilight. They make a dry rustling music that whispers of the turning seasons, of waning light and change - they sing of a fine and crunching frost below my feet, of bare branches glistening overhead, some time very soon.

Afloat in the Fog

If the universe had unfolded as it should have, I would be curled up this morning in a comfortable chair somewhere in (or near or on route to) Traverse City, Michigan, drinking coffee, sharing tales and catching up on life's adventures with a group of wise (and much loved) women friends with whom I try to get together around this time every year.

It is sufficient to note that this year I am here rather than there, and I was feeling blue when I awakened this morning before dawn and pottered off to make coffee, but the open kitchen window had a small and much appreciated surprise for me today. We were afloat on the first of the autumn fogs like a leaky old wooden schooner drifting in the Bay of Fundy, and nothing could be glimpsed of the garden behind the little blue house in the village.

The only thing to do in the circumstances was to bundle up in our jackets, caps and "wellies" and go for a long walk in the fog with Cassie. It was dark when we set out, but our favourite village trail was pure magic this morning. There were occasional chirps and scraps of melody from songbirds in the hedgerows and small cottontail scamperings were heard among the grapevines, but nothing could be seen of our wild friends at all. At times like these, I always seem to head off into the green, and the protocol has always stood me in good stead - I return refreshed by the experience and soothed by what I have discovered, even on days like this one when the universe is unfolding as it should not, and I cannot see.

Now the sun is coming up, the music of Frederick Delius (La Calinda from his lovely opera Koanga) is floating out of the CD player, there is a mug of good dark coffee in hand, and I am girding myself for another day, putting on (perhaps) the armour of light.

Space

The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,
Moves on: nor all your Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all your Tears wash out a Word of it.
Omar Khayyam, The Rubaiyat

This week the theme at Mama Says Om is "space". The word emerges full blown from the Latin noun spatium which means simply area or expanse and makes no assumptions about what lies within the space in question. We define our world in terms of spaces used and unused, full and empty, loved and loathed, tended and ignored - inner space and outer space, wide open spaces and closed in spaces, work space, living space, thinking space, personal space, meditative space, sacred space. . .

This morning I find myself thinking of creative expression and the spaces which are integral to it in all its many forms, the spaces between individual words written on a page, between one click of the camera shutter and the next click, between one application of brush to canvas and the one which follows.

Mostly I am thinking of words. The stories, songs and tales which are such rich and poignant expressions of human spirit and creativity are exquisite when we view them in their entirety, but there are other and greater revelations to be experienced when we begin to look closely at their elements, the individual words of which they are composed, the punctuation employed and the spaces between the words.

The words and spaces which form our language are little works of art or theater, tiny plays or compositions, each descriptive of a feeling or perception, a physical sensation, an encounter with the wild, an interaction with other beings or with existence itself, and what we are not hearing, saying or writing is just as important as what we are hearing, saying or writing. Silence is as meaningful and expressive as speech, and often much more so - there are times when the spaces between the words are more eloquent than the words themselves will ever be. There is a profound causal relationship between what we communicate in words and what we do not (or cannot) communicate in words.

Poetry Thursday - Blue

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, 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 (Evening)

Rilke's perfect song to the trees and the deepening blue skies of evening is a poem I carry with me everywhere I go although it is a short composition, and there is no need to commit it to paper and carry it about in my billfold. I seldom observe a nightfall (particularly in autumn) or watch the moon and stars come up without thinking of this poem and and reciting it to myself. Everything this man has ever written is perfection.

Beyond the Fields We Know (V)

Conclusion

Waking, sleeping and dreaming are liminal activities, and the very act of breathing may be construed as liminal. Spirals, labyrinths, mazes, tors, mounds, stone circles, groves and sacred enclosures are liminal spaces opening into other realities and other modes of being and thinking — as are winding woodland trails, oak stands, clear streams and mountains (I find myself thinking of the Queen Mother of the West and the mythical Peach Blossom Spring here.).

We each approach the liminal in our own way and our own time, and the lens through which we filter our liminal experiences is a unique and very personal thing. For some of us, the gateway lies through church services and collective ceremonies — for others it is private prayer, meditation and silence — for still others, the way is through loving observation of the natural world, personal ritual, carefully crafted rites of passage and the old seasonal festivals. Sunrise, noon, twilight and midnight are liminal times of day when according to ancient lore, divination and magic could be worked by those skilled in such arts — such times would have been fearful and vulnerable intervals for those without magical gifts or the protections of the Craft. The old fire festivals of the Celts are perhaps the most powerful threshold times of all, for the four feasts of Samhain (Halloween), Imbolc (Candlemas), Beltane (May Day) and Lammas (Loaf Mass or First Harvest) fall at the times of the year when the veils between the worlds are thin and magic is indeed afoot.

Life is full of thresholds or liminal spaces, and I sometimes wonder how many we pass by every day without recognizing them or realizing what adventures or enlightenment await us, in Lord Dunsany's words, "beyond the fields we know".

Ours is a winding trail holding wonders and surprises, and whether or not we realize it, we all encounter liminal spaces from time to time. We need such places in our mundane lives in order to survive and evolve, to become authentic beings and exercise the creativity which is the Old Wild Mother's shining gift to us. Liminal spaces allow us to step out of the ordinary world for a while, and into the rich realm of the archetypal, the strange and the creative.

From time to time, I encounter the liminal in art, meditation and stillness, in the flowing movements of Tai Chi and yoga, in smouldering sticks of nag champa incense, in deep twilight and the shapes of trees, in strong coffee and the keyboard sonatas of Scarlatti, in winter days in the shire when the air is so hushed that one can actually hear the snow falling in the trees, in loons (anywhere, anytime) and walks through the oak woods in late autumn, in the creaking timbers of old log barns, in wood smoke, in dark chocolate, in good brandy and the fragrances of bergamot, violets, lavender and rosewood.

---------

This is the fifth and last part of a rambling article on liminal space which was posted here over the last few months. The earlier parts are indexed below.

Part I, April 2006
Part II, May 2006
Part III, June 2006
Part IV, August 2006

Vibrant Transformation

This is the first of a series of cards which I am creating as part of autumn's artisan tour (The Crown & Pumpkin Studio Tour) in the Lanark Highlands next month, and I suspect that I shall be revisiting this image when the snow lies deep around the little blue house in the village, and winter winds are howling in the eaves.

One of the things which always strikes me at this time of year when the leaves are turning is the magnificence of their gesture - theirs is a gift from the heart which knows no limits, one which speaks eloquently of the mystery and grandeur of natural cycles and illustrates the boundless generosity of the silent entities with whom we share this planet. Would that I could call this an act of reciprocity, but where is the mutual exchange here? What are we giving to the trees in return? What could we possibly give back which would parallel such a transcendent gift?

Aglow with the hues we see in our rambles through the woods in autumn, we usually forget that we are witnessing an untrammeled spiralling dance of entropy, a fluttering death song of incomparable beauty. The leaves in the forest are putting on a last glorious display before they crumble into dust and blow away, becoming the stuff out of which next springtime's wonders will arise. In the end, we all return to the Old Wild Mother, and she tends her wayward garden with loving care, putting everything to work in the service of her creation.

There is an original Monday haiku sequence here, and there are beautiful haiku offerings at One Deep Breath, where the theme this week is solitude.

Lantern and Maple Leaves

It's a a classic September morning: grey skies, foggy foggy dew, cool temperatures and a light caressing wind that refreshes body and spirit after the rainforest interval of northern summer. This morning, there is rain in the air, and the heady fragrance of herbs wild and domesticated flinging their leaves and their seed to the overcast skies with riotous abandon.

The world around me is still green and will be mostly so for many days to come, but it is dappled with leaves in red and gold and russet, and the glorious colours are echoed in the organic produce I am acquiring at farm gate shops, farmers' markets and roadside kiosks.

Every day or two, the lantern at the gate fills up with fallen red maple leaves from an old tree behind it, and I climb up to clear out the lantern casing in order that we can see our twilight world when the sun goes down in flames behind the garden. There is such abundance everywhere, such vivid wealth in these early fall days. . . .

Changing

The jeweled butterflies of summer have
departed, and the maple leaves are turning,
the old trees by the beaver pond the first
to go scarlet and drop their leaves among
the drowsing stones and dried grasses.
Dare I hope for a turning of my own?
To become a creature of light and colour
and wind myself, would be a splendid thing.

Mama Says Om - Train

This week, the theme at Mama Says Om is "train".

The word springs from the Old English traynyn, thence from the Old French trahiner and the Latin tragina, all meaning to pull or drag something along behind one or one's conveyance. Synonyms for train include: alternation, appendage, caravan, chain, column, concatenation, consecution, convoy, cortege, course, court, day coach, entourage, file, following, gradation, line, order, procession, progression, retinue, row, run, scale, sequel, sequence, set, string, succession, suite, tail, thread, tier, track, trail, wake.

One sees signs like this one at rural crossings and train stations all over France, and they have given me much food for thought over the years, not to mention a wry chuckle now and then. In English, the sign may construed as saying, "Attention, watch your step, look both ways and be very careful crossing this track. There may be another train hidden (or lurking) right behind the one you are looking at now."

There is (of course) a specific and practical context here: that we should be cautious when standing on a train platform, watching a train, boarding a train, conducting or driving a train or perhaps just thinking about trains when we are otherwise engaged, but the words have a much wider application. They are an admonishment to be mindful of our thoughts and actions and aware of their hidden consequences, wherever we are and whatever we are doing - whether we are participating, creating or simply being observers in one of life's many activities. Trains and railway tracks are good metaphors for this voyage we are all on together, and when I encounter one of these signs, I also find myself thinking of the expression "running off the rails", something that happens to all of us from time to time.

My French railway sign holds out excellent advice for anything and everything in life - it all comes down to a very Zen thing methinks, keeping one's eye on the ball (or train) and paying attention to what one is doing while she is doing it. Pinning such a sign on my bulletin board would be a wise manoeuvre - I am always forgetting to pay attention and wonder if I will ever "get it right".