In the spirit of the season

Branches bare of leaves are top-coated with snow. The woods look full of giant skeletons. An occasional peek of sunshine brightens an otherwise dull day. Fields freshly coated with snow will soon return, for a time, to their autumnal tans, bronze, and brass. Consider last night and today a preview of coming attractions. The dogs don’t remember last winter’s snow so they’re freshly disconcerted by this stuff on the ground under their paws.

pileated woodpecker at suet feeder

Photo by J. Harrington

Conifers have been seasonally highlighted by sparkling flakes. The birds and squirrels have already displaced most of the 3” snow cap on the deck railing. This morning, for the first time, we saw a flicker at the bird bath. Some time during the next few days we’ll put up the suet feeder and see how long until a pileated woodpecker arrives.

There’s been a serendipitous alignment between our season’s first snowfall, watching video’s of our one year old granddaughter exploring her yard in the snow (with parental assistance) and a paragraph in a book I’ve recently begun reading. I may be stretching a little, but not a lot. See what you think:

.... We know that, although our children have come through us, they issue from a source deeper than us. In their face we glimpse something of the Light from which all life has come. In their skin we smell the freshness of life’s origins. It is this deep natural knowing that Celtic wisdom builds on. It is a sacred knowing that becomes the basis of spiritual vision.

The book just quoted is Sacred Earth Sacred Soul, Celtic Wisdom for Reawakening to What Our Souls Know and Healing the World. I picked it up at Scout & Morgan Books on not much more than a whim, while dallying before checking in for my COVID booster shot at the Cub pharmacy down the road. Since the snow doesn’t warrant blowing, and I’m feeling more lethargic than usual, and my left arm is sore, I’m curling up with that interesting book until I return to what laughingly passes for normal around here. Today’s Campbell McGrath poem seems to capture much of what Sacred Earth is about.

The Everglades

Campbell McGrath

Green and blue and white, it is a flag
for Florida stitched by hungry ibises.

It is a paradise of flocks, a cornucopia
of wind and grass and dark, slow waters.

Turtles bask in the last tatters of afternoon,
frogs perfect their symphony at dusk—

in its solitude we remember ourselves,
dimly, as creatures of mud and starlight.

Clouds and savannahs and horizons,
its emptiness is an antidote, its ink

illuminates the manuscript of the heart.
It is not ours though it is ours

to destroy or preserve, this the kingdom
of otter, kingfisher, alligator, heron.

If the sacred is a river within us, let it flow
like this, serene and magnificent, forever.

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Welcome to Summer, solstice!

Today, in the Northern hemisphere, the sun will reach its most northerly point at 4:23 this afternoon, our local time. If we stop to think about it, for one half of the year, the days get longer. For the other half, they get shorter. There is no extended period when they are all the same length. Things, including daylight and length of night, are always changing. And yet, unless we are among the relative few whose days are actually governed by the length of daylight, we pay little or no attention to anything but artificial time measured by mechanical or electric clocks.

Summer solstice, the dawning of a new season

Photo by J. Harrington

The (quasi-)mechanical portrait of our solar system that I was taught about in grammar school may have been an improvement over the concept that the sun revolved around the earth, but does it fit with the concept that "our" universe is expanding? Sometimes I ponder such questions as I pull buckthorn. Occasionally I wonder about them instead of pulling buckthorn. If I overindulge in heat, humidity, stubborn buckthorn, and bugs, I can do unhealthy things to my blood pressure.

a solstice celebration

Photo by J. Harrington

With luck, and some cooperation from the weather, this evening we'll celebrate the solstice by ignighting the brush pile (of mostly buckthorn) in the back yard. Perhaps some friends, whom we haven't seen in too long, may stop by. We'll maintain proper social distances. Some, perhaps all, of us will wear face masks. COVID-19 is slowly becoming but another speed bump in our lives' highways. Its repercussions may be more serious than the slowly healing tick bite on my leg, but with proper precautions and some luck, neither ticks, nor mosquitos nor COVID-19 will result in premature termination of our journey. Would you think Summer's heat had melted my brain if I asked "What was there before the big bang went boom?" May today's solstice bring us Northerners an enjoyable, healthy and safe Summer.

Solstice

Tess Taylor

How again today our patron star
whose ancient vista is the long view

turns its wide brightness now and here:
Below, we loll outdoors, sing & make fire.

We build no henge
but after our swim, linger

by the pond. Dapples flicker
pine trunks by the water.

Buzz & hum & wing & song combine.
Light builds a monument to its passing.

Frogs content themselves in bullish chirps,
hoopskirt blossoms

on thimbleberries fall, peeper toads
hop, lazy—

            Apex. The throaty world sings ripen.
Our grove slips past the sun’s long kiss.

We dress.
We head home in other starlight.

Our earthly time is sweetening from this.

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A resolution for the New Year

I'm (in)famous for refusing to make and honor New Year's resolutions. Next year I'll make an exception for the resolution below. Wouldn't the world be a better place, and we all be better people, if each of us remembered?

under which sky were you born?

Photo by J. Harrington

Remember

Joy Harjo - 1951-

Remember the sky that you were born under,
know each of the star's stories.
Remember the moon, know who she is.
Remember the sun's birth at dawn, that is the
strongest point of time. Remember sundown
and the giving away to night.
Remember your birth, how your mother struggled
to give you form and breath. You are evidence of
her life, and her mother's, and hers.
Remember your father. He is your life, also.
Remember the earth whose skin you are:
red earth, black earth, yellow earth, white earth
brown earth, we are earth.
Remember the plants, trees, animal life who all have their
tribes, their families, their histories, too. Talk to them,
listen to them. They are alive poems.
Remember the wind. Remember her voice. She knows the
origin of this universe.
Remember you are all people and all people
are you.
Remember you are this universe and this
universe is you.
Remember all is in motion, is growing, is you.
Remember language comes from this.
Remember the dance language is, that life is.
Remember.

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Mary Oliver, requiescat in pace

In Julius Caesar, Shakespeare has Mark Anthony say “The evil that men do lives after them;
The good is oft interred with their bones.” (Act 3, Scene 2?) Mary Oliver, who yesterday walked on, is an exception that proves Anthony's rule. Her good lives on not only in the memories of those who knew her, but also in the hearts of those who read her poetry and loved it and her through it. We were among the latter. We will miss her good words, her good insights, her good heart, her good instructions in how to write good poetry, her goodness.

days and lives arise

Photo by J. Harrington

and they set

Photo by J. Harrington

Oliver lived much of her adult life in one of our favorite places, Provincetown, at the tip of Cape Cod. Many of the places and creatures she wrote of in her poems are familiar to us since we lived near and visited the Cape often. She depicted the place and its inhabitants and visitors accurately. Unfortunately, her ability to experience an awe awakened by encounters with such places and creatures is all too rare. Many, too many, of us take for granted or, worse, find beneath our notice, the aspects of nature that enabled her to enthrall us. Her simple language is available to each of us. Her appreciation of life shared with nonhuman peoples isn't. More's the pity. She will be missed. She is as much a national treasure as the Cape Cod Seashore. We expect her poems will be as long-lived and resilient as the places she wrote about, cared for, and will always be part of. May she always rest in peace, embraced by the world she so loved. The following link will take you to a list of her published works. If you've not read her, do yourself a favor and pick up any one of them at a book store or library. Learn to see, pay attention, and live.

Some Things The World Gave

by Mary Oliver

1
Times in the morning early
when it rained and the long gray
buildings came forward from darkness
offering their windows for light.

2
Evenings out there on the plains
when sunset donated farms
that yearned so far to the west that the world
centered there and bowed down.

3
A teacher at a country school
walking home past a great marsh
where ducks came gliding in --
she saw the boy out hunting and waved.

4
Silence on a hill where the path ended
and then the forest below
moving in one long whisper
as evening touched the leaves.

5
Shelter in winter that day --
a storm coming, but in the lee
of an island in a cover with friends --
oh, little bright cup of sun.

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MERRY CHRISTMAS!

The context:

Original Caption Released with Image:

This narrow-angle color image of the Earth, dubbed 'Pale Blue Dot', is a part of the first ever 'portrait' of the solar system taken by Voyager 1. The spacecraft acquired a total of 60 frames for a mosaic of the solar system from a distance of more than 4 billion miles from Earth and about 32 degrees above the ecliptic. From Voyager's great distance Earth is a mere point of light, less than the size of a picture element even in the narrow-angle camera. Earth was a crescent only 0.12 pixel in size. Coincidentally, Earth lies right in the center of one of the scattered light rays resulting from taking the image so close to the sun. This blown-up image of the Earth was taken through three color filters -- violet, blue and green -- and recombined to produce the color image. The background features in the image are artifacts resulting from the magnification.

Image Credit:

NASA/JPL

Image Addition Date:

1996-09-12

The consequence:

Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there--on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.

Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.

It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.

-- Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot, 1994

May your days be filled with the blessings of new beginnings, new perspectives, old traditions and a miracle or two!

In the beginning was the Word,
and the Word was with God,
and the Word was God.

Photo by J. Harrington

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August gold I saw today #phenology

On the way home from this morning's dental appointment, and mid-day while walking dogs, this insight occurred to me: August is, literally, golden moments in time.

Distant clusters of goldenrod

Photo by J. Harrington

Roadsides brightened by bird's-foot trefoil

Photo by J. Harrington

Scattered stalks of common evening primrose(?)

Photo by J. Harrington

Fields of black-eyed susans

Photo by J. Harrington

 Goldfinch males

Photo by J. Harrington

Unfortunately, last night our cloud cover kept it from being like:

August 12 in the Nebraska Sand Hills Watching the Perseids Meteor Shower

By Twyla Hansen

In the middle of rolling grasslands, away from lights,

a moonless night untethers its wild polka-dots,

the formations we can name competing for attention

in a twinkling and crowded sky-bowl.

Out from the corners, our eyes detect a maverick meteor,

a transient streak, and lying back toward midnight

on the heft of our car hood, all conversation blunted,

we were at once unnerved and somehow restored.

Out here, a furrow of spring-fed river threads

through ranches in the tens of thousands of acres.

Like cattle, we are powerless, by instinct can see

why early people trembled and deliberated the heavens.

Off in the distance those cattle make themselves known,

a bird song moves singular across the horizon.

Not yet 2:00, and bits of comet dust, the Perseids,

startle and skim the atmosphere like skipping stones.

In the leaden dark, we are utterly alone. As I rub the ridges

on the back of your hand, our love for all things warm

and pulsing crescendos toward dawn: this timeless awe,

your breath floating with mine upward into the stars.

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