December 26 - December 31 Flocks of Humans, Flocks of Birds

2010-(Somewhere in the western Caribbean.) It would be appropriate to comment on what the whales are doing but there have been no sightings. To be completely surrounded by ocean is a new experience, but I have to say that the immense size of the ship and its fierce forward motion somewhat mitigates the fragility of our position I expected to feel. F finds it frightening and feels much better when we are in sight of other ships. Several thousand humans enacting Times Square New Years Eve, dancing, drinking and shouting, in the middle of the ocean is a sight that gives me emotions hard to describe.
2011-no entry

2012-First major snow in two years. In the less than 24 hours since I filled them, the feeders are attracting juncos, cardinals, a red headed woodpecker, nuthatches, a downy woodpecker, chickadees, a couple of blue jays, mourning doves, sparrows, purple and yellow finches which are neither purple nor yellow (right now), and a single crow who appeared to be supervising rather than participating. A general mood of hysteria prevails.

Is your breast so white,
Or is it something to do
With the snow, Junco?

December 21 - December 25 Winter Solstice

2010-A little observation reveals that while the landscape here in south Florida at first appearance is never changing, there are seasonal cycles here.  Some of the trees, which I can’t identify, have lost their leaves and there is a great fall of acorns from some new kind of oak, greatly appreciated by the Muscovy ducks and the squirrels.  There was a Solstice full moon and a lunar eclipse that we roused ourselves out of bed to observe. It seems carping to point out that the lunar event seemed somewhat overshadowed by the bright exterior lighting and the ubiquitous pink sky, but so I found it.
2011-No entry
2012-If I had not stayed home this year I would not have discovered that my house is actually a Neolithic temple.  As with its sister structure at New Grange, on Winter Solstice morning, the rays of the rising sun pierce the front door aperture and illuminate the entire interior passageway. Luckily, I got a picture.

December 16 - December 20 Pewter Moon

2010-Here in Florida the days are more than an hour longer and the temperature cycles wildly between warm and downright cold. I am struggling to find some connection between myself and the cycles here, without success.  The people here like to keep the blinds down and the air conditioning on even when its cooler outside. At night I play the rebel and open my window wide to let in cool fresh air, pink, never-dark sky and constant sirens and traffic noises.
2011-Still up north this year, the weather’s taken a turn towards cold just as the electric heat in the studio stops working and the radiators up here are leaking worse and worse and I’m supposed to leave tomorrow morning. The other reason people hate the cold-there’s really so little between us and it. The sun set at 4:21 yesterday and will set at 4:22 today. The sunrise is still getting later, albeit slowly, less than a minute a day. The day length was 9 hours and two minutes. Is that the shortest?
2012- A slice of moon caught in forsythia’s tresses. And what of this one little flower, so out of season? Did it live it’s life lonely, wondering where were the bees, the friendly spiders, the other blossoms and the sun’s long soft touch? Did it spend it’s life wondering if it was just a mistake or accident of nature? Or was it a willful manifestation of Deva Forsythia’s full glory, flowering out of season for just that reason, to Experience the new and unusual- to Know More.

December 11 - December 15 Murder

2010-I prepare to leave on a seven week trip- to Florida for a month including a week long cruise in the Western Caribbean, then onto New Jersey for three weeks to watch Judi’s cats while they go away.  I hate to leave the bird feeder though I feel I have prepared them by always letting it really run down between refills so that they have found alternate sources. While warm weather and longer days will be fine, something in me is loathe to leave this particular matrix of time and space and climate that has come, through particular observation, to feel part of my own self.
2011- A long explanation on the radio about why the sunrises stay the same or continue to get later while the sunsets stay the same at this point and then begin to get later. December 8 was called a crossing day and had something to do with the angle of the Earth and the gradual change in the Earth’s orbit(?) over millennia. Then there is something called the analemma, the apparent movement of the sun in the sky if you marked its position every day at the same time. I wish I could visualize this better, but it reminds me of a pendulum's movement as well.
2012-I am so looking forward to staying north this winter. It seems every year just as I begin to get into the quiet winter mind space of close attention, I whisk myself away.
The other morning, a very plump mouse stuck her head out from under the oven and then scampered under the fridge. She poked her head out from under there and watched me for a moment and then kind of ran/waddled under the sofa and disappeared. She was very fat or, more likely, pregnant. She was very adorable. The next day, as I removed the body of a mouse from the trap, I wondered if it was her. When later that afternoon however, she poked her head out from under the stove and pretty much repeated the performance of the day before. I found myself feeling really happy that she wasn’t the mouse in the trap. This situation, and I’ve written about it before, is driving me crazy. I am lover and murderer battling each other in the same body. I don’t want mice in here, I don’t want droppings on the counter and insulation chewed out of the oven to line nests, etc. I could use live traps, but that doesn’t solve the problem of removing a mother from a nest of babies, the gruesome result of which I’ve also written about before. I am not against hunting for food, which can be done with reverence.  But killing because I don’t like or want a creature around is not sitting right with me. But I continue to set the traps and even get more ingenious about it so the escape rate is lower. Diabolical.

December 6 - December 10 First Real Snow

2010-It has been snowing copious amounts to the north and west of us but, except for the top of High Point Mountain, we have had no accumulation.  The air has been filled, sun and cloud, with myriads of solitary flakes drifting lazily down. Now that the garage painting is done I have started my winter reservoir walks. On the past few frigid days I feel like bundling up and going out into it is the last thing I want to do, but I force myself and I’m always glad. Being properly dressed puts you in right relation to the cold and you no longer have to shrink from it.  And the walk itself, time after time, puts me into an alternate consciousness where the beauty out there is something I can feel and not just see.  True as that is, everyday I need to force myself to do it as if the person in charge is not the same as the person who goes out.
Yesterday a small hawk mysteriously flew into the bathroom window and stunned himself though ultimately proved unhurt.  It’s an odd little out of the way corner behind a shrub and hard to figure out how he came to be flying into it except possibly diving after one of the little feeder birds.  How unexpected reality is and we seem always to be crashing into it.
2011-Warm weather.

In some Decembers
Like a well banked fire, autumn
Continues to burn.
The frosty mornings melt away;
The afternoons recall May.

I’d thought the shortest day was 9 hours and fifteen minutes up here in Olivebridge, but this morning was 9hours 10. And more than two weeks still to go.
2012-In the course of five years of regular morning meditation done in the spirit of ‘for its own sake’ and not for gain, I do feel a kind of accomplishment. While actually in meditation I’m aware of a circle of deep peace and a kind of gratitude/contentment coming fairly regularly and seeming without much effort.  As I mentioned a few days ago, my walks at the reservoir bring similar feelings. I’m entertaining a vision of these little puddles of awareness ring up to run together and engulf me completely.  And then other people’s puddles rising up to join mine until we are all engulfed. I like to think that’s how it will happen.

Scissors, paper, rock.
Cloud takes the mountain away--
Wind then brings it back.

December 1 - December 5 Nights Below Freezing

 2010-When I woke up this morning I looked first in the south east to see if I could again glimpse the crescent moon with huge and brilliant Venus just above but I was late.  Even as the days continue to get shorter, it was already too light.  I did catch, just at sunrise, the first rays striking the tops of the trees on the rise to the west, bathing them in a rosy light that slowly extended down their trunks.  The sun itself was still below the high ridge across the street. It was not until a good fifteen minutes later that the actual sun appeared above the trees flooding everything golden.

Pink western tree-tops.
My own personal sunrise
A little later.


2011-For the first time the grass has stayed frosty even after the sun hit it. I’ve had a visitor chewing in the walls the last week or so.  Last night it was behind the dryer trying to chew through the duct tape and cardboard I’d sealed the vent opening with. After a few hours, and undaunted by my banging on the wall, there was a suspicious silence.  I went into the kitchen to investigate and heard it shuffling near the laundry basket and then run back behind the dryer, so it had chewed through. It was pointed out to me that it just wants to come in and be warm and that got me thinking about animals in winter. I’d always assumed they had the wherewithal-fluffing up fur and feathers- to keep warm in nature. The thought of them suffering out there, driven to come inside and so determined is upsetting.  It’s like they know they are suffering out there and want to come in where it’s better. Why would things be so arranged?
2012- A warm couple of days took me out to the reservoir. There’s something about the walk that’s like a meditation because my consciousness feels more than subtly transformed by the way back. The sun was partly behind some draping swags of cloud and everything was suffused with mist because of the warmth. If I had been just looking out the window it would have seemed like just a ‘meh’ kind of day, but being out in it was being immersed in a silvery goldeny glowing theater of air and water. There are some legitimately magical areas there as well, meaning they transform your vision for you rather than having to be transformed first to see there. In the place where I dreamed the fairies, a six point buck and doe meandered about quietly eating moss not ten yards away and let me sit on the railing and watch for as long as I wanted.

November 26 - November 30 Seeing by Inner Light

                                       A handful of diamonds in the window box-(why I’m rich)

2010-We harvested the last salad from the garden, mostly what came up from the mesclun mix I planted at the end of August.  There was chervil and two kinds of green lettuce, some frisee and of course arugula, which is still growing. There were two small heads of radicchio, a red and a green that I left to see if they winter over.  I also cut some baby chard leaves and the yellow flowering stalks from the baby bok choy that were very sweet, not bitter at all.  When I cut some chard for Judy over the weekend I noticed that the slugs were still busy eating the ground leaves.  I hope on a morning like this they freeze solid.
2011-Most of the late season things in the garden were eaten by deer this season (see Oct. 22) but I did manage to make a Thanksgiving vegetable dish out of a mix of collards, kale, and wild mustard that was fantastic.  Every time it’s turned cold so far we get another reprieve of a couple of beautiful warm days.
I would have presumed that colors are brighter under the sun, but yesterday, under a deeply cloudy sky, the dried milkweed was bright rust against the scarlet rosehips. The greys behind them were rich and warm. Today under the sun, the milkweed is pure beige and the rosehips are lost in the tangle of their thorny branches.
2012-Early this month I wrote that the color had drained out of everything. But, as we are blinded when the lights go out, then gradually become accustomed to seeing by whatever available light, my eyes have become accustomed to this early winter palette. The relationships have changed, but from the high notes of the maroon rose stems to the underlying black greens of the junipers and the velvety charcoal apple trunks flecked with pale sage green lichen, the range is rich and varied once the vision clears. I wish I could paint it instead of talking about it.

November 21 - November 25 Bare Trees

2010-
The cobalt air balks
When the test results come back.
Red leaves dancing down.

2011-The fly is back-at least I think it’s him. Where does he go?
2012-On Nantucket this summer, the stars were brighter than I had ever seen which seemed natural away from bright lights. But this night the stars were shockingly bright here-like little shining lamps you could almost read by. Of course it was exceptionally clear but it seemed I had learned how to see stars better this summer and now have that new skill. It’s just the kind of learning how to see or where to look that I’ve been thinking about.

November 16 - November 20 Everything Turns Silver

2010- The ancient Chinese categorized this segment of the almanac as the time “pheasants enter the water and turn into monster clams”. It’s easy to laugh at these preposterous old fashioned ideas and explanations of the natural world, but what about the part of me that prefers these interpretations to the scientific one?  It is a cold and distant beauty that one observes in the world with just the strict senses and rational brain to go by.  I miss being personally involved; I need to have it be about me too and why not?  I am lonely for a world where such transformations are not only possible but part of the natural order.  Myths have gone missing or have been relegated to children who know, as we once knew, that these mythic explanations are in fact the more correct.
If pheasants enter the water and turn into monster clams, what transformations are possible for me?
2011-The little annoying fly that I asked not to bother me turns up every day around two o’clock. Then he fell in my wine glass and nearly drowned. I felt sorry for him then and put him on the counter to dry off. Later he flew near me but I haven’t seen him since. Do I miss him?
2012- A pair of bluebirds showed up, larking all over the deck and sipping rainwater from the slate table. At one point they both flew up and their feathers caught the sun and flashed out in that electric blue. I like to watch them with binoculars from not too far away; close enough to watch the breeze rippling their little brick colored under-feathers.
It seems that I am surrounded by magic but I’m simply looking the wrong way, or in the wrong direction.

November 11 - November 15 The Last Warm Spell

2010- A stretch of warmish days gives me just the time I need to finish painting the studio.  The crops, except for collards, kale and Brussels sprouts (which benefit from frost, becoming sweeter), are all in and processed.  (Oh, and except for the parsnips that stay in the ground all winter.)  Suddenly I will find myself with free time.  Before I can begin to write I know I will experience that period of restlessness and  ennui, the roaming from room to ruin and accomplishing of nothing that always precedes creative times. But with Thanksgiving coming and then leaving early for Florida, I wonder if I will be able to make that transition this year.
Every morning I listen for the weather report on the radio that tells the sunrise and sunset times, the length of the day and the loss in minutes of daylight from the day before. If I think of it in energy terms it is as if the meteorologist were reporting precisely the daily loss of yang. I almost experience a wave of nostalgia for a lost culture, one where I don’t feel so alien in terms of my sensibility and beliefs, one I never had of course but sense or imagine I sense in the culture of old Japan. In any case, it makes me wonder what it would be like to live in a time and place that resonates and truly feels like home.  Is that just not meant to be our (my)portion in this particular place?
2011-Am I surrounded by insect allies? The fruit fly that comes to sit at the top of the page just as I’m reading that animals and plants are smart? The spiders perhaps are not just busy making cobwebs but cheering me on from the corners, waving their multiple legs.  The fly in the kitchen that is so annoying but perhaps just wants to befriend me?  It is all I can do not to kill it, yet that’s something.

.A praying mantis
Pays a visit, nods hello;
Magic seeping in.

2012- I heard about some memory studies that show that what we remember is changed by the remembering. As some older people move towards spending more and more time recalling long ago events, perhaps they are reshaping the still malleable clay of their being into something more satisfyingly meaningful.  Perhaps there is no such thing as ‘what really happened’, but only what we make of it.
As for the mice, I can’t do the traps anymore. Not with that praying mantis staring at me. Seems there’s so many humane ways to go now, there’s just no excuse.

November 6-November 11 Hard Frost

2010- According to a Chinese almanac, it is officially winter. “…winter was not the season of death, as we might first suppose, but rather the season of dormancy and concealment.  So winter’s creatures are shell-covered…The dark turtle of the north is winter’s emblematic beast.”  I could claim that that is the prevailing ether driving me inside myself but honesty demands I admit that that personal psychic predilection came much before the season.  However it is good to feel, albeit briefly, in sync with the external world.  I also consider that the shortening of the day, the waning of the light is also the waning of the yang energy, the flowing in of yin.  This suits me to a T. 
Some wind and hard rain have made the bareness of the trees sudden.  This suits me as well.
2011-A spell of warm 60-70 degree days feels like a gift. Extra time to mow once again and collect cuttings for mulch, time to un-net the blueberries and prune them to make them easier to net next summer. The time change is affecting me differently this year. The morning feels correct now, getting light before seven, but the afternoons seem suddenly amputated. Though they had been feeling strangely long to me before. Hard to please! I am not feeling the hibernation urge yet either.
2012- After just a few nights of frost, color has drained out of any remaining leaves. Any bit of hue past grey or beige passes for bright and so it will be for many months to come. Days shrink to an even ten hours. Last night a fragment of waning moon shone through a light fog and a screen of bare branches like a night wanderer with only a feeble lantern.
Once again I find myself the Death Dealer. Many flies with the swatter yesterday- (Where are they coming from? What do they want? I tried to let them be but, finally, could not.) And a mouse in the trap this morning, beautiful really, neck crushed. I hate it but cannot bear the droppings everywhere, the smell when they get into the stove insulation, the pathetic infants crawling out of hidden nests when their mother fails to appear. (Those were not my fault, I had no traps set then. That one’s on you Mother Nature, but still...)

November 1-November 5 "like every other thing, a gift..."

(like every other thing, a gift...Charles Frazier in Cold Mountain)

2010-Real Indian summer follows a hard frost which we have not yet had.  But I will not argue with these last warm days.


Under a close November sky
The poetry of the apple
Red in the bare brown tree
Is sung by the eye
With the fire of orange Echinacea
Gone to purple ash.

A wind out of the twilit mountain
Pours intimations of snow
And bitter stinging
Over the still warm ground
Scattering the milkweed floss and
Rocking the apples on their stems.

Polarities chase each other onto tornadoes
Of mute foreboding
Leaving us no way to see ahead.
Is it fear makes the present
Seem so sweet
As apples embraced by frost?


2011-It turns out that it is still too early to put out the bird feeders.  I should have realized that it is not that cold and there is still plenty of food out there to be gathered--no self respecting creature would think of hibernating yet.  (The rose hips are especially plentiful this year.) I was awakened by the sound of the feeders hitting against the window as they will do when it is windy.  I watched as the new one broke free from its hook and dropped.  In retrospect it fell rather softly, but at the time I blamed myself for not securing the hook well and fell back to sleep, only to be awakened again. But this was not like wind and I realized something was out there scuffling around. Before I could think anything else I saw two huge black paws patting against the big window and then sliding down. A bear was standing on the cushion box and trying to get the other feeder down.  I jumped out of bed and banged on the window causing the bear to drop down and saunter off across the deck where it disappeared. It was a young bear but not small and the way it calmly walked away could be considered almost insolent.  At the same time, its silent silky ways were like night incarnate.  I am left with the shamanic image of a bear standing over me, paws raised.
Color worth noting; the maroon, green and yellow of the forsythia when a cardinal comes to pose there. Clashing and aggressive-wonderful.
A flock of mixed finches is going crazy scarfing down ash keys all over the deck even though they fell months ago.
2012-  A neon colony on the picnic bench, a lone inky cap appearing overnight in the middle of the lawn; there were few chanterelles this year but these recent mysterious visitations of the fungi people are intriguing. What have they come to say?

October 27-October 31 Leaves Turn Brown

                                                    storm over Seaside Park, NJ 2009

2010-The brightest yellow was the star magnolia which slowly shaded from acid yellow green to pure golden yellow so bright it hurt your eyes.  Then it gradually darkened to real gold and then mustard and then ochre. Today it is so butterscotch brown it makes my mouth water.
The trees on the hills all around have lost their brightness and turned a hundred shades of browns. It always amazes me how that one palette can seem as varied as the full spectrum when spread out before our eyes. Brown red and brown yellow now seem as separate and distinct as their primary cousins.
Yesterday, taking advantage of the warm to put away the grill and hammock and summer furniture, I came across a lone dandelion in the grass.  We don’t think of later fall as a time for flowers to bloom but, like the errant dandelion, some do.  The most spectacular and surprising is the forsythia which has more flowers now than in some poor springs and against dark burgundy leaves.  My pink climbing rose didn’t re-bloom this year but many around here have.  (I remember the roses in the churchyard in Aberdeen blooming into December.  So poignant and utterly different from their June counterparts.)

Dandelion blooms
Yellow against frost-sere grass.
They do not fool me.

2011-An unprecedented nor’easter appears out of nowhere, roars up the coast and deposits about ten to twelve inches of snow.  The leaves having not completely fallen, wet snow sticks to them and many branches come down; again leading to power outages (over a million all up the coast.) This is more than inconvenient this time as with temperatures dropping into the twenties, water lines freezing is a real possibility. We are lucky and power is on in less than twenty four hours though they say Connecticut and the Berkshires will take much longer. Bright green grass appears between the white patches, oddly littered with brown and yellow leaves.  The grill and the lawn furniture are under a layer of snow-I’d thought I had more time.  The dahlia is completely frost-blackened; time to bring the tubers inside.
I did buy seeds for the bird feeders, but though the bag was labeled black oil sunflower, it contained regular large sunflower seeds. They are mostly too big to fit through the little openings in my squirrel proof feeders and the birds must think I am playing a mean Halloween trick on them.  They are not amused.
2012-Sunday night into late Monday night, a fair amount of wind and intermittent spits of rain. The power goes out, but that’s fairly common here. A tree is down across our road, but generally the roads are clear. Schools close for a day, the power returns. Without media input, that would have been our total experience of  this particular late October storm.
But this storm was Super-storm Sandy. Gathered at houses with generators, over the airwaves of battery radios, and later when power returns, we hear and see an unending stream of images and reporting of the most devastating storm to ever hit the Northeast. We share each other‘s experiences now; ours is shaped and colored by what we consume through our devices. What we have invented has turned around to re-invent us and nothing is the same.
 

October 22 -October 26 Brilliant Leaves

2010-Usually peak is passed by now but this year it is late.  We are just in the midst of that series of days each one of which seems to be the most intensely colored until, unbelievably, the next day surpasses it.  The colors seem most set off by the absolute bluest of skies and then even more brilliant in contrast to the dark grey of clouds and wet black trunks.  The best part is the clear intense reds and yellows that hurt your eyes to see.  No, the best part is the subtle combinations of colors so mixed they haven’t names.  Cool air is the perfect environment until it warms and the scent of decaying leaves rises to complete an even more perfect whole.  The theme here is that when you think things are so good you can barely stand it, they get even better.
At the bird feeder;

Timid cardinal
Lurks scarlet in yellow leaves
Waiting for a turn.

2011-The deer are especially aggressive this year. They managed to get into the garden over the fence, ate all the beets and chard, generally trampled everything else and then tore the gate off on their way out.  They came back several times until C showed me  where they were getting in and I fixed it.  V has had deer damage for the first time ever and even M’s fenced-in property has been breached. I thought maybe they knew it was to be a hard winter and were stocking up, V thought maybe their usual things weren’t available because of the wet season, and C says that here are more aggressive males because of management practices, ie more lucrative licenses.  Whatever the reason, (not)for the first time I have a real sense of the power of the male animal (deer wise).
The colors seem to be fading without ever having really peaked. The ash in back and the maple in front are completely bare but the nectarine has all its green leaves, a few yellow among them.  The magnolia is still completely green, while the forsythia, in their second sparse blooming are just beginning to turn red and burgundy.
I have had a second visit by Praying Mantis. This one (same one?) climbed up to my face and waving its arms and moving its mouth parts seemed to have something important to say to me. Pumpkin visited in meditation and was very comforting.
2012- The colors this year! I don’t mind driving for a change because everything is so beautiful. Every oak seems to be creating its own painting. Dyeing yarn from plants this fall yielded a very similar palette which makes me feel a little like a god participating in the creation of this spectacle.
It’s time to plant garlic for next year. So, in the midst of watching this season fade away, I am planning and acting for a season yet to come. That in itself is enough to stave off some of the ‘winter dread’ I customarily feel around this time. But now there’s a chance I won’t be here to have this garden next year. I ask myself, what’s the point of planting? After a few days of sitting with that I’ve made up my mind to plant it anyway. Who would I be disconnected from that cycle? So the garlic will grow and be here to nourish whomever comes next.

October 16-21 The Glass is Half Empty

2010-There was an afternoon, a certain mix of cool air and warm sun, that made me think of spring.  I paid more attention and, with eyes closed to erase the vivid trees, could find no perceivable difference between this mellow fall afternoon and one in say, May.  Even the damp earth smell was the same.  Why was this so surprising?  It emphasized for me that there is no external difference; the vast felt difference must be entirely internal, emotional.  Spring feels the way it does because of the meaning we attach to it and the contrast between where we’ve been and where we are going.  Likewise fall, though sensually identical to a spring day, is steeped in loss and colored by what we know is passing away.  Half full or half empty is our own creation.
2011-Returned from a trip to Florida in heavy rain and found most trees already bare. Today, even in sunshine, the colors are the grey of bare branches, black of wet trunks and brownish green or yellow of the remaining leaves. The grass however is till emerald green and there has been no more frost.
Spiders eat spiders.  I see one of the fragile seeming, long legged corner dwellers has captured a fat black one that now hangs well wrapped in a web under my desk.  Drama under the furniture.
2012-Days are an even eleven hours-briefly. The colors are intense this year and when the sun just rises in the morning, it beams on the maples to the nw of the garden lighting them up til they shock. A spring like feeling again these days.