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.