February 25 - February 28/29 Slush

2010- After four days of shoveling  eight or more inches of something very like wet cement, and my arms and back and shoulder aching from it, what else could it be?  And it says so much; the offspring of the snow of winter mating with the warmth of spring, the frozen white crust slowly turning green with the water melt running underneath. After freeing one of these rivulets with the shovel, it gains momentum joining others in the trip down the driveway forming a miniature river complete with waterfalls and rapids.

The last winter storm;
Green snow undermines white ice,
Stream sweeps it away.

2011- Much the same weather this year, but on top of a foot of snow. As it warms and rains there’s the likelihood of more flooding than last year.  I saw flies yesterday, the ones that fly in dizzy circles that I drew in a cartoon. I’m a little ahead of last year in gathering sugaring supplies-drill charged, tubing and spouts ready. When it stops raining I can set up the fireplace and stack wood but I think it will be difficult with all the fallen wood being buried in snow.  I love the sound of rain at all times, but right snow it’s the sound of the loosening of winter’s iron grasp; the sound of life beginning to flow again through the veins of trees and animals and us, too.
2012-Maple sap is continuing to run and I hope to boil down another batch on Friday after this next snow, sleet, freezing rain, rain event passes through. I covered the wood I have but it will be a challenge to find enough dry.
Out at the reservoir the eagles were busy rebuilding the nest that blew down in the August hurricane.  One swept in right in front of me landing on a branch where it hopped about a bit and then leaned over and broke a branch off and flew away with it. Why that particular tree and branch. Obviously it can tell dead branches from live even when they are leafless.
2013-Perfect forecast next week, supplies gathered, wood stacked and covered; we’re getting good at this syrup making. So of course the next instinct is to ramp up-find more trees, collect more sap, even if the trees are on other properties, requiring driving to pick up. Really? My syrup partner is all excited about this but I push back. I like it small. Some is enough. I remember working at the bakery when it was new: a small operation, one wood fired oven, productive and efficient, but human sized.  Then sadly, since more is more, another oven was built and pressure increased to work faster and produce more. By the time I left it was beginning to feel like a factory and now I hear the whole operation is moving to extensive new quarters and actually will be a factory. I know the saying ‘grow or die‘, but is it true? It seems human activities grow until they bloat, eating everything in their way and then collapsing under their own weight. That’s not what I see around me, surely not what the trees say.

February 19 - February 24 Eagles Lay Eggs

2010-I guess the egg laying is confirmed by now.  Saturday I walked out there past a knot of thrilled eagle watchers photographing one of the pair posing very photogenically on the first of the two dead trees.  I rounded the corner towards the fountain and one (the same?) came swooping right over me, landing in the dry grass and scooping up talons-ful with little hopping movements. Then it flew back to the nest.
The chickadees are singing their spring song and two vultures (the new sign of spring?) were spotted in the tree next to the creek.
I found a nice little south facing crook of the house to bask in yesterday--it got so warm I stripped down to a tank and stayed there about an hour, sniffing dirt, eating a pungent onion grass bulb, and dreaming of springs past.
Suddenly a flock of robins scavenging over the ground and I can’t help it-my heart leaps!  They are saying now that robins stay year round and that they are no longer a sign of spring, but it’s not that easy to overcome a lifetime of conditioning.  Anyway, even if they are around in the winter, apparently they stay in the trees.  Robins on the ground will always mean spring.  Unless like J said, they are really little turkey vultures in red vests.
Now snow is falling, thick and wet white sticking to everything.  More forecast for tomorrow and the next day and the next…I’ve cut a little branch of the forsythia to put up here in the loft-behind it a window full of snow.
2011- Is it possible to look forward to the spring without losing full presence here at mid February?  A new landscape of possibility seems to be opening up for me where I can let myself open more to this cold seemingly endless end-of-winter time. It has always been just something to get through, get over with, but this year I am enjoying it for itself.  I feel more able to let it happen as it will. Slowly, not wishing it away. Savoring more light, more warm sun, but appreciating the quiet time, the resting time, before the bustle of garden season begins.  I have also started feeling like I don’t want to be anywhere else, I don’t want to miss any part, any day of this unfolding process. I want to walk around this tiny piece of the world greeting each bush and plant and check on each one every day. It feels a little like being in love.
2012-Successful maple syrup making-I stopped at two quarts though C took the next day’s sap for almost another quart. The taps are still in though, and with the sudden turn back to cold and a good four inches of snow last night it’s hard to tell what will happen. Standing around the syrup fire the other day I remembered seeing the first red winged blackbirds in other years. None in sight that day but then yesterday a huge flock-several hundred I guess-though their epaulets were so thin a line I searched in vain for the binoculars to make a definite identification.
A beautiful bunch of forced forsythia in the living room-every bud opening spring yellow. And I saw some yellow snow anemones in Stone Ridge yesterday.
2013- More snow is predicted this weekend. The front yard is a sheet of ice. The temperatures are barely thirty during the day and the wind has been strong so it feels much colder. I have never taken a walk on the reservoir in the winter, even having to force myself to go, that I didn’t feel better afterwards and happy that I had got out of a closed state of mind into an open one. And I discover, time and again, that every kind of weather has something to offer. Yet, having learned that-knowing that- today I find I cannot force myself to go. Such a clear sense of being two distinct people with differing agendas, so, even though I have no idea if the reservoir is frozen this winter or not, if the eagles are on a nest or not, I stay in and cook and wait for the weather to ‘improve‘. And feel sorry about it.

February 15 - February 19 The Mind Falters

2010-Cold, windy, another snowstorm on the way.  Bad feelings are rampant, (not just me), as if the mind has failed to persuade that spring is pulsing underneath- the feeling is of deep disappointment, dread and doubt- do I have it in me to wait it out?  Will I make it?  Bad situations are manifesting.  Everything in me feels hunched up and angry, but…
The forced forsythia is showing green and seems to promise many blossoms this year.
The days are noticeably longer which cuts through the heaviness some, when walking back to the studio after dinner I can see orange clouds still hugging the horizon.
The sun feels stronger too, even through the cold you can feel its warmth like those little Egyptian sun hands patting you on the back.
 Out at the reservoir, one of the eagles was sitting on the nest-I could hear its cries as I got near.  It continued crying out the whole time I was out there, every half a minute or so.  I assume it was calling its mate to come back and relieve it, or maybe it was hungry, but he/she never showed up the whole hour I was out there.
Yesterday there appeared to be no one on the nest unless it was hunkered down in there.  An eagle flew by high overhead but didn’t stop.
I expected the starlings to get into some kind of an uproar when they discovered the roof space where they’ve been nesting has been closed off, but this morning there was just one sitting quietly in the shrubbery looking very sad.
It’s cold and windy again but for just a second the wind had the look and feel of the waking-up-the-trees winds of March.
Oh and yes! The forced forsythia is breaking into exuberant bloom!
2011-It was brutal cold last night, down in the single digits. The things I have been observing are all signs of spring; the  lone robin hopping on the dirty snow bank (I guess they are no longer signs of spring, but I have not seen one all winter), the willows seem to be coloring up, but of that I’m not sure either, the eagles are busy busy busy at the nest. And one day the surface of the reservoir was a solid unbroken field of ice and snow; after one warm afternoon it was full of dark and rotten green looking  wet spots, and even a tiny little open water on the west side of the dam. The bulbs I left in the fridge to harden while I was away had sprouted a full pot of leaves, yellow for lack of light. Amazing how in that dark cave they still knew the season. But I feel I’m forcing something, like the cut forsythias I inspect daily for a sign of green. I need to dwell right now on last night, an almost full moon pouring blue light onto a white earth, hard under a shining crust of ice.  The purity of that and perfect stillness, perfect quiet.
2012-Spent yesterday cutting wood for the maple syrup fire. The sun felt not warm but hot while I worked. The sap is already flowing, in fact it might already be too late to tap, it’s been that warm. Apparently once the trees start to red up the sap gets what’s called buddy’ and is no longer good for syrup making. I saw snowdrops out on 213 yesterday but no robins yet. The ground is still mostly frozen with a layer of water lying over it.
2013- The best thing about winter, I realize now that it’s passing, is having time to think.

What would I ask for?
For every moment lived
Two to contemplate.

February 10 - February 14 Spring Falls Back to Sleep

2010-Another snowstorm, though only three or so inches, recoats the ground and, together with the cold, gives the light that winter sharpness.  The wind is strong and harsh and something within that was beginning to soften or to imagine softening recoils, wounded.  Under a hard blue sky, the need arises to go within and discover additional resources to withstand the assault.  It is the mind with its knowledge, so unbelievable to the body, that reassures us this is only temporary.  Winter’s struggle is doomed.
T says when she saw the nest on her walk there was no one on it and driving by Tuesday I saw the two eagles again sitting side by side nearby.  Surely if there was an egg, one would have to be sitting it.  A false alarm?
2012-This is the first time I remember there being no ice on the reservoir in mid-February, only a slim necklace at one edge and a crush of fragments susserating against the shore  in the wind driven current. There is a faint dusting of white on the mountain that I did not notice yesterday. Poindexter told me that the eagles nest blew down in the August storm but he sees them rebuilding it in the same tree but higher up. I couldn’t see anything.
2013- So anxious to get home and see what’s going on there, force some forsythia, check out the reservoir…

Lupercalia Ritual for the Dark of the Moon
                                                                            As the sun sets
                  A dream from the night of full moon in Pisces
                                 Should be sifted through silk
                             For jealousy and frustration
                                                And these
             swallowed down whole.

  Divide a heart into four quarters
             Offerings for the snake
                       perfect lingam
For conditioned suffocation
For the sea slick mermaid
                    And for fear.
 
       Purify if possible
                  If not
    Visualize purification.

          When you are ready
                  Light the candles
          For what’s left is to burn
           Burn the whole long night
             Between the wolf bitch in heat
              And the cold void that birthed her.

   Howl out your spite at the blackened moon and
         do what you can to forget this in the morning.

February 5 - February 9 Chinese Almanac Spring

2010-There is a change in the bird’s behavior I can’t pinpoint- a restlessness and could it be they are beginning to sing spring songs?  Just in case they are ready to start nest building, I’ve begun putting out little bundles of dryer lint. 
There were little holes in the snow under the maple and I thought they must be melting snow.  But when the snow disappeared, the pavement was stained; definitely sap.
Out at the reservoir the eagle pair sits quietly together on a high branch next to the nest.
But it’s still so cold, it’s easy to lose patience with it.  Best to cut forsythia branches to force and not think ahead to how long it will be to gentle blossom time. 
Yoga seems to be about just trying to maintain the status quo these days.  Progress consists of not going backwards.  I miss a week because of schedule changes and find myself gone sadly stiff.  Warding off the chill with hunching shoulders, my own flesh seems to get in the way of flexibility.
Yesterday (February 6) an eagle was on the nest while the other sat beside.  If it takes 35 days for the egg/eggs to hatch, that’s around March 13.

In the spring night sky
The moon holds hot Venus tight.
Down here we turn green.                                                                                                                                Houseplants; the olive tree and the orange tree have begun to sprout new leaves.  2013-Snowstorms, icy rain, forty seven degree days, winter, spring? Someone reading the weather mentions that the daily average temperature is just a combination of extremes and just like that it dawns on me that there is no such thing as winter or spring. I have been noticing in myself a kind of irritation when the weather doesn’t fit my expectations for the season and now see that for what it is; a way to avoid just being present and taking each day as unique and never to be repeated.

January 30 - February 4 Afternoons Return

2010-Starting on February 2, the days have reached the ten hour point, growing by two and three minutes a day.  Suddenly it seems the afternoons are back and the pattern of the days needs to be reconfigured to take them into account.  The eagles can be seen around the nest, singly or together, though not looking very busy.  Still it snows, sometimes lightly for days, and everything is white,
The seed catalogs are piled up, the seed and plant lists are made.  Too early to do anything--not true-yesterday I potted up the amaryllis bulbs and the rooting begonia.  I guess I just needed to touch some dirt.

Ice coats every limb.
North wind shakes frozen branches
To make ice music.

2011- no entry
2012- no entry

2013-
Cat tiptoes on snow,
Sparrow passes overhead;
Just their shadows meet.