How do you know that the pilgrim track 

Along the belting zodiac 

Swept by the sun in his seeming rounds 

Is traced by now to the Fishes’ bounds 

And into the Ram, when weeks of cloud 

Have wrapt the sky in a clammy shroud, 

And never as yet a tinct of spring 

Has shown in the Earth’s apparelling; 

 O vespering bird, how do you know, 

 How do you know?

from The Year's Awakening

by Thomas Hardy

“Come in, -- come in! and know me better, man! 

I am the Ghost of Christmas Present. Look upon me! 

You have never seen the like of me before!” 

from A Christmas Carol 

by Charles Dickens

“Much is missed if we have eyes only for the bright colors. 

Nature should be viewed without distinction… She makes no choice 

herself; everything that happens has equal significance. 

Nothing can be dispensed with. This is a common mistake 

that many people make: They think that half of nature 

can be destroyed — the uncomfortable half 

— while still retaining the acceptable and the pleasing side.”

 – Eliot Porter

“Sometimes you can tell a large story with a tiny subject.” 

– Eliot Porter

“Big Ben was beginning to strike, first the warning, musical; 

then the hour, irrevocable.” 

from Mrs Dalloway

by Virginia Woolf

“Our memories are like a city: we tear some structures down, 

and we use the rubble of the old to raise up the new ones.” 

from The City's Son

by Tom Pollock

“It doesn’t do to read too much,’ Widmerpool said. ‘

You get to look at life with a false perspective. By 

all means have some familiarity with the standard authors. 

I should never raise any objection to that. But it is no good 

clogging your mind with a lot of trash from modern novels.” 

from A Question of Upbringing

by Anthony Powell

"O Winter! bar thine adamantine doors:

The north is thine; there hast thou built thy dark

Deep-founded habitation. Shake not thy roofs,

Nor bend thy pillars with thine iron car.'

He hears me not, but o'er the yawning deep

Rides heavy; his storms are unchain'd, sheathèd

In ribbèd steel; I dare not lift mine eyes,

For he hath rear'd his sceptre o'er the world."

from To Winter

by William Blake

"Polaroid by its nature makes you frugal. You walk

around with maybe two packs of film in your pocket.

 You have 20 shots, so each shot is a world."

Patti Smith

"On the high prairie

are only horse and rider

                 

 wind in dry grass

clopping in silence under the toy mountains

dropping sometimes and

                  lost in the dry grass

                  golden oranges of dung"

from The Cariboo Horses

by Al Purdy

We knew it was coming.

"With a host of furious fancies

Whereof I am commander,

With a burning spear and a horse of air,

To the wilderness I wander.

By a knight of ghosts and shadows

I summoned am to tourney

Ten leagues beyond the wide world's end::

Methinks it is no journey."

from Tom o' Bedlam

 anonymous

“They got up steam and proceeded calmly to the north - 

where there seemed to be no people, but only mountains, 

lakes, reedy snow-filled steppes, and winter gods who played

with storms and stars.” 

from Winter's Tale

by Mark Helprin

Halloween was wet and cold but we had 35-40 kids, a record. 

Winter then came with the turn of the calendar's page.

From Nov. 1 to Nov. 4, Calgary has already officially recorded 

17 centimetres (6.6 inches)  of snow, surpassing the monthly average.

The Tourist

“It is difficult to speak adequately or justly of London.

It is not a pleasant place; it is not agreeable, or cheerful, 

or easy, or exempt from reproach. It is only magnificent.” 

Henry James

“As a cloud crosses the sun, silence falls on London; 

and falls on the mind. Effort ceases. Time flaps on the mast. 

There we stop; there we stand.” 

from Mrs. Dalloway

by Virginia Woolf

A New London Rising ?

“London has the trick of making its past, its long indelible past, 

always a part of its present. And for that reason it will always 

have meaning for the future, because of all it can teach about 

disaster, survival, and redemption. It is all there in the streets. 

It is all there in the books.” 

from Imaged London: A  Tour of the World's Greatest

Fictional City

by Anna Quindlen

"I had rather see the portrait of a dog that I know,

 than all the allegorical paintings they can show me in the world."

Samuel Johnson

Detail of a painting at the National Gallery (London)

So how can you tell me you're lonely, 

And say for you that the sun don't shine? 

Let me take you by the hand and lead you through 

the streets of London

I'll show you something to make you change your mind 

Ralph McTell; Streets of London Live

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Whv7MgepUQQ&list=RDWhv7MgepUQQ

Home again, home from our trip to London. 

"By seeing London, I have seen as much of life 

as the world can show."

Samuel Johnson

"and it occurs to me

that if I were to die at this moment

that picture would accompany me

wherever I am going

for part of the way."

from The Last Picture in The World

by Al Purdy

"You're the one who flew down

to that river from the heavens,

as if your form alone were the only

holy message needed."

from Stone Bird

by Pattiann Rogers

"But its real strength lies in the quiet tension of isolation   

And living patiently, without atonement or regret,

In the eternity of the plain moments, the nest of care   

—Until suddenly, all alone, the mind is lifted upward into   

Light and air and the nothingness of the sky,   

Held there in that vacant, circumstantial blue until,

In the vehemence of a landscape where all the colors disappear,   

The quiet absolution of the spirit quickens into fact, "

from There Late Wisconsin Spring

by John Goethe

Went to Kew today. Nowhere near Natural History Museum. We are fine.

"I have been younger in October

than in all the months of spring

… walnut and may leaves the color

of shoulders at the end of summer

a month that has been to the mountain

and become light there

the long grass lies pointing uphill

even in death for a reason

that none of us knows"

W.S. Merwin

"When despair grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things"




from The Peace of Wild Things

by Wendell Berry 

"The moon drops one or two feathers into the field. 

The dark wheat listens. 

Be still. 

Now. 

There they are, the moon's young, trying 

Their wings. "

from Beginnings

by James Wright

"I seem to hear a bar of music float 

And swoon into the west; 

My ear can scarcely catch the whispered note, 

But something in my breast 

Blends with that strain, till both accord in one, 

As cloud and colour blend at set of sun. "

At Sunset

by Pauline Johnson

"And as I take my body back 

the sun lays its warm muzzle on my lap 

as if to make amends."

from I Am Learning to Abandon the World

by Linda Pastan

" Let us live for the beauty of our own reality. "

Charles Lamb

We left the cabin last week, fall was just entering the stage

but plans for travel meant, that this year at least, we could

not stay for the change. Now that we have a wood stove,

we may give it a try next year. When I think of the seasons

I always, eventually think of Edwin Way Teale.

"We would see a thousand moods and facets of the season, 

We would see new birds, new lands, all in the surroundings

of fall."

from Autumn Across America

It is only when we are aware of the earth and 

of the earth as poetry that we truly live.

Henry Beston

"Change is a measure of time and, in the autumn,

time seems speeded up. What was is not and never

again will be: what is is change."

Edwin Way Teale

"For man, autumn is a time of harvest, of gathering together. 

For nature, it is a time of sowing, of scattering abroad."

Edwin Way Teale

Garden pond at the farm.

"2 A.M. moonlight. The train has stopped

out in a field. Far off sparks of light from a town,

flickering coldly on the horizon.

As when a man goes so deep into his dream"

from Track

by Tomas Transformer

"Summer girls they sure are fun 

Get so golden in the sun"

from Summer Girls

as sung by Blue Rodeo

Faded flowers and the last of the summer girls

at a family BBQ Tuesday night.

"I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,

And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made;

Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honey-bee,

And live alone in the bee-loud glade."

from The Lake Isle of Innisfree

by William Butler Yeats

""Nostalgia is a wound that we refuse time to heal," Asa once wrote"

from Dispatches from the Cradle: The Hermit—Forty-Eight Hours in the Sea of Massachusetts
by Ken Liu

My wife and I have found the early spring and early fall weather
a bit chilly here so we added a wood stove, which I have named Lincoln
Logs for no particular reason. We were able to do a lot of the
installation ourselves with the assistance of Helen's brother Ralph
in getting it into the cabin. Ralph also put the chimney up through
the red metal roof which he so lovingly installed in 2011 with Helen's
other brother Brian. The last act of our inspection was to remove a tree
that was too close to the chimney. Ralph duly arrived with his chainsaw
and home made tree jack and removed not 1 but 3 rotten poplars which
over hung the cabin. Much as I hate to remove trees, unlike the beavers that
continue to besiege us, they had to go. However this means that I will no
longer be eye to eye with the local swallows that have claimed the cabin,
while I am standing at the living room window.

For the last three years we have walked the dogs through the 

hayfield to the gate and back. Every year we see a number

of snakes on each walk. We also see a few by the cabin.

This year we have seen only a few in the hayfield and none

by the cabin. Until today, I was about to step on the deck when a 

large garter snake sailed past me it's front 4 or 5 inches erect,

it was dangling a small frog or toad in it mouth. Wow, small

as it was it encapsulated every film, documentary or story

I have ever seen or read about snakes. Quite the sight.

"Securely sunning in a forest glade, 

A mild, well-meaning snake

Approved the adaptations he had made

For safety’s sake.

He liked the skin he had—

Its mottled camouflage, its look of mail,

And was content that he had thought to add

A rattling tail."

from A Fable

by Richard Wilbur

`And beyond the Wild Wood again?' he asked: `Where it's all blue and dim, and one sees what may be hills or perhaps they mayn't, and something like the smoke of towns, or is it only cloud- drift?'

`Beyond the Wild Wood comes the Wide World,' said the Rat. `And that's something that doesn't matter, either to you or me. I've never been there, and I'm never going, nor you either, if you've got any sense at all.