Happy Halloween (recommended reading)

"Yet more disturbing than our view of the asylum was the idiotic gaze that it seemed to cast back at us. Throughout the years, some persons actually claimed to have seen mad-eyed and immobile figures staring out from the asylum’s windows on nights when the moon shone with unusual brightness and the sky appeared to contain more than its usual share of stars." 

"And next to that room would be another room that was unfurnished and seemed never to have been occupied. But leaning against one wall of this other room, directly below the sliding panel, would be some long wooden sticks; and mounted at the ends of these sticks would be horrible little puppets."

"To make things worse, the setting sun would each day slip out of sight behind the asylum, thus committing our town to a premature darkness in the long shadow of that massive edifice."

from Dr. Locrian's Asylum

by Ligotti, Thomas

Sept. Snow

"Fast drives the snow, and no man comes this way;
The hills grow wintry white, and bleak winds moan
About the naked uplands. I alone
Am neither sad, nor shelterless, nor gray,
Wrapped round with thought, content to watch and dream."

from In November

by Archibald Lampman (One of my favourite poets)

Coot

"To hear at eve the bleating of far flocks,
The mud-hen's whistle from the marsh at morn;
To skirt with deafened ears and brain o'erborne
Some foam-filled rapid charging down its rocks
With iron roar of waters; far away
Across wide-reeded meres, pensive with noon,
 To hear the querulous outcry of the loon;
To lie among deep rocks, and watch all day
On liquid heights the snowy clouds melt by;
Or hear from wood-capped mountain-brows the jay
 Pierce the bright morning with his jibing cry.?"

from Comfort of the Fields

Archibald Lampman

"Back there at the beginning, as I see it now, my life was all time and almost no memory. Though I knew early of death, it still seemed to be something that happened only to other people, and I stood in an unending river of time that would go on making the same changes and the same returns forever.

     And now, nearing the end, I see that my life is almost entirely memory and very little time." 

from Jayber Crow

by Wendell Berry

Fall Reflections

"This land like a mirror turns you inward

And you become a forest in a furtive lake;

The dark pines of your mind reach downward,

You dream in the green of your time,

Your memory is a row of sinking pines."

from Dark Pines Under Water

by Gwendolyn MacEwen

Big Walk 2

"Live with me on Earth among red berries and the bluebirds

And leafy young twigs whispering

Within such little spaces, between such floors of green, such

figures in the clouds

That two of us could fill our lives with delicate wanting:"

from Live with Me on Earth Under the Invisible Daylight Moon

By Milton Acorn

The Big Walk

Labour Day weekend we went for a walk intending to visit an area next to the cabin where we can hear frogs in a wet spring. We found it, a dried slough but got turned around in the trees and the half hour walk became 2 1/2 hours as we walked past sloughs, neighbours' fields, the nearby lake, Helen's brothers place and the family farm. But we saw some lovely things and the rain held off until we got to the cabin.

"But rather as children of one common birth,

Discerning in each natural fruit of earth

Kinship and bond with this diviner clay.

Let us be with her wholly at all hours,

With the fond lover's zest, who is content

If his ear hears, and if his eye but sees;

So shall we grow like her in mould and bent,

Our bodies stately as her blessèd trees,

Our thoughts as sweet and sumptuous as her flowers."

from On the Companionship with Nature

by Archibald Lampman

Heading Home Red Deer River crossing

"Do not think for one minute it is the Poem that matters.
Is is not the Poem that matters.
You can shove the Poem.
What matters is what is out there in the large dark
and in the long light,
Breathing."

from Let Me Make This Perfectly Clear

by Gwendolyn MacEwen

I am not sure who if anyone other than the occasional friend or family member checks in here, but I thought I would mention I am have cataracts at present, which means taking and processing photos is a bit more of a challenge. One solution is that they might become more processed i.e. brighter, with a bit more garish colours. (which I am starting to like) 

Despite this I have a backlog of photos I want to work through and they fall within two parameters. Photos taken at the cabin, and photos taken on drives, many from a moving car, on the drive home from the cabin. Helen and I love the landscape of southern Saskatchewan and Alberta and if we had not chosen the Parkland as a location for the cabin (or if it had not chosen us) we might have picked the rolling landscape of the Canadian prairie, (which will be the focus of those photos called Heading Home), as the spot for our cabin.

Gull

"Time and space - time to be alone, space to move about - these may well become the great scarcities of tomorrow."

Edwin Way Teale

One thing our somewhat truncated autumn at the cabin showed us is the potential beauty we could experience during a longer stay.

“Time is the river. We are the islands. Time washes around us and flows away and with it flow fragments of our lives. So, little by little, each island shrinks….But where, who can say, down the long stream of time, are our eroded days deposited?” 

Journey into Summer
Edwin Way Teale

"The seasons, like greater tides, ebb and flow across the continents."

Edwin Way Teale

Since we got the snow in Sept. at the cabin, we seemed to enter directly into winter with over 30+ cm or about a foot of snow in 24 hours earlier this week in Calgary. We spoke to a gallery owner Saturday who lives in the foothills and she got over twice that. But before we left the cabin the beauty of autumn was really becoming evident. One thing that really impressed us was the thousands of snow geese that passed over head or lay like drifts in the fields. And when I think of of the seasons I think of Edwin Way Teale and his four book series The America Seasons documenting 75,000 miles travelled across America to follow the changing seasons. Although at present I do wonder whether Autumn Across America or Wandering Through Winter is the more appropriate volume.

" 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

"I am a part of all that I have met; 

Yet all experience is an arch wherethro' 

Gleams that untravell'd world"

from Ulysses

by Alfred, Lord Tennyson

The snow seems to have followed us

The snowstorm and the gale increased in violence that night, and I slept uneasily, plucked again and again from slumber by the fierce battling of the wind that shook my windows as if with an imperious demand for admittance. It came in billowy gusts, with strange noises intermingled with it as for a moment it abated, with flutings and moanings that rose to shrieks as the fury of it returned. These noises, no doubt, mingled themselves with my drowsed and sleepy consciousness, and once I tore myself out of nightmare, imagining that the creatures of the Horror–Horn had gained footing on my balcony and were rattling at the window-bolts. But before morning the gale had died away, and I awoke to see the snow falling dense and fast in a windless air. For three days it continued, without intermission, and with its cessation there came a frost such as I have never felt before.

from The Horror-Horn

by E.F. Benson

Shaun is unimpressed. 

I am not sure if we will see the postie

this morning