Today

 

“I live in my dreams — that's what you sense. Other people live in dreams, but not in their own. That's the difference.”  Demian

Morning

This morning I went out to shovel but this white-tailed jackrabbit 

was still resting so I came back inside.

“The Whole landscape drifted away to the north,

To Moose Factory, hundreds of miles, to the pole

And beyond, to the Arctic ends of the earth,”

A Window on the North

R.A.D. Jones

Snow with Coyote

Snow this morning, At 6:30 I was just finishing shovelling 

when a coyote trotted past me down the centre of the 
street. It is -15, wc -23 but it did not feel that cold.


“so I came straight off here, through the Wild Wood and the snow! My! it was fine, coming through the snow as the red sun was rising and showing against the black tree-trunks! As you went along in the stillness, every now and then masses of snow slid off the branches suddenly with a flop! making you jump and run for cover. Snow-castles and snow-caverns had sprung up out of nowhere in the night--and snow bridges, terraces, ramparts--I could have stayed and played with them for hours. Here and there great branches had been torn away by the sheer weight of the snow,”

from Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame

 

Snow

 

'All my life,' she said, 'I've been so busy running from Beethoven to Bach to Brahms, I never noticed I was twenty-nine. Next time I looked up I was forty. Yesterday, seventy-one. Oh, there were men; but they'd given up singing at ten and given up flying when they were twelve. I always figured we were born to fly, one way or other, so I couldn't stand most men shuffling along with all the iron in the earth in their blood. I never met a man who weighed less than nine hundred pounds. In their black business suits, you could hear them roll by like funeral wagons.'

'So you flew away?'

'Just in my mind, Mr Terle. It's taken sixty years to make the final break. All that time I grabbed on to piccolos and flutes and violins because they make streams in the air, you know, like streams and rivers on the ground. I rode every tributary and tried every fresh-water wind from Handel on down to a whole slew of Strausses. It's been the far way around that's brought me here.'

from The Day it Rained Forever by Ray Bradbury

Snow Day

"White are the far-off plains, and white
The fading forests grow;
The wind dies out along the height,
And denser still the snow,
A gathering weight on roof and tree,
Falls down scarce audibly."

from Snow by Archibald Lampman

 

Still Here

"MACHEVILL: I count religion but a childish toy, And hold there is no sin but ignorance."

Christopher Marlowe

Today

 

"The visions of good men are good; it is the undisciplined will that is whipped with bad thoughts and bad fortunes. When we break the laws, we lose our hold on the central reality. Like sick men in hospitals, we change only from bed to bed, from one folly to another; and it cannot signify much what becomes of such castaways, — wailing, stupid, comatose creatures, — lifted from bed to bed, from the nothing of life to the nothing of death."

from Illusions - Ralph Waldo Emerson  

Reading Not Reading

I had been happily reading some library books mostly about the fur trade and the indigenous peoples of the Canadian West, a topic of abiding interest to me. I have described the origins of this interest here.

https://thatsjustthewildwood.blogspot.com/2018/01/the-beaver.html

However the world as too much with me, and my concentration not all it should be at present so I returned them. I will borrow then again. I am holding on to library books on the history of the Madan and the history of the Anishinaabeg peoples for better days.

So instead I reread a couple of novels by my beloved Andre Norton and have set my sights on reading Johnson's "Preface to Shakespeare". I have been watching a youtube series on reading the classics by a young man using the "name" Drunzo" and want to make the reading a few classics part of my routine, with definite goals.

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC72a8QL142vdH3s6Dn3NVRA

Helen and I discovered a youtube series on the history of Godzilla, and we follow each episode by watching, in my case, often rewatching the movie.

https://www.youtube.com/c/BigActionBill

I leave you with one of my favourite quotes and a photo from this summer at the cabin.

"I hear new news every day, and those ordinary rumours
of war, plagues, fires, inundations, thefts, murders, massacres,
meteors, comets, spectrums, prodigies, apparitions, of towns
taken, cities besieged in France, Germany, Turkey, Persia,
Poland, &c., daily musters and preparations, and such like;
which these tempestuous times afford, battles fought, so many
men slain, monomachies, shipwrecks, piracies, and sea-fights;
peace, leagues, stratagems, and fresh alarums. A vast confusion
of vows, wishes, actions, edicts, petitions, lawsuits, pleas, laws,
proclamations, complaints, grievances, are daily brought to our
ears. New books every day, pamphlets, currantoes, stories, whole
catalogues of volumes of all sorts, new paradoxes, opinions,
schisms, heresies, controversies in philosophy, religion, &c. Now
come tidings of weddings, maskings, mummeries, entertainments,
jubilees, embassies, tilts and tournaments, trophies, triumphs, revels,
sports, plays ; then again, as in a new shifted scene, treasons,
cheating tricks, robberies, enormous villainies in all kinds, funerals,
burials, deaths of princes, new discoveries, expeditions, now comical,
then tragical matters. Today we hear of new lords and officers created,
to-morrow of some great men deposed, and then again of fresh honours
conferred; one is let loose, another imprisoned; one purchaseth, another
breaketh; he thrives, his neighbour turns bankrupt; now plenty, then
again dearth and famine; one runs, another rides, wrangles, laughs,
weeps, &c. Thus I daily hear, and such like, both private and public
news, amidst the gallantry and misery of the world"


from Anatomy of Melancholy
by Robert Burton

A photo from our trip to the farm at Christmas

"I've learnt the beatitudes of ice,

something sacred, something cold,

demanding respect, a paraphernalia

of horned boots, cowl and padded vest,

for body nicely flexed to winter's mould."

From Shovel to Self-propelled Blower:

The Immigrant's Progress

Reinzi Crusz