Still Here

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

Christopher Marlowe

Snow geese on the way home

 We returned to Calgary in mid Sept to vote. The last day we also had our first really chilly night after a summer of drought and heat. We had hoped to see the huge flocks of snow geese sweeping south but that is always a tossup between when they appear and when we have to leave. We were really pleased to see some on the drive home. 

"Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely, 
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting - 
over and over announcing your place 
in the family of things."

from "Wild Geese" by Mary Oliver

It's been an odd summer

 

It has been an odd summer. Broken up by trips back to Calgary, heat domes, the drought, wasps and some personal matters I will not go into, we did not do many of the things we had planned. We did not make paths around the back slough, hook up the water system and install the grey water tank. We never got the canoe to the slough though whether the water level was high enough anyway is questionable. We did manage a lovely week in Grasslands Park which is another post or two.

It seems when we leave in a few weeks we will have again cancelled our travel plans but that is fine. More time to fuss with dogs and books and craft projects I really mean to start this time.


It is fall now, a couple days of rain mean the water tanks are full for the first time this year. All but one or two of the Franklin's Ground Squirrels have turned in. But we also had our first Thirteen-lined ground squirrel under the feeder. The White Throated Sparrows that have been lurking in the grass all summer are now jostling there with the chipmunks. Chickadees now seem to outnumber everything else but the drought has also meant we have shorebirds skirting the edge of the slough. This morning I started a fire to take the chill off before the family was up, caught the sunlight thru the smoke and startled a heron eying the ducklings. 

"one side so far from the other

it is impossible

to see across

without stepping out

                              onto a slick, tight rope,"

from (Re)conciliation by Cindy Clarke

Within These Lines

Singer-Songwriter Nanci Griffith (1953–2021)

 

A good interview with Nanci

https://acousticguitar.com/remembering-singer-songwriter-nanci-griffith-1953-2021/

Grasslands Park Last week and I will start updating again.

 

"do u understand what heaven is it is the surround of the living" 

James Merrill

The Changing Light at Sandover

It looks like we can spend some time at the cabin this summer.

"Cocked in that land tactile as leaves

wild things wait crouched in those valleys

west of your city outside your lives

in the ultimate wind, the whole land's wave.

Come west and see; touch these leaves."

from Midwest

by William Stafford

Alberta’s Environmental Appeals Board was set to review the application to infill some wetlands, alter others

  Would that I could find Burton's detachment, although he seems to have a very comprehensive list of what has happened for someone who is so zen.

"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 alarms. 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 villanies in all kinds, funerals, burials, deaths of Princes, new discoveries, expeditions; now comical then tragical matters. To-day 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 publick news. Amdist the gallantry and misery of the world: jollity, pride, perplexities and cares, simplicity and villany; subtlety, knavery, candour and integrity, mutually mixed and offering themselves, I rub on in a strictly private life."

Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy 

Contentious $500M motor sports racing park near southern Alberta hamlet seeks environmental approval

https://calgary.ctvnews.ca/contentious-500m-motor-sports-racing-park-near-southern-alberta-hamlet-seeks-environmental-approval-1.5320641

Sunday (London Trip 2018)

 

Literature is the irreplaceable human art. “A book,” wrote Franz Kafka, “must be the ax for the frozen sea inside us.” Reading not only illuminates our souls, it makes the lives of others more real to us — in all their diversity and complexity. Books enlarge, enhance and refine our humanity, and slowly transform our society to match our dreams.

from Literary L.A. with no apology 

http://danagioia.com/essays/literature-in-california/literary-l-a-with-no-apology/

Hoping for the best in the New Year

 

"We know

the current is there, hidden; and there

are comings and goings from miles away

that hold the stillness exactly before us.

What the river says, that is what I say."

from Ask Me by William Stafford

Glenbow Ranch Provincial Park Oct 9th

“But when the sun drops closer to the earth, the cold of the earth runs to it from the water and causes all green things to dry up. And because the sun has dropped closer to the earth, the days are short, and it is winter.”

― Hildegard of Bingen, 

I am not sure the quote is scientifically accurate but it is a nice conceit. It is still fall here though. 

https://defendabparks.ca/

Trip to the mountains pika and it's food pile

"Who sees, the ultimate Recipient
of what happens, the One Who is aware
when, in the administrative wing
a clerk returns from noon-day, through
the ointment of mortality
for one strange hour, in all his lustreless life,
has touched his face."

from The Apex Animal
by Margaret Avison

https://defendabparks.ca

Trip to Drum - Dancing Through the Last Days of Sept

 

"Open up the window

I'm breathing in the last of September

I can feel the wind blow

and the late summer sky is like a giant ember

everything is turning into gold"

Last Days of September by Henrik Nagy feat Frida Wallin

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_zSdBF1ywKs

Road Trip - We found a lovely spot for lunch with friends

 

“A man can fail many times, but he isn't a failure until he begins to blame somebody else.”

― John Burroughs

Road Trip Photos Continue

 “In every act of looking there is an expectation of meaning.”

—John Berger

Yamnuska Wolfdog Sanctuary - Our Yamnuska Pack

Nova and Nickki

Yesterday we visited the Yamnuska Wolfdog Sanctuary outside of Calgary. Part of our tour involved spending 40 minutes with the Yamnuska Pack. These were beautiful, shy and gentle animals. The discussion with our guide was quite informative, but I am not going to paraphrase it and risk getting something wrong. Go see them for yourself or read the information on the website and make a donation.

https://yamnuskawolfdogsanctuary.com/wolfdogs/

Zeus

Nikki

“We need another and a wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of animals. Remote from universal nature and living by complicated artifice, man in civilization surveys the creature through the glass of his knowledge and sees thereby a feather magnified and the whole image in distortion. We patronize them for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate for having taken form so far below ourselves. And therein do we err. For the animal shall not be measured by man. In a world older and more complete than ours, they move finished and complete, gifted with the extension of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren, they are not underlings: they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendour and travail of the earth."

From The Outermost House: A year of Life on the Great Beach of Cape Cod

by Henry Beston

Meer

 

"where there's a wall
there's a way
around, over, or through
there's a gate
maybe a ladder
a door
a sentinel who
sometimes sleeps
there are secret passwords
you can overhear"

from Where There's a Wall

by Joy Kogawa

No cabin but some critters at the Calgary Zoo.

"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

On our trip thru the Canadian Wild we thought the wolves were pacing the confines of their cage, but it turned out they were stalking each other in a game of fur and shadows.

 

 

And now for something completely different.

Night in Florence, 2019

"Somewhere a ball has closed its doors and ended. Its yellow lights
out, its musicians are silent, it dancers have all gone into the night
air, and Time has said of it, "Let it be past and over, and among the
things that I have put away."

from Bethmoora
by Lord Dunsany

Cedar Waxwings

We have had a flock of 5 or more Cedar Waxwings hanging around the

backyard for the last couple of months. They are such elegant birds.

"Above us, stars. Beneath us, constellations.

Five billion miles away, a galaxy dies

like a snowflake falling on water. '

from Flying at Night 

by Ted Kooser

Winter waxwing

"Pan, who and what art thou? he cried huskily

"I'm youth, I'm joy," Peter answered at a venture, 

"I'm a little bird that has broken out of the egg.”

― J.M. Barrie, Peter Pan