"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

" 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

After a trip to an art exhibit in Rosthern, 

we had a lovely lunch as well, (see the

b & w photos,). We crossed the mighty

North Saskatchewan River on the 

Wingard ferry which is free, holds up to 

six cars and is a trip of several minutes.

Viewing these photos I think of other

journeys.

"Imagine that you see the wretched 

strangers,

Their babies at their backs and their poor 

luggage,

Plodding to the ports and coasts for 

transportation,

And that you sit as kings in your desires . . .

What had you got? I’ll tell you: you had 

taught

How insolence and strong hand should 

prevail,

How order should be quelled; and by this 

pattern

Not one of you should live an aged man,

For other ruffians, as their fancies wrought,

With self same hand, self reasons, and self 

right,

Would shark on you, and men like 

ravenous fishes

Would feed on one another."

from the New Yorker, If you Prick Us, 

July 10 & 17, 2017

article by Stephen. Greenblatt, 

The quote's possible attribution, an

unpublished work by William Shakespeare 

from a play on Thomas More

" They are also called liberal because their aim to free us. 

It's as if knowledge contains within itself the power

 to give us some form of freedom, to free us from 

various sorts of tyranny; "

from reading dante (text version of the free 

Yale Open Course on Dante' s Comedy)

by Giuseppe Mazzotta, this quote is on 

the difference between the liberal and 
mechanical arts, "an old medieval 
distinction."

I think in this trying time, when rationality and decency seem
largely absent, that I need to turn my back on the certainties 

of the past, engage less in the present (especially the news) 
and quietly reexamine what I want to do for myself, my family
and what I want to contribute to the world. I see this as part exile

and part journey of discovery, to identify some new mental or 
emotional tools that can bring me a new, stronger sense of 
equilibrium that I can use to deal with a changing world.

I may have mentioned before that I have spent many years
studying the lives and works to two very contradictory individuals

 Charles Darwin and Dante Alighieri, in my mind Darwin personifies 
scientific inquiry and Dante the results of government and faith 
questioned. Both questioned what they saw, spoke truth to power
and both left works of great beauty and power. As Dante himself 
may have melodramatically phrased it , They shall be my Virgil.

"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 

1

Sometimes in the open you look up

where birds go by, or just nothing,

and wait. A dim feeling comes 

you were like this once, there was air,

and quiet; it was by a lake, or

maybe a river you were alert

as an otter and were suddenly born

like the evening star into wide

still worlds like this one you have found

again, for a moment, in the open.

2

Something is being told in the woods: aisles of

shadow lead away; a branch waves;

a pencil of sunlight slowly travels its

path. A withheld presence almost

speaks, but then retreats, rustles

a patch of brush. You can feel

the centuries ripple generations

of wandering, discovering, being lost

and found, eating, dying, being born.

A walk through the forest strokes your fur,

the fur you no longer have. And your gaze

down a forest aisle is a strange, long

plunge, dark eyes looking for home.

For delicious minutes you can feel your whiskers

wider than your mind, away out over everything. 

Atavism by 

William Stafford

My first photos of one of the beavers that are

denuding our property of aspen. Also as a species

an animal which played an enormous role in shaping 

our country. The photos were taken from our screened 

in porch and therefore a bit fuzzy.

Shaun and Whateley prepare for the long journey home.

Traveling thru parkland and prairie we meet fellow travelers. 

  

"There are rooms in a life, apart from the others, rich

with whatever happens, a glimpse of moon, a breeze.

You who come years from now to this brief spell 

of nothing that was mine: the open, slow passing

of time was a gift going by. I have put my hand out

on the mane of the wind, like this, to give it to you."

                                        

 from Little Rooms

                         by William Stafford

"He had seen the end of an era, the sunset of the pioneer. He had come upon

it when already its glory was nearly spent. So in the buffalo times a traveller

used to come upon the embers of a hunter's fire on the prairies, after the hunter

was up and gone; the coals would be trampled out, but the ground was warm,

and the flattened grass where he had slept and where his pony had grazed, told

the story.  This was the very end of the road-making West; the men who had put

plains and mountains under the iron harness were old; some were poor, and even

the successful ones were hunting for rest and a brief reprieve from death. It was

already gone, that age; nothing could ever bring it back. The taste and smell and

song of it, the visions those men had seen in the air and followed,—these he had

caught in a kind of afterglow in their own faces,—and this would always be his"

                                         from Lost Lady

                                                     Willa Cather

I have not blogged for awhile, I was caught up in the horse latitudes of winter

combined with the work blase. But towards the end of May we loaded up the dogs

and headed for the cabin, a trip across the plains and into the parkland. This mean

a new look at a favorite Midwestern poet William Stafford and a renewed

commitment to read the prairie writer Willa Cather. Also there will be

some opportunity to take some photos and reconnect with family.

Marsh by Jackfish Lake, Battlefords Saskatchewan

''one could breathe that only on the bright edges of the world,
on the great grass plains or the sage brush desert.
That air would disappear from the whole earth in time, perhaps; but long

after his day. He did not know just when it had become so necessary to him, but

 he had come back to die in exile for the sake of it. Something soft and wild

and free, something that whispered to the ear on the pillow, lightened

the heart, softly, softly picked the lock, slid the bolts, and released the

prisoned spirit of man into the wind, into the blue and gold, into the morning,

into the morning!''

from Death Comes for the Archbishop

Willa Cather

" I walk here and there, seeking open,

flat spaces against a sky up high.

I have discovered, too late, perhaps

that I always preferred the empty

more than the full

for breathing and forgiving."

from  The prairie farmland fields

Teresa Palomo Acosta 

We have been at the cabin for a couple of weeks which 

accounts for my absence from the net. Since we took the

dogs for the first time we converted the 9 hour drive into a

two day journey. They traveled well but I did enjoy the shorter

days. The first part of the journal was thru the mixed grass 

prairie an area that, once you are away from the rivers could 

be described as flat. It is very much an area of the open road

long distances between small prairie towns marked by water towers 

and the increasingly endangered grain elevators. It is a landscape

that celebrates its identity as big sky country. 

  

  

This particular elevator located the in aspen parklands area

of the northern prairie before it transitions into the boreal forest

is an indication that we are close to home.

"On the prairie, what you are left with is the bare truth,

 the land pared down to the bone, the basic dirt and 

grass and sky that shape the lives that play out upon it."

                           from The Secret Life of Cowboys

                                             Tom Groneberg

                   

"We wrote it on our papers
in round big shapes,
Jan., 1928.

The snow outside
glittered like mica-shavings
in the Alberta sunshine."

from A Seed of History

Margaret Avison

 

 

"The country of innocence is

a mistake of nature. The white

Geometry of winter leaves no margin

For error, no relic in the snow."

 

from The Geometry of Winter

 R.A.D. Ford

 

 

"NOT to forget the sullen, grey-cloaked sky

With red along its western hem

Not to forget brown leaves blown down a slope

and all my thoughts pursuing them!"

 

                     from Song to Myself

                          Dorothy Livesay

 

 

"Our best days are now a winter sky

White with coruscations of the clouds,

A mirror of the logos, flared

And cracked across our lives."

   

from Soliloquy to Absent Friends

D.G. Jones