After all, time is not money. It is an opportunity to live before you die. Donald Culross Peattie

 

On the nine hour drive from Calgary to Central Saskatchewan on Dec. 29th we saw almost no snow. The fields were mostly bare the entire way. Given that we had watering restrictions right up to Nov. in Calgary and only two small snowfalls in Calgary from mid Oct to Christmas it has been an incredibly dry fall and winter. The bit snow at the farm is way below average and the temperatures unseasonably warm.

 

The pages above are from A Book Of Hours by Donald Culross Peattie, 

Decorations by Land Ward, 1937. The book was a Christmas gift from my brother. 

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

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  

Singer-Songwriter Nanci Griffith (1953–2021)

 

A good interview with Nanci

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

We are heading to the cabin soon. And Helen is busy with other plans as well so after a long fairly quiet period. we may be busy.

 

By this time next week we should be settled in a the cabin. 

Hopefully I will be updating my blog more regularly then as well.

"Life is a long walk forward through the crowded cars 

of a passenger train, the bright world racing past beyond 

the windows, people on either side of the aisle, strangers 

whose stories we never learn, dear friends whose names 

we long remember and passing acquaintances whose
names and faces we take in like a breath and soon

breathe away."

from Local Wonders

Ted Kooser

Old photos new quote

 Paula Gunn Allen

"We are the land… that is the fundamental idea embedded in Native American life… the Earth is the mind of the people as we are the mind of the earth. The land is not really the place (separate from ourselves) where we act out the drama of our isolate destinies… It is rather a part of our being, dynamic, significant, real. It is our self… It is not a matter of being 'close to nature'… The Earth is, in a very real sense, the same as our self (or selves)

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20210420-mental-health-healing-the-trauma-of-climate-change

"Nothing There: The Late Poetry of John Koethe" by Robert Hahn

 "And that is why artists keep trying—to speak to something beyond the confines of the page, to move the stars to pity."

from "Nothing There: The Late Poetry of John Koethe" by Robert Hahn

https://kenyonreview.org/reviews/the-swimmer-by-john-koethe-738439/

 I am thinking about poetry and that can only be a good thing.

Drumheller - Books - Reading

"He had long wanted some neutral time, in which he could let go of the fixations of a liner life story story and rediscover the infinite potential of simply being. "

from Shrike
by Quentin S. Crisp

Atomic Sleep

 

“a series of luminous tracks that betray invisible electrons startled from atomic sleep,”

D. G. Jones

https://thewalrus.ca/startled-from-atomic-sleep/

On a very rainy day here a photo from Florence 2019

“I crossed over to Broadway and walked north to 

Twenty-fifth Street to the Serbian Orthodox Cathedral

dedicated to Saint Seva, the patron saint of the Serbs, 

I stopped, as I had many times before, to visit the 

bust of Nikola Tesla, the patron saint of alternating current, 

placed outside the church like a lone sentinel.

I stood as a Con Edison truck 

parked within eyeshot. No respect, I thought.

from M Train, Patti Smith

Reading (Ducks in Saskatchewan)

  "I am actually alone in my head, 
   and that's where 90 percent of my problems are." 

  Network Effect, (The Murderbot Diaries )
  by Martha Wells

To keep everyone safe it does not look like we will visit the farm or cabin anytime soon

“The leaves fall, the wind blows, and the farm country slowly changes from the summer cottons into its winter wools.”
― Henry Beston (Northern Farm)

If your looking for a book to read I recommend Beston's
The Outermost House: A Year of Life on the Great Beach of Cape Cod

And stay safe.

The Farm

"Yesterday, I lay awake in the palm of the night."

from The Names by Billy Collins

Walk about

  “It took me less than half a lifetime to realize that regret is one of the few guaranteed certainties. Sooner or later everything is touched by it, despite our naive and senseless hope that just this time we will be spared its cold hand on our heart.” 

Jonathan Carroll

Thoughts upon reading Matt Cardin's, The Stars Shine Without Me

"And I have seen dust from the walls of institutions,
Finer than flour, alive, more dangerous than silica,
Sift, almost invisible, through long afternoons of tedium,
Dropping a fine film on nails and delicate eyebrows,
Glazing the pale hair, the duplicate grey standard faces. "

from Dolor
by Theodore Roethke

Reading Thinking

"Everything he wrote, Berger says, was written “during the period of the Wall.… Everywhere the walls separate the desperate poor from those who hope against hope to stay relatively rich. The walls cross every sphere, from crop cultivation to health care…. The choice of meaning in the world today is here between the two sides of the wall. The wall is also inside each one of us. Whatever our circumstances, we can choose within ourselves which side of the wall we are attuned to.”

https://www.thenation.com/article/culture/john-berger-joshua-sperling-biography-review/

Photos of beavers taken from the porch while talking to my brother on the phone - Nature's Little Wonders

Last night I stepped out on the porch while talking to my brother on the phone and noticed this tranquil domestic scene directly below me at the edge of the slough. Four beavers have dug their version of the Erie Canel just below the cabin to better access the tress on this side.

Another group from the back slough has begun working the way up the lane from the other end. One thing I wonder about is that they ignore smaller trees that are a few years old and seem perfect for transport. Instead, they spend several nights taking down on a massive tree that then gets hung up on the surrounding and does not fall to the ground, creating an ongoing hazard for everyone. I guess they know their business, but maybe they could use an MBA to help them reorganize their processes. That would at least ensure that no more trees would get taken down, and they could learn all about the joys of focus groups and powerpoint presentations.

The deprivations of the Back Slough Gang from last year are recorded here. https://thatsjustthewildwood.blogspot.com/2018/09/view-of-chute-beavers-use-to-harvest.html

"We haul'd some barges in our day

Filled with lumber, coal and hay

We know every inch of the way

From Albany to Bufallo

Low bridge, ev'rybody down

Low bridge, we're coming to a town

You'll always know your neighbour

And you'll always know your pal

If ya ever navigated on the Erie Canal"

from Low Bridge

by Thomas Allen

"It does a man good to turn himself inside out once in a while: to sort of turn the tables on himself: to look at himself through other eyes—especially skeptical eyes, if he can. It takes a good deal of resolution to do it: yet it should be done—no one is safe until he can give himself such a drubbing: until he can shock himself out of his complacency. Think how we go on believing in ourselves—which in the main is all right (what could we ever do if we didn’t believe in ourselves?)—a colossal self-satisfaction, which is worse for a man than being a damned scoundrel." from Walt Whitman Speaks

Snow gone, blue skies melding to grey

"Half the walk is but retracing our steps."

Thoreau

"Show me the place, help me roll away the stone

Show me the place, I can't move this thing alone

Show me the place where the word became a man

Show me the place where the suffering began

The troubles came I saved what I could save

A shred of light, a particle away"

from Show Me The Place

by Leonard Cohen