mumma yaga

 Nov. 17 The witches are wearing white. The old witch looks the best because she has so many branches. I want a hat that looks like her! Yesterday was like Christmas day, endless and snow-blown. I had a holiday feeling all day, while it snowed and snowed. I have forgotten, almost, what it is like to have snow. Soon I will not be able to walk across the meadow and through the woods. When the snow is deep, I walk down to the farm, or go up the camp road, if the camp people have been up with a vehicle and made a track, or I can put on my snowshoes and cross the meadow to the ridge and beyond. I am mentally a long way from putting on snowshoes! It was barely a week ago we were enjoying a late warm spell, out in the sun without our coats! Rain and Fox spent the night, because the road was not going to be cleared in time for them to come up in the morning. (Rain works here, on-line, and I help with the baby.) It has been cold today and feels cold in the house as well. We have had the fir...

 Nov. 12 Walking: it is like water. It quenches a thirst. Forty millimetres of rain fell overnight. The pools and streams were brimming! Like water features in a Japanese garden, the ponds seem to have a natural focal point: a rock, tree or log, like an altar stone. Nature does not waste a good design on just one project. Like those of a clever artist, her patterns and colours repeat on different scales for various effects. (Not counting that whole experimental Burgess Shale thing, which seems to have been a huge brainstorm in creative design! * ) Antlers and a giant squid; and a fungus on white birch, its colours and echoes right out of a Group of Seven painting.  Did you, when you were a child, play in the flooding ditches in the spring, follow the temporary rivers along the curb, and clear debris for them to flow to the drains? When I was little we played in ditches, but my grandchildren and I follow the curbside creeks on our street. Today I was nine again, but following a...

 November 11 Some days I feel like a child building towers with wooden blocks. I think that I have built some structure of ideas that holds up, and then it all comes crashing down. What tower of wisdom can justify any selfish notion of accomplishment that will allow respite from toil and suffering? How can I stop the suffering of millions, how can I laugh or rest while children are hurting, terrified, lost. How can I cure the ills of evil and destruction in all the politics of the world.  And then I have to ask, what is the point? This is where I was at twenty-two, in the black mud of the swamp, when I opened the university syllabus (reaching up) and found philosophy. Here were the questions that had been knocking at my brain, the purpose of life, its meaning, god. How could I do my life until I knew what it was for . (Swamp metaphor for depression.) (But now, also, I wonder if I might have, should have and now, is it too late?) I lived, raised kids, worked, built structures ...

Dec, 6 Today, we remember this day in 1989, when fourteen women were murdered, at the École Polytechnique in Montreal. Thirty-three years later, we have seen the right of personal autonomy taken away from women in our closest neighbour, the US.  I have yet to find words. (I published this short post in November, but have reposted it to today. I had the reminder in my calendar in November as well as December. I have remedied that, but now I have to remember again, having had the cloud of it weighing on me in early November. Today the weather is a repeat of the day in November that I took this photo, warm, overcast, almost raining, but I am in Toronto.) Hug your daughters, and your sons.  mumma yaga