Winter arrived this morning

 Not exactly this morning...several days ago the temperatures dropped into the twenties. But even so,

this, from Danielle Barlow:

Winter arrived this morning. Her icy shawl spread across the land, and the low glimmers of early sun had turned the willow stems to glowing copper and gold. It was as if there were flames dancing on the edge of the meadow.

And with her arrival a sense of peace landed in me. Despite my best efforts not to, I am usually running at full tilt at this point in the year, swept up in the tide of ‘ more, more, more’ that is blasted at us. It’s a relief when she arrives. It is my reminder to stop. To be. To embrace the long nights and the fallow land. To go deeply into the Dreaming Days.

Of course, life doesn’t stop. Winter is hard, physically. There are logs to chop, and roofs to mend, ditches to clear and horses to tend. But this is good work, anchoring into the seasonal flow of living on the land, which my mind and body needs.

And this illustration:

Here are a few more words and pictures for this last day of November:

artist: Catherine Hyde

“Forests will

always hold your

secrets, for that’s

what forests are

for. To separate and

hide things. To

protect, to comfort,

to hold, to envelop,

to demonstrate, to

slow down, to hold,

to teach. Go to the

trees to explore

your questions and

dreams. Go to the

trees to desire

and seek. The world

will listen as you

walk, watch, soften

and breathe.”

~ Victoria Erickson, Writer, “Edge of Wonder: Notes from the Wildness of Being”

full moon...artist unknown

November moon .... artist only known by Martina

MAHMOUD DARWISH

WE HAVE THE RIGHT TO LOVE AUTUMN

translated, from the Arabic, by Munir Akash and Carolyn Forché

 

And we, too, have the right to love the last days of authumn and ask the grove:

Is there room now for a new autumn so we may lie down like coals?

Like gold, autumn brings its leaves to half-staff.

If only we never said goodbye to the fundamentals

and questioned our fathers when they fled at knife-point.

May poetry and God’s name have mercy on us!

We have the right to warm the nights of beautiful women, and talk about

what might shorted the night of two strangers waiting for North on the compass.

It’s autumn. We have the right to smell autumn’s fragrances

and ask the night for a dream.

Does the dream, like the dreamers themselves, sicken? Autumn. Autumn.

Can a people be born on a guillotine?

We have the right to die any way we wish.

May the earth hide itself away in a blade of wheat!

Binge Watching "Stranger Things"

 

November has been swallowed by my cookie dough making and then my cookie dough baking.

It's my annual contribution to our house's gift to the associates - all departments - and the other sisters in other local communities who live here in this big building.

I have made 16 different batches of cookie dough:

1. Amish Raisin Cookies

2. Date Walnut Cookies

3. Magic Cookie Bars

4. Candy Bar Hersheys Cookies

5. Potato Chip Cookies

6. Molasses Sugar Cookies

7. Butter Cookies

8. Oatmeal Gems

9. Peanut Butter Cookies

10. Dream Cookies

11. Cranberry-White Chocolate Cookies

12. Russian Teacakes

13. Blueberry and White Chocolate Ginger Cookies

14. Apricot Almond Chews

15. Cinnamon Pecan Toffee Cookies

16. Snickerdoodles

I have now baked 11 batches.  Trying to get most of them baked and in the freezer before my students' papers and finals roll in.

Besides the baking, I have become addicted to the Netflix series  "Stranger Things." I watch one episode each night,  well, most nights.  It's gripping and gruesome and middle school melodramatic, with truly gluey monsters.   More on that another time.

I tried to post some photos from the tv show, but the computer won't allow me.

some remarks about "Stranger Things" from the New York Times reviewer:

"One of the first season’s best ideas, in which a 12-year-old trapped in an alternate dimension used his family’s Christmas lights to communicate, is consciously recycled.

Other repetitions are less explicit but just as noticeable. A major plotline set in the past is integral to the season’s mysteries but also seems designed, in a fan-friendly way, to present the actress Millie Bobby Brown as often as possible in the childlike haircut and costume that defined her in Season 1. The exasperated byplay between the odd-couple friends Dustin (Gaten Matarazzo) and Steve (Joe Keery) is still amusing, but it has become so formulaic that you are likely to tune it out.

And yes, there’s plenty of time in these episodes, which average more than an hour and a quarter, to think about things like that.

...Back in Hawkins, Ind., the town that sits over the Upside Down — the literal home of other-dimensional monsters and the metaphorical receptacle for the stereotypically middle-American sorrows and regrets that the monsters exploit — the remaining characters begin to detect the emergence of the latest creature.

Season 4 continues a progress away from the heightened, delicate emotionalism and wry humor of a Spielberg-style fable and toward the guilt, dread and body terror associated with Brian De Palma and David Cronenberg. It’s a logical move — the particular magic of the first season was probably impossible to maintain — but it doesn’t play to the brothers’ strengths."

The clocks fall back at midnight.

 It's 9:27 and tomorrow it will be 8:27  and dark.  The darkness is increasing. Nothing new; it happens every year when Daylight Savings Time ends.  So why am I writing about it?  Just that I am connecting it this year to the six deaths we've had in our province in the last month.

This morning, Sister Marian Hamwey died. She was with us at Cape May just a few weeks ago. She was really physically ill then, but we had no idea she was going to die.  Her breathing was so strange...but she went to all our prayers and liturgies and meals, and talked with everyone during our pre-supper gatherings.I just supposed that her strange breathing was something she knew about and was taking medicine for. But whatever, she was close to death then.  We called an ambulance and she went to the local hospital, who helicoptered her to the big hospital in Camden.  She seemed to be recovering, but last night she "took a turn for the worst."  This was a remarkable woman...a  missionary in the Congo for thirty years, and living in our provinces in the US for thirty more years.

Somewhere in my folders I have a photo of her at one of our community meetings about 20 years ago, playing the drums and talking about the Congo.  If I find it, I will post it here.

In the meantime,

Here is our retreat group at Cape May. Marian is the third down on the right.

The thin veil is here.

 

Stand still. The trees ahead and bushes beside you

Are not lost. Wherever you are is called Here,

And you must treat it as a powerful stranger,

Must ask permission to know it and be known.

The forest breathes. Listen. It answers,

I have made this place around you.

If you leave it, you may come back again, saying Here.

No two trees are the same to Raven.

No two branches are the same to Wren.

If what a tree or a bush does is lost on you,

You are surely lost. Stand still. The forest knows

Where you are. You must let it find you.

 

David Wagoner

 

All Souls Day

 

All Saints Day

 

Some Trees  

by John Ashbery

These are amazing: each
Joining a neighbor, as though speech
Were a still performance.
Arranging by chance

To meet as far this morning
From the world as agreeing
With it, you and I
Are suddenly what the trees try

To tell us we are:
That their merely being there
Means something; that soon
We may touch, love, explain.

And glad not to have invented
Such comeliness, we are surrounded:
A silence already filled with noises,
A canvas on which emerges

A chorus of smiles, a winter morning.
Placed in a puzzling light, and moving,
Our days put on such reticence
These accents seem their own defense.

 

 ( I think trees are saints, too)