A Winter's Eve in Late December

 The lamp is burning low
upon my table top
snow is softly falling
the air is still
in the silence of my room
I hear your voice softly calling 
Gordon Lightfoot

 I've always identified with the melancholic angst of Lightfoot's breathtaking Song for a Winter's Night, and play Sarah McLachlan's heartrending rendition of it regardless of the season to temper times of my own melancholia.  Tonight seems the perfect fit with snow softly falling and a heart filled with both sadness and joy this Christmas week. For now, immersion in what is present in my life will be my healing...

It is the evening time of a late December day. The early dark to which we still aren't fully accustomed has descended in full and with it brought a welcome blanket of snow. The snow is already several inches deep and whatever quiet it lent to the landscape has been shattered by the shouts of excited children who've donned winter gear and headed out to play. The houses are lit with their Christmas finery.  Blue, red, green and golden lights frame roofs and windows. Wreathes of  fragrant greenery and berries hung on outside doors to welcome callers by are softened by a layer of fluffy white flakes. There always  seems to be snow between Christmas and New Years someone comments. How magical it must be to a little Seattlelite home for Christmas for whom snow is still cause for celebration. And how wonderful to head out into the dark night to play a while in the white wildness before bedtime calls everyone in for the night!

Darkened silhouettes of pom pommed toques move swiftly past my candlelit window
Muffled voices shout out plans for snowball fights, and forts
It's perfect snow for making snowballs bellows one voice,
where's the red shovel asks another.
Snow falls aslant across the street light that marks the corner of our little street
Cars move at a lessened pace up the hill of the nearby main road
Black and barren Maple branches reach up to greet the falling flakes like arms of the beloved calling me home-

This wintry night beckons  a memory of pink cheeks and cracking a pottery mug my parents got for their wedding by sitting my very hot, hot chocolate in the inches deep snow on their front step to cool when I was newly in to the double digit years of my own life. In this memory I am eleven again, and worried about telling how the molten chocolate seeped like lava onto the pure white snow from the shaped and now broken clay that once represented a hopefulness in what the future held for my mom and dad. I did not get in trouble for breaking that mug despite my fears. Besides, we then represented the hope the future held for my parents as newlyweds. They no longer needed a mug to remind them of that my mother thoughtfully explained.  Most definitely they had a house full of us kids reminding them of that both day and night. Yet faithfully throughout all those chaotic years of our childhood, my mother did love to see us kids out in the snow. Mom still says how happy romped upon snow makes her feel, how she hates to see the yard without little footprints marking a playful meander over her little corner of the world. Me too. And with three children of my own I now understand well why she didn't get mad  at me that wintry day I broke her mug. 

I hear shouts again outside, and happy screams as footsteps thump a stampede of winter-boots across my snowy suburban yard. Perhaps I'll go set the kettle for some cocoa  to warm cold un-mittened hands when they soon appear in my kitchen.

A Merry, Snowy night to you!
Jill

Dear people of the world I love:   Yes you!   And you too! 

 When was the last time you can recall feeling so full of love that you actually felt it spill out past your own perimeter, and extend itself beyond all those boundaries you have wittingly and unwittingly constructed in preservation of your self-hood? Many of you know someone in your life who shares love so openly, and often times that person is a young child not yet encumbered by fear of being so open to the world. What if you as an adult could be that person?

 Just recently I was that person! It happened to me in a shopping mall of all places. Not being much of a shopper this was hardly somewhere that I would typically bliss out in. I was walking and thinking of all the people who like me were stuck for some reason or other in this form of shared misery-milling about in the poor air and poor lights that inhabit our modern shopping centers. When all of a sudden I felt a communion with everyone I could see within my field of vision. And not just a small sense of connection -this was huge- I felt intimately in love with absolutely everyone I came in contact with! I felt the very intense love feeling you usually only share with someone that you know very well and whom you care about deeply, yet everyone I looked at was technically a stranger to me. I didn't know what to do with this very strong feeling or how to begin sharing it with others so I just continued walking, smiling happily to myself and to anyone who looked my way.

 Instead of feeling angry or hateful at the excess in the stores and damning us all for the role we play in perpetuating it through our consumption of goods and services (my usual line of thinking when I am walking in a mall) I felt blissfully detached from a need to change anything; detached from negativity and outcome.  Transformed, I experienced a deep sense of the immense abundance which we carry within and too often fail to recognize in ourselves or share with others.

This was not the first time that I've experienced such a strangely deep opening. It has happened to me on other occasions as well. And strange might not be the best word to describe the sensation because it involves such a profound sense of comfort and familiarity. The feeling is so familiar and comfortable I can't help but think of it as a return to our most natural way of being in the world and would compare it to the feeling you get upon a return home after time away. 

When boundaries are dissolved space arises for greater acceptance and love. We experience connectivity in such a way that there is no room for judgment or fear. This is a place of boundless beauty and goodness and amazingly, even blessedly is within our grasp if we just loosen our grip on self enough to let it appear.

Thankfully, this has been happening to me more, not less often as of late. It helps me be more compassionate towards myself and others I encounter throughout my days. For the presence of such moments in my life I will always be grateful. They serve as reminders to me of what is truly possible when we open our eyes and hearts to what is already there.

I am deeply inclined to think that this dissolution of self into love is possible for everyone-that it is a birthright of sorts, for us all, not just for those who understand it, those who are spiritually inclined or have a language framework to express it. Besides, language fails to paint the truest picture of the profundity of these experiences. Many people become tongue-tied by the lack of cultural references we have in our language system to describe such moments. The word ineffable, or unspeakable is the word that some fall back on to explain their experiences. I truly believe that cultivating a sense of awareness and openness within our own hearts is the greatest pathway towards increasing the presence of love in our lives.

Wishing you all the deep experience of your own abundant heart!

Jill

Feeling a little Blue...

Evidently, it has been some time since I published my first blog post. How often to post is a common dilemma shared by bloggers. For me, I've found that both everything and nothing have prevented me from returning sooner to prattle and ponder with you. That along with my own debilitating notion that penning anything worth sharing comes only once in a blue moon for me! Nonetheless, today I have decided to share this! Enjoy!

Once in a blue moon...

Did you ever wonder where this common saying came from? Admittedly I was an adult when I first learned that a blue moon referred to something other than the oh so romantic hybrid rose genetically altered to appear in a most glorious shade of blue which I used to swoon over in the plant catalogs of my childhood. I did understand that the phrase spoke to those events which took place only on rare occasion (such as "my husband and I go on a date 'once in a blue moon'") but I did not know the origin of the saying until  one evening when our local meteorologist explained it on the evening news. For the purpose of this article I will use the online source EarthSky's simple explanation:
 
In recent decades, many people have begun using the name Blue Moon to describe the second full moon of a calendar month. The time between one full moon and the next is close to the length of a calendar month. So the only time one month can have two full moons is when the first full moon happens in the first few days of the month. This happens every 2-3 years, so these sorts of Blue Moons come about that often.
and:

A blue-colored moon is rare. But folklore has defined two different kinds of Blue Moons. A Blue Moon can be the second full moon in a month. Or it can be the third of four full moons in a season.

That said, after becoming enlightened as to the frequency of their occurrence, my romantic side couldn't resist the rare opportunity of celebrating the magic of a blue moon falling on the last day of the first decade of the new millennium. Here was a bit I shared with some mystical friends about my plans for that magical eve: 

Shore walker friends,   Dec.31st, 2009

O Happy Night so full of Hope and Possibility
O Night of the New Year's Eve Blue Moon...

Tonight to celebrate the changing of the decade Paul and the kids and I are  packing our hot chocolate and heading out to the north shore to toss any regrets we may carry in our hearts out to sea and whisper in the blue moonlight our deepest desires for ourselves, our family and our world and let them travel the shaft of moonlight out over snowy land and seascape beyond our edges to that ever-bright and ever-hopeful place of greatest beauty... that boundless place beyond the constructs of time and place and self...

Thinking of you all tonight and wishing you all a Happy New Year... Enjoy the spectacular sky...it quite literally took my breath away driving home a short time ago...Thinking of you Jenny and Sr.Moon and I'll raise my thermos cup to you all from a snowbank this eve...Jill 

Perhaps you will be inspired to discover some magic on the next blue moon to occur on July 2, 2015, or at least to find time to spend with ones you love in the meantime!

Bluing Bolete (another magic blue for me):

 

There is something so attractive about a bluing bolete. At first glance, the ones which recently appeared in my heavily treed yard following a warm, wet spell appeared to be hardy fungi. Broad capped, thick stalked and coloured a ruddy, burnished copper they lent the magnificent illusion of earthy strength. What then of my children's discovery that even the slightest touch of their fingertips or a brush by the end of their boot caused a deep bluing to occur on the mushrooms flesh? We bore witness to a staining so akin to a fast spreading bruise that we were left to wonder if fungi can suffer from anemia?

Rest assured, what we had witnessed was not a rapid deterioration of a stunning creature from strong to weak. It was rather the result of a series of chemical reactions so rapid yet complex in their nature that it makes one reconsider how we as human beings negotiate the concept of time, and one which instantaneously brought me back to my own discovery of bluing boletes with my mother during my childhood many years ago.

The blueing reaction is easily explained through biochemistry. A compound called variegatic acid remains colorless unless it is exposed to oxygen. The cell walls of Gyroporus cyanescens are easily broken, exposing the variegatic acid to the air. The oxygenase enzyme converts the variegatic acid to its quinone methide, which is blue. Interestingly, in many other boletes, in the absence of oxygen, variegatic acid is converted to variegatorubin, which is responsible to the red color found in many members of this group. The possible functions of the variegatic acid and its color shifts to blue or red are unknown. Anyone have any ideas? (Tom Volk) 

The chemical reaction which causes the bluing is demystified above by Tom Volk, yet he still leaves the reader with a remaining question- this speaks volumes to our enduring interest in understanding nature; no matter how much we discover about something, blessedly there still remains something to keep our fascination for  further discovery!

Other favourite blues of mine:
~ the ocean blue

~ blue dishes (transfer ware, earthen ware, pottery)

~ blueberries (homemade jam, pie, picking them in late July)

~ denim (jackets, jeans, purses, skirts)

~ twilight

~ forget-me-nots

~ blue beaded lily

~ blue flag iris in wet ditches in June

~ a paper I did for Dr. L.Watson on Jazz and Blues called Black and Blue in America

~ the intensity of sadness

~ the way clouds look on a blue sky in September

~ blue eyes of the ones I love

~ and like my beloved uncle Gerald, my favourite ornaments on a Christmas tree are the royal-est of blue.        

There, I feel strangely better now, hope you do too!