October 16, 2012
The clouds are pale indigo-violet, then a blustery bruised grey shot through with long warm lines of golden sunlight and rich blue – this sets the red reds and the yellow yellows and the living greens in brilliant, stop-in-your-tracks collaboration. I feel as though I’m watching the gods at play in a game where they best one another in acts of impossible beauty.
From far and away family gathers to roll around in the astonishing splendour of where and when we are together at the end of growth — so brief this year. Together we stop in our tracks and wonder. Then we move on, we joke, we sing, we cook, we eat, we drink – though it’s perhaps true that this year that none of us are left without feeling privately humbled by the world through which we’ve hiked.
Three days, then family leaves reluctant, less difficult, more compassionate maybe than last year, though it’s hard to say. Then the wind whips up every leaf from it’s branch to dance it high like opera, like gregorian chanting for four days – then pitches each one down in its own time to serve as mulch for 2013.
The rain, the hail and the heavy heavy sky nightly calls the woodstove to warm, and we feel compelled willy-nilly to finish what was undone – to clear, stow away, cover up, rake and dig while we imagine the day soon come when we cannot.
We know this in our skins, just watching the feverish feeding birds and chipmunks. We catch ourselves nodding up at the sky as though to a partner we know well who sends clear signal:
it will be a heavy winter.
An incredible January hike in 2009 – ice formed on the tops of all the trees along the north-facing shore of Georgian Bay. We were astonished, all of us.
There’s a part of me that’s eager. The fast pace of things this year flows in my veins and there may be at last some time to slow down and warm up on the inside, to listen to the resonance of what has occurred, in this year the Mayans were so clear to note in stone.
…we hike in North Sydenham, while the ground shifts beneath us, which it always has done, and always will.
I do hope, wherever you are, that you feel just as deeply grateful for what’s right in front of you – including your own self.
This is dedicated, in part – in a large part – to Amanda Todd who died last week.
Hug from me, A.T.
K