the real world

re words: nettle

~ carin ~ 2 Comments

Several years ago I was asked to contribute a sentence for the anthology A Rewording Life: finding meaning in the wor(l)d, being put together by Sheryl Gordon in support of Alzheimer’s. The fabric of the book being random sentences from hundreds of writers, some well known, some not, each of whom had been given a word, the sentences interspersed with essays written by Sheryl on the subject of her mother’s dementia.

The word I was given was ‘nettles’ and I couldn’t have been happier. Nettles are one of the things I’d put on my individual ‘family’ crest, should I ever fancy making one. And I might.

While clearing out files today I’m reminded of all this, and the sentence I submitted:

The air turned blue with the heat of her language as bare legs walked through summer field and felt the sting… then a small voice arose: “Don’t hate me,” said the nettle, “I’ll do you no harm, and I make a very good soup.”

All very timely too given that the nettles will soon be making an appearance in my garden and I’ll soon be making soup.

Note: other items on my yet to be designed personal crest would be dandelions, columbine, and (of course) horseradish.

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what stays

~ carin ~ 1 Comment

Going through a bin of old correspondence, clearing out this and that, stopping to read along the way, remembering and being reminded of much I’d forgotten, lingering over a few letters from a friend travelling in Australia, back when we were in our twenties, thirties, news of people and events, sorrows and joy, none of it relevant anymore, except one small passage: the description of a jacaranda tree, which I don’t even remember reading then and yet, now, thirty years later it stands out as the only thing that matters.

When I mention it to her, she remembers it well.

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the view from here

~ carin ~ Leave a comment

I’m sitting on a small wooden deck, plastic chair well padded with a wool blanket. Comfortable despite the temperature. I’m looking at trees dancing in wind and thinking how different they are, birch, balsam, maple, spruce, tamarack, alder, beech, and yet the same, needing water, light, nourishment. Kinda like us. Each of us different yet the same. What I love about the dancing is that every one of them has their own way of moving depending on variety, age and size, its location relative to other trees. Every nuance in wind direction, no matter how brief or tiny the increment, registers in their branches, the same effect but differently for each. The same but different. And how it’s this difference that makes the whole thing work. If they all leaned the same way, to the same degree, in the same moment, the forest would fall over. It’s the variation of sway that gives strength to the whole. Like us I’m thinking. Not so different from us. More same than different.

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do’s and don’ts, an ongoing list

~ carin ~ 2 Comments

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Don’t fret about what you can’t do anything about.

Do what you can do in your own small space of self, community, your own three square feet. Consider your choices. DO what you can do. This is not nothing.

Stop scrolling. Just stop. Stop.

Breathe. Walk.

Read something made of paper. Listen to the sound of each page turning.

Think about what you just read.

Read a cook book and realize all the food in the world. Make some.

Find a window to look out of. Paint, write, sing, dance what you see. Send the painting to a friend.

Befriend a tree or a rock and if the weather allows, stick around a while, see if it befriends you back.

Find the sun, turn your face to it, eyes closed, heart open. Send it thanks. Not just on the solstice.

If you can breathe, walk, read, cook, write, sing, dance, paint, are near rocks and trees, if you are relatively healthy, safe, and comfortable, and if the sun occasionally shines, especially then, kiss the ground.

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Image courtesy of Wikicommons.

summer postcards: good enough

~ carin ~ Leave a comment

I’m reminded of the chap who once stopped me on the beach, he was visiting the island, staying at a nearby cottage with his young family and wanting to know WHAT to do and WHERE to go and THINGS to see and all this as we were surrounded by one of the most glorious stretches of coastline, uncrowded, perfect weather, seals breathing deeply on that rock there, blue heron on another, a single tern idly floating in water calm as glass, the occasional kayaker and only a few swimmers in this magical expanse of saltwater where only minutes earlier I’d been floating myself, though not entirely tern-like, eyes to the horizon, thinking how extraordinary to have all this s p a c e to myself… and so I ask the chap, who is the whole time he’s talking, looking at his phone… I ask how long he’s here for and he says a week and I give him some places because he seems so intent on What and Where and Things, but then I add my best advice which is, honestly, for now, just sit down, I say, and in the morning see how you feel and if you Must Go Somewhere, drive in a random direction, don’t plan anything and be surprised by everything or, even better, don’t drive, stay where you are another day, and maybe another… He nodded as if yes, yes, but he could hardly stop fidgeting, scrolling, googling for better ideas while all around him the heron and the tern and the horizon scratched their heads.

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Later in the week, I went back to the beach and there was the guy again… seems time and maybe the absence of finding what he thought he was looking for, had had its effect, turned him into a guy who wears loose clothing, trousers rolled halfway up the shin, hands in pockets and walking sloooowly along the shoreline, stopping frequently to stare at the horizon, walking in a way that looks like he’s in love with walking and you can imagine him walking like that around the world, no sign of a phone and the tween kids are swimming a ways down the beach, his partner walks too, at her own pace, separate but together, like they’ve all found each other by giving each other space, not separation. Walking like someone who noticeably breathes differently than the guy I saw six days earlier. In fact I hardly recognized him.

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summer postcards: field feathers

~ carin ~ Leave a comment

We’re getting close to finishing our harvest of haskaps, the first of the berries to ripen in our berry fields. Today, overcast, and thunder rumbles in the distance and eventually rain falls, through which we continue to pick until we’re done, always leaving a few berries for the birds.

This morning, feathers and pieces of bone and wing around some of the bushes tell a story that probably involves the foxes who were born under the barn in early spring, a couple of them still sleep there and hunt in our meadows and forest. We have become very fond of them, each having a name and as time goes on, we’re able to notice a difference in their behaviours, one from the other. But I’m fond of the crows too, who also have names and behaviours, and it was the crows who were angry yesterday, grack grack gracking madly for ages. I knew something was up and I suspected it had to do with the foxes. When they were just kits, I worried about their safety, worried every time mum went hunting, would she come back with enough for them to eat. I once watched her arrive with a baby raccoon in her mouth, which the kits devoured. A dead baby to feed babies, yet I was glad they had nourishment. My callousness surprised and appalled me. But then, I didn’t know the raccoon family, hadn’t watched them grow up, and I saw the offering only as food for young, not violence.

Looking at today’s feathers, I’m confronted again with the fact of killing as a daily necessity, how very normal it is, and after taking a moment to recognize the lives of both the foxes and the crows and the place they hold in this world I’m privileged to share, I think how so little of this is taught to us as children, how so much is sanitized, Disneyfied, and I find myself grateful to have been raised on Grimms rather than Disney. Some residual memory of those pull-no-punches stories surely helps put into perspective the impossible heartbreak of this very real world—

— in all its wisdom and beauty, and sadness. 

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and sow it begins

~ carin ~ 2 Comments

I sow radishes because of how they are with butter on slices of bread I make with almond flour and because of that night a half dozen decades ago when in a rainy cabin there was nothing to eat but radishes, butter, a rye loaf my mother made, and I ate and ate and ate and because it instantly became, and remains all these decades later, one of my most precious culinary experiences.

when thoughts turn to radishes, as they inevitably will — what to do with them? the radishes, i mean

rosehips

~ carin ~ 4 Comments

Every year my mother went to the beach to pick the hips of wild roses. Only a short drive from our house, the beach was somewhere we spent a lot of time as a family, swimming, picnic suppers, walking in the rain, collecting stones for a new rockery. The rosehip outings, though, were just the two of us, and always later in the year, in the fall when the hips were ‘ripe’. Not that I helped with the picking, I just liked any excuse to be at the beach. I picked shells and danced barefoot on cool sand while she, some distance away, stood, back slightly bent, leaning over thorny bushes that formed a long line parallel to the shore, filling her apron, or maybe a bag or a pillowcase, holding it open to receive each fat red hip. She would dry them for tea, mixing them with handpicked calendula, chamomile and linden, to make her own special blend kept in tins to enjoy all winter.

I remember how the hips turned the water pink. Magic.

It wouldn’t have occurred to her to buy tea, even if such blends were available then. ‘Making her own’ was a way of being… a farm girl from the Austrian alps, where there were no shops nearby and where everything was homegrown and homemade and medicine came from the garden, the fields, or the forest. Teas were medicine. Even after moving to a medium sized city in Canada with shops at every corner, her way remained homegrown and homemade, our medicine cabinet was the garden.

Someone mentioned roses the other day.

It doesn’t take much.

Another kind of magic.

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I think of her whenever I see wild roses anywhere but it’s only those that grow on beaches that come with a memory made in a millisecond a thousand years ago when a child looked up from her barefoot dance and in the distance saw a woman she knew so well but would never truly know, holding open an apron, or was it a bag or possibly a pillowcase…

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and this…

~ carin ~ 5 Comments

…. when checking on my scarves, which are daily feeling like metaphors blowing in the wind, I find a nest I assume is a hummingbird’s so I ask an island expert on such things and she tells me that, no, not a hummingbird but a vireo made this beauty, which delights me because I’ve heard what I dared to fancy were vireos chorusing in this particular neck of the woods and now I wonder if this little place will be returned to like a swallow’s box because the very truth of it having withstood the heavy snow, pelting ice, and winds of winter is astonishing and if the vireo owners are maybe thinking of subletting, I’d like to suggest that ‘durable’ would not be an overstatement in any ad.

The picture distorts size. Imagine the cupped hand of a small child. Also, know that it’s hanging in mid-air, fixed to thin branches by spit, grasses, and hope.

A hummingbird, I’m told, makes a nest the size of thimble.

my scarves