Category: Blog

After days of clear skies and sunshine, that have been gifted on the first days of the new year of 2025. Waking at midnight, the brightness outside calls to to look for a moon. There is none. Instead there is the inky horizon of night sky, dotted with a plankton sparkle of stars in sharp relief.

It’s a clarity of view which is rare and always breathtaking.

Normally it would be an image held only in memory. None of my usual photographic devices seem capable of capturing anything approaching what the eye can see. At least not without the absolute immobility of a tripod mounting. However, having just received a new phone for Christmas, it was a good opportunity to see what the new camera could do.

Using the night setting, and holding it as still as is possible for a handheld device while standing in the middle of the road, it performed well.

Excellent contrast, little blur, I am impressed. I have to admit, my favourite grouping of stars, and one of the most recognizable, is Orion’s belt. Orion is known as the hunter, or the archer, depending on the mythology. I am inspired to learn more. On a January night, when it appears most clearly in the northern hemisphere, it is reassuringly constant.

Here’s hoping that the peace and clarity of this sky above mirrors the possibility of clarity coming to other clouded issues on earth in the coming year.

LMC

First, a shout out for my son’s website. If anyone reads this, looking for a super tech support guy, he’s it! His website: https://danjoannis.com/it/

Otherwise it’s just a waiting game for winter to end. Snow melts away, grass starts greening, crocuses poke little green spikes out to smell the air, then it snows again.

Makes it easy to see the rat tracks up the yard and across the deck though. Some of them have pretty big feet. Grandpa rats.

The baby chicks arrived two weeks ago, on good Friday. Dan said one looked like a Reeces peanut butter cup, Isabel said the other one looked like a Peeps. They are growing fast, and fly well considering how young they are. They’ve been spoiled though, living the good life in the house, the food and water plentiful, exercise out of the cage in the evening. They like to fly up from my shoulders to sit on top of my head.

The other pets are interested, but haven’t really tried to attack them when I have them out. Luna will even sit on my lap when they are on my shoulders. Wouldn’t trust them unsupervised though. Tigger is the most intrigued.

Anyhow, I’ll post a few recent, random pics here for fun. Been a while.

After a night and morning of wind gusts blowing across the hills and skipping above our little hollow, only the Apple Tree is still clinging to any leaves. It, being tucked in the lea of the hill, retaining wall and greenhouse, has only half of its foliage tumbled down to carpet the lawn, revealing the dozen red apples that cling to await a ripening frost.

The weather, strange and wild with a welcome warmth rare for November, is exhilarating and inspires gratitude and verse. As below, an image inspired poem.

The Potato Bed

The straw was supposed to be dead,
dead and dirty from the birds,
fit only for compost from the coop
to the garden bed, left to lie
fallow through fall and winter.

But in November, green spikes poke up
from the tucked-in, spread-flat soil
settled for a winter sleep. Some force
still lingers there, waiting it’s chance,
defying expectations.

Too long since the last post. And, I just realized that the contact email address I’d set up in 2020 didn’t work anymore because messages weren’t being delivered, so that’s been updated on the main page. Good intentions to post more often, but life, gardens and a broken arm are a challenge. Just to overcome inertia, here are a few random thoughts I have thunk over the years – do with them as ye will!

I can be light, or I can be blind. It is merely a matter of choice.

Seek knowledge for joy, not power. Agendas corrupt knowledge with their quest for control.

Anything goes when you’re being metaphorical.

Pigeons peck at a square of broken bread, and commune with the offering of apology and yearning.

Ego is a defence. With compassion I no longer crave approval, and instead I seek to align myself with the universe.

Pictures do say a thousand words but first you have to learn their language.

Love yourself. You will always be there for yourself. Love yourself for being vulnerable. It’s okay to hurt, it’s not a permanent condition.

Clarity doesn’t assign blame. Clarity encourages conscious evaluation and constructive response. Blame is a way of avoiding action and staying trapped. Blame is fear based. Fear destroys.

You use the cleaning thing to clean the thing but how do you clean the thing that cleans?

Misery demands an audience; courage consoles itself in silence.

Beauty is a reflection.

Shanti…

My sweet cat Noelle passed away last night, November 5, 2021, just before 6:00 p.m. Her pain is gone now, this I have to believe, and she is finally at rest. We placed her in a spot beneath the apple tree, right next to my daughter’s kitty Finn, and together, I imagine, they will bask in the sunshine and prance through the dappled shade, on another plane of existence. Au revoir, Noelle and thank you for the memories.

I miss her. I miss seeing her in her favourite spot on the couch where I would give her a rub on the head in the morning. I miss hearing her clanking the water bowls because she wanted them filled up more. I didn’t realize how much I relied on her reminder until I noticed them empty and dry after supper this evening. I miss her sitting on the kitchen table and poking her head through the blinds to look outside. Even though the ends are broken off of three strips. I miss the softness of her fur, and the way she finally, in the last months of her life, wanted to cuddle in my lap in the evening.

We were together for 15 years. She chose our home one Christmas day, made her presence known on the back porch with a clatter, and walked right in when I opened the door. We couldn’t find out where she came from, and so she stayed with us.

She was a protector, stalking bugs and mice around the house, weaving a web of safety around my legs while I waited for the bus in the morning. She was a quiet presence that would sit at your side, always on her own terms. She was fierce and independent. Anyone who says that cats, or any animal for that matter, do not have a soul and the capacity for thought and determination, never took the time to see it.

Our dog Buddy will miss her too. He loved her, mostly because she would tolerate his attention and intrusive kisses. His eyes were sad as he watched her lying still in my lap. He sensed she was not well, and tried to heal her the only way he knew, by licking her face, her head and her ears.

I am not sure how to end this. It will take a while to adjust to her absence. There have been too many changes over the past few weeks. This one is the hardest.

Seeing this old shack, and the many other abandoned-looking buildings like it around the roads and bays of Newfoundland, inspires curiosity and a little bit of nostalgia.  Overgrown and dilapidated, it’s just a matter of time before a gale force wind, or heavy snowfall, collapses it into a pile of wreckage. I imagine all the activity and people which once brought this place to life, who may now be lost to time and memory. There is not always a surviving family member to uphold the traditions of place, or to bring them into the future. Eventually, the wooden planks will rot away and revert to ground, and all that will remain is a few footings to indicate where it once stood.  This remains to serve as a monument to the past.

Equally, it is a reminder. A call to awaken to the finite aspect of life on the physical plane of existence. It can be hard to face that knowledge which we all sense but hesitate to examine too closely. The unknown is frightening. The guesses, ideas and beliefs that pass as consolation can’t be confirmed, merely taken on faith.  This is the great mystery of life that will not reveal itself. Perhaps there is peace to be found by accepting fate. But the great miracle of life is that there is always a choice: accept or refuse to accept.  All our decisions, the path we take to get here, the outcomes and consequences, are aligned on that choice.

We can flow through life like wind, cling to our place like a boulder, or rise and fall with the seasons like wild lupins until we release our claim on time, the physical fades away and our energetic essence begins its next adventure. Considering this, it could feel like life has no real purpose.  We’re born, live until we die, and eventually all trace of us crumbles into oblivion. But life could also be accepted as a gift; a time to appreciate what we learn from others, friend and foe, and to share what lessons we can give of ourselves.

These gifts develop the traditions that travel beyond our time, and last longer than any monument to our physical existence. They work together, the outside and insides selves. To create something meaningful we need to be caretakers of both, while we can.

It’s not a spectacular or eye-catching image. It’s about the play of dark and light, contrast, and how things that can be invisible or ignored on clear days can come alive in the right circumstances. That thin, horizontal stripe of darkness on the horizon is the base of an island which, on sunny days, shows the road meandering up the hill from the ferry to the homes of its residents. Shows the cliffs, the green meadows, and houses dotted along the top. Often, there is a ferry tucked into the wharf, waiting to welcome travellers to and fro.

But at the moment captured here, there is a thick low cloud. It obscures the island, hiding all signs of human occupation and activity. It is heavy with the rain that will soon pound down on the roof, make waves on the street outside as it travels down to the bay and transfers to it the weight of the air.

It seems to say, nothing to see here, and my usual tendency would be to just observe that thin strip of black and decide to focus on indoor activities; the mundanity of putting the house in order is saved for such days. Today, the stark black cross of the telephone posts catch my eye. Just as an experiment, I focus on what I usually consider detracts from the view I want to see.

The low cloud has brought these man-made structures to the forefront and they refuse to be ignored. If you want to see the “out there” world, this is it. There is nothing else. They are simple, without mystery, utilitarian. They hide right in front of us, disregarded and taken for granted simply because they are everywhere.

The lack of distraction, finally, reveals an appealing starkness. The low cloud as a background unveils the complexity of its task, makes visible the thin disks which support the wires’ path from house to house to house. Displays in relief the drum-shaped transformer that protects us from an energy that has the power to kill. Reveals its invisible passage among us through the translucent dome of the street light, which illuminates our way in the darkness of night. Even through the interference of tree branches, it connects us, doing what it was designed to do, without rest. Without recognition.

Yes, even as an inanimate object it deserves our gratitude. And who can say if, perhaps as a purveyor of electricity, it absorbs some of that energy and knows its own version of life. There is no way to know, except through the imagination. And through a willingness to acknowledge that we tend to ignore what is right in front of us, until we have no choice but to see it. Until it is taken away.