Tag Archives: beauty

The Seasons of Fire and Water

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Where water is, there is the absence of water. There is always water, hidden in life. There is never water hidden from life. Even in the absence of water, there is water. Celtic consciousness dragged to this land from Europe holds that there are four seasons, Spring, Summer, Autumn and Winter, which function in a cycle. This is a cycle of eternal return, a concept that European anthropologists wrote upon indigenous cultures throughout the twentieth century, often quite brilliantly, but do take a look at four images of one hill in one valley in one grassland above one lake in one small fault in the plateau east of the volcanic arc of the Northeast Pacific shore. These are the seasons of fire.

Where water is, there is fire. There is always water, hidden in fire. There is never water hidden from fire. Even in the absence of fire, there is fire. Fire is always present. It takes on bodies. It comes to life. Life is always present. It takes on fire. It burns. These seasons are one.

What It’s Like to Belong to an Ecosystem

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So, remember the early moons of the year, when Siya? (Saskatoon) was opening out of winter’s buds that she held in offering on her stems?

Well, look at the offering now: light. Siya? is all offering. That’s a way of saying that this is our plant. It is for us. That’s why I can see it and can say “she is all offering.”

And what is this collecting of light and its extension into my mind for? Ah, for this:

They are meant to be taken. They are incomplete if we do not, but not just us.

This is what it is to be a part of an ecosystem. Western culture calls our reaction to Siya? “thought”, “hunger” and “desire.” It is none of those things. It is more.

Slow Fire in the Okanagan

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It has been a summer of fast fires, burning off the growth of a century throughout the grasslands and fire forests between the mountain ranges of the North East Pacific Coast. While that has been consuming attention, a slower fire has been going on. This one is called drought.

It’s not drought. This is one of the Turtle Hills along Turtle Ridge in Vernon. Note how so many plants, which have flourished in a long series of fire-free, wet summers, were burnt away this summer by the sun alone. It is the same story of balance and renewal. It is this cycle of forces that have made this land, and are continuing to make it in new circumstances, right now. Destroying land like this to protect houses is necessary, but it is also very colonial. It is the wound originally opened in the earth at the time of British and American settlement and the separation of the land and her people. There is a song that could be sung here at the intersection of Earth and Sun.

It is stress like this — not the easy years — that create the patterns of energy that are the story here.

American Dipper Among the Salmon

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This is the bird that weaves the worlds of water, air and stone.

It walks into the water and out of it again.

To Dipper, these worlds are one.

Deep under the water, the earth is formed, and the sun, and the stars.

Dipper eats them all and sings. The salmon have come to lay some more.

They weave through Dipper’s tracks. You know the ones. The one Dipper lays down to lead us, if we will follow.

String Theory and Black Holes in the Summer of Smoke

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There is a way of increasing the effects of gravity. Here is a picture of the string theory of contemporary physics, out of the laboratory and in the real world.

Call it the black hole effect, if you like. Physicists weren’t the first to work out its possibilities.

But the weavers were. Anyone who enters their gravity wells find themselves moving slowly. Gravity for them is quadrupled, if not more.

Every event horizon has its mistress.

 

And its beauty.

In a year without birds, the managers of the universe, driven away by our drought and our fires, these systems proliferate.

The Earth returns. The web below is an image of her gravity, made into a living thing.

That’s the kind of place it is. Simple as that.

The Redfish Come Home

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Things are pretty great on Redfish Creek above the over-deepened trough of Kootenay Lake these days.

The kokanee have come home.

The work of mixing the sun with the earth and the water continues.

It is good work.

To live is to rejoice.

To be here is to rejoice even more.

This is a human-made spawning channel.

A gift freely given.

And freely taken.

That is the circle. That is the way.

How The Sun Makes Rich Soil

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It’s simply beautiful how it is done. First, water sorts out the finest grains of silt, and deposits them on the surface of low points in the earth, filling them in. Then the sun evaporates the water, and  cracks the silt all crazy like.
Wind and gravity (and birds passing through the seasons) deposit feathers and leaves. The angular effect of the sun on the fluid shape of the silt holds them from drifting.
When the rains come again to the lowest ground, it fills the cracks, softens leaf and feather, and then deposits new silt around them.

They are now mixed in.

The cycle repeats with each season, or each thundercloud.

This is the lightning of the earth.

Beautiful, isn’t it!

What exquisite music.

A Proposal for Nature Tourism for the Okanagan

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This wetland beauty is what a real tourism is made of.

I witnessed busloads of Asian tourists scattered across pastures in Iceland, to take pictures of exquisite light.

The timing, the location, the season, all have to be right.

These are ancient, honourable traditions.  They are alive here.

So often, though, I have seen Asian tourists in Vernon trying to find some nature to photograph off the front of their main stop, the honey farm, and the meadery, which closes its tasting counter for their arrival, by the busload.

So often have I seen them crossing traffic to shop at the Dollar Store.

Well, if they came for beauty, we have cattails. What are the tour bus companies thinking?

We also have feral squiggly willows.

They are worth $3000 of Nikon equipment, too.

And a plane ticket.

But why just Asians. Why don’t Canadians come for Beauty, too?

It’s not particularly hard to find, even in the ruins in which we are forced to live.

It’s easy. You go by foot. Then you stop.

Then your mind stops.

It’s all ephemeral, but here’s the thing: ephemerality is continuous. We have the ability to flow, but also to pool.

Let’s pool.

Let’s follow the turtles for awhile and give our guests the respect they deserve and open our social forms to the living world for them.

Look at how the water turns to turtle shell with the lightest breeze!

And by doing so, open them for us.

 

What Colour is a Damselfly Anyway?

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Note how the damselfly in the water is tall and full of energy, while the one on the butt of the birch log is weary and weighed down by the weight of the sky.


And look how the one in the water has taken on the colour of the birch, while the one in the sky has taken on the colour of oxygen. What a beautiful world!

~

Gardom Lake