The light goes down on 2012

'.... tonight I'll be on that hill 'cause I can't stop

I'll be on that hill with everything I got

Lives on the line where dreams are found and lost

I'll be there on time and I'll pay the cost

For wanting things that can only be found

In the darkness on the edge of town

In the darkness on the edge of town

(Thanks e,  Boss)

Howling with the Wolf Moon

It's a little foggy and real real cold out there, but the full Wolf Moon (aka Snow Moon, Long Night Moon, Hunger Moon, Crow Moon) revels herself on her path to the highest, northernmost trajectory of all the moons in the calendar.

Earlier in the day there was so much cloud, I thought I didn't have a chance with this one. Then I look out and there she is. Potent with promise: a huge fertilized silver yolk in my sky.

Forget about wishing on a star, the inner wolf will have no restraints.

Auwhooooooooooooooooooooooo........it is now or never. There's a wild and precious life to be lived.

Snow days

Snow wrecked havoc in the area a few days before Christmas. School was closed. My library staff couldn't get to the library so I ran it single handed for 3 days, tramp tramp tramping through the snow to get there.

Gingerbread crafting helped with the marooned and abandoned.

Walking with my ghosts

And then the sun came out.

The world is briefly brilliant and silvered with trembling drips and drops.

Willows stand out a vibrant yellow.

Extending my usual routes, I tramp back and forth around town, past puffy pillowy fields, snowmen in front yards and children improvising sledding runs.  I bathe in the light, luxuriating in it even as long shadows lean hungrily across the sun.

Bring back the light

My solstice ceremony: digging a path out of the frozen snow. City public works, in their generosity, built up shoulder high berms around Hale Makua, as part of their snow ploughing efforts yesterday. Getting back in was interesting clambering and especially frustrating after a day of running my library solo all day with no breaks because the staff could not get in to work.

 Living in snow climates is not for wimps. Bring back the light!

Barefoot through snow: stirring up the secrets

When the sun goes down here
And darkness falls
The blanket of winter
Leaves no light at all

You search for shelter
To calm the storm
Shaking with an instinct
Just to stay warm

Chorus:
But I'd walk through the snow barefoot
If you'd open up your door
I'd walk through the snow barefoot

You hear the howling
Of dogs and wind
Stirring up the secrets
That are frozen within

The ice will haunt you
It lays so deep
Locking up inside you
The dreams that you keep

Chorus

This wind ... through my soul ... blows cold 

Reality bites

There's a lot of talk about the beauty of snow. Yes, fresh snow is pristine. It can make the world beautiful, simple, minimalist, magical, enchanted.

Living and working in snow there's another face.

Yesterday I had an early morning meeting down the road about 16 miles. There had been snow for a few days. Temperatures had dropped a lot in the night. The snow berms left by the ploughs towered over the Moonlight Escape, frozen breaking waves.

The crunch of wheels moving over frozen surface is loud. Unsettling. Walking from vehicle to building is like being on an ice rink.

When I get back to my usual workplace later in the day, I find that some creative citizen has fashioned a snowperson from the berm left in the centre of the roadway right outside the library.

For scale: this snowperson looked me in the eye. I am 5 foot 10. Pretty sizable barriers of ice divide  usually undivided roads in places. It is not unusual to see people driving along the highway with the scoop of a snowplough on the front of their vehicles. A snowplough is necessary to get out of rural properties this time of year. And useful to navigate a parking place downtown in some settlements, it seems.

Later in the day snowperson lost its head. Ah well, it happens. Temperatures stayed in the teens and lower twenties all day.

A day later the landscape is altered once more. Mounds of powder have smoothed over all again, building up up up.

Winterscape reconciliation: Day of the Vow

Sunday would have been my parent's wedding anniversary.  December 16th: Dingane's Day or Day of the Covenant, was a high holy religious holiday in the country of my childhood, the country which no longer exists.

It became a day of reconciliation. With a side order of alienation

I went out walking with my ancestral ghosts. Deadhorse Gulch, icy and putting on a mantle of snow,  never fitted the name better.

Blooming starlings: a meditation on flight and entanglement

Skies have been low and dark for days now as waves of winter storms pass over.

I go out briefly for air. Windblown graupel stings my cheeks as I raise my face to a bird-winged whoosh and sigh. A swirl of starlings blooms on bare tree tops. The world is lean and linear. Starkly dis-embodied.