Wintering in
The sun’s in Capricorn. I look for the number 6 and fail at caret browsing
Check in
Introit
Often, on waking, a single word comes into my understanding. One recent word was “introit.”
In liturgical terms, introit is the verse, or music or words that introduce the holiest part of a service: in the Christian tradition, that is the Eucharist, or Holy Communion.
The word has fallen out of favor and I haven’t encountered it in years. Why it floated up into my consciousness is a delicious mystery.
At the beginning of the year, an introit is appropriate. A calling-in of the newness of the season. An invitation to new life as the calendar clicks over.
Calling in
Sing now a song of enchantment, Entrainment, the crossing of threads. The warp and the weft of the weaving— The new year, wherever it heads. Be now a bridge for our crossing The river of dread at our feet A way through the darkness, a lifeline To make our transition complete. Time rumbles on, in its passage We’re fashioned of stardust and glue. Bring us glitter and crystals and music The tension is built; steer us through.
Triad
Three words, three shades of meaning.
Quiet
Silence
Stillness
Quiet
Quiet is the state of no sound, but sound is never truly absent. Perhaps you hear the ticking of the Universe, or the pounding of your heart in your ears. But from outside of you, no sound intrudes. Then, in the kitchen, the refrigerator clicks on.
Silence
What you hear now is silence. Silence is the suppression of sound. A denial that sound exists. A willful return to quiet. The memory of things heard, now set away from you.
Stillness
What is left is stillness. This is where you become aware of sounds, simple and single. A drip of water from the tap. The clicks and pops as the house settles on a winter night.
Stillness calls for a response. Slowly, the sound horizon broadens. Now in the cavern of silence you hear that still, small voice.
It fills your heart, it fills your ears. It sings the music of the Universe. Dance to it.
Six
The number 6 swam into my attention when I was on the No. 6 Trimet bus, traveling north on Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard. The bus passed a Motel 6 in Lloyd Center.
After that, I started taking notice of the number. Problem is, I couldn’t find many uses of it. Groups of 5s, 4s, 7s—those abound, but 6 does not seem to be a category for anything.
Then, on Northeast Fargo Street, I took a photo in front of a house numbered 56.
A few houses down, a colorful garage door.
I keep looking for 6s, but I really haven’t found any more. Know any instances where 6 appears? Please comment.
Don’t look before you answer
Here’s a trivia question with a 6 in it: name the shift character on the 6 key on the QWERTY keyboard.
Give up? It’s the caret — ^.
Evidently, the caret is used as an insertion point in editing copy, but nobody does that. I’m a retired copy editor, and I have never used it. Mostly it’s useful in making emoticons, like this one: (^_^)
A caret time sink
Microsoft has created a new function called “caret browsing.” It allegedly turns the cursor in a web browser into a caret and allows you to navigate using the arrow keys.
Thing is, I can’t get it to work. I know it isn’t functional in some browsers, such as Safari, but it doesn’t work—for me—in browsers like Brave or Chrome. I dutifully hit the F-7 key and affirm I want to turn caret browsing on. Then . . . nada.
I am so tired of dead-end app promises like this one. I spend some time trying to get caret browsing to work. Not a lot of time, but it adds up.
Finally, frustrated, I give up. Another Web mystery.
Leftovers
Folks in my neighborhood can’t seem to give up on their Halloween/Thanksgiving pumpkins. Their brave colors continue to peek out from porches and stoops.
Winter love
In winter, the barrier between the real world and dream time thins. You push it aside like plastic wrap, but then it dissolves like rice paper. If you put a wet finger on a rice-paper screen, a hole appears and you can look through. Or pull the paper off the door, push it open—and the warm breath of the world is upon you.
Winter life is so gray in our world and so colorful in dreams.
Color matters more in the winter. When I lived in South Dakota, I saw cardinals in the snow, welcome flashes of red.
One winter, I saw a gay hummingbird—Anna’s hummingbirds stay in Portland in the winter—outside the kitchen window. We made eye contact, each of us surprised, before it darted off.
Winters past
Some of the scenes in this poems are from decades ago, in Bloomington, Minn., and Sioux Falls, South Dakota. My family moved to the West Coast in 1967.
Winter stories
A man found a hummingbird Collapsed in the snow, Stopped by the cold. His hands warmed the bird, Heart beating in palm. Fly away, bird! Find a warm nest. We rode the toboggan Down the slope to the lake. Smells of the ice house, Kerosene and wet wool. Hockey boys with long skates Took over the rink. Snow on the windows We made cookies inside. Sticky beige cookie dough Was new in the stores then. The cookies tasted peculiar, Not like homemade. Waiting for Mom after a violin lesson, Fiddle in hand, feet cold in thin boots. She’d forgotten to get me, I stood there an hour. Somehow I got warm. We always got warm.
Winter birds
I’m in love with winter in a society that worships summer. And on gray Western Oregon days, when the color contrast is dimmed, when there is not only no color but no brightness either, winter hating is understandable.
Just not for me.
In winter, I yearn to get out more, observe more, rain be damned. The sorties aren’t just for fun; they are part of the work. And always, some off-the-cuff research, stray questions: Are cardinals as nasty as jays? Or friendly like robins?
How do we categorize birds? Cheerful as sparrows. Majestic as crows, practical as woodpeckers, graceful as swifts, reserved as owls, resourceful as geese, wise as pelicans, selfish as gulls, edgy as herons, crazy as kingfishers.
At the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, you can download an app called Merlin that helps you identify birds. It can tell you which birdsongs you are hearing.
Check out
I don’t have to finish
My life is unfinished. My work will never be done. I’ll never clean up the last email or totally empty the basket of mail, clippings and other papers on my desk. I will never get all the clutter out of the basement.
But, oh, the joys of incompleteness!
I am a lover of journeys, prone to take aimless bus rides just so I can ogle the other passengers and look out the window. I often scramble to find a destination to justify my wandering. Often I just wander.
Think how unfinished things spice up your life. That sock you knit and knit on, never seeming to get to the last row. You know that the joy of knitting is in the making as much as the finished piece. For me, the best part of cooking is the prep, researching recipes and chopping vegetables. All cooks know you can never get around to making all the recipes you’ve collected.
Again, there’s a feeling of accomplishment when you finish a book, but the experience of reading it—that’s what matters.
My writing database (DevonThink, if you’re curious) is full of stories and snippets and ideas that will never resurface. Every day, I spend 20 minutes doing free writing, coming up with little stories and ideas that I then file away.
When I’m old(er) and bedridden and done with Substack, I think maybe I’ll have time to sort through my old writing. Although, more likely, I will be playing video solitaire and watching endless television.
Just leave it
No matter the task, I don’t have to finish. I can leave some carrots on the plate. I can get off the bus before my destination to chase down something I saw from the window. I can stop playing the violin before my arm gets tired.
I can put aside a piece of writing. I can pick it up again the next day. Or I may never visit it again.
Not finishing is not a function of sloth. It is the way the Universe works.
One last photo
My neighbors’ year-round Halloween display, all dolled up for the holidays.
Hummingbirds keep turning up in this post. See the feeder up by the pirate?
—30—
Have you forgotten what 30 means? Email me and I’ll send you the explanation.
Thank you for reminding me that it's okay not to finish or not to do anything at all. There's a lot of that going on in my household these days. Jeff got a new pair of jammies and he's become gloriously slothful in them. Our weekend mornings are getting longer and longer until eventually, they'll meld into bedtimes. That's when we'll know we've accomplished something meaningful.
Beautiful musings. I feel so much Celtic spirituality in your writing!
It was special to meet you today.