Midsummer’s micro seasonality, seasonalities, personalities on parade as I bicycle through the Champlain Valley and foothills past cattails and hay bales, cycling, recycling, readying for change.
Before the change there is a coalescence of factors and experiences that produce a undeterminable ready-ing… Can unforeseen ready-ness be nourished?
— Nora Bateson, “An essay on ready-ing: Tending the prelude to change”, 21 September 2022 (Source: Medium via Readying)
My meandering mind summons songs of cattail utility in Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass (and her students’ smiling faces after harvesting cattails and experimenting with some of their uses.) I’ve never eaten cattails, nor attempted to weave the fibrous foliage into baskets or mats. I do recall jousting with cattails as the fluff flew, and there’s no unreading Michael Ondaatje’s enchanting description of flaming cattails dancing in darkness like fireflies in his novel In the Skin of a Lion. Perhaps the summer I can experiment with both, cattails edibles and torches.
Cattails and hay bales. Roadside reminders that midsummer drifts into late summer, that ripening August morphs into autumn by way of Septembering, that while some blossoms fruit, soon all will be harvest or memories.
Look, the trees
are turning
their own bodies
into pillars
of light,
are giving off the rich
fragrance of cinnamon
and fulfillment,
the long tapers
of cattails
are bursting and floating away over
the blue shoulders of the ponds,
[...]
To live in this world
you must be able
to do three things:
to love what is mortal;
to hold it
against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it go,
to let it go.— Mary Oliver, “In Blackwater Woods” (Source: American Primitive via Words for the Year)
Leave it to Mary Oliver to braid it all together like a basket for holding what we love. Another vessel that we must learn to let go as change finds us.
How to learn from the hayfields that push up grass that is cut, baled, and stored to nourish livestock when autumn succumbs to winter? Round baling and basket weaving perhaps closer than kissing cousins.
I look beyond our famous hayfields to our famous hills, to the notch where the sunset is beginning, then in the other direction, eastward, where a full new-risen moon like a pale medallion hangs in a lavender cloud beyond the barn. My eyes sting with sweat and loveliness.
— Hayden Carruth,"Emergency Haying" (Source: Academy of American Poets)
Another sunset. Another moonrise. So many voices whispering among the cattails and hay bales, singing songs of change, joining together and merging, braiding restlessness into hopefulness.
When my bicycle brings me back to Rosslyn for a cooldown swim and an August agenda at my desk in the icehouse loft, I still hear the singing underneath, I still feel the gentle pull, a prelude to change.
What do you think?