Category Archives: Arts

Faith in a Seed (of Light) – Two Solstice Stories

Posted on December 21, 2015 by Sandy Stott | Comments Off

“I have great faith in a seed. Convince me that you have a seed there, and I am prepared to expect wonders.” Henry Thoreau

Sisyphus at Solstice

Well that was, as always, a long way down to where the year’s slope relaxes and my stone is still.

But here’s a day of rest at the bottom; then, I get to begin the work I like, pushing this glowing rock uphill, seeing it add to each day a thumbnail’s worth of light on both margins. From here to the stretched light of summer’s a long climb. But that climb begins right after 11:49 p.m. on the 21st.; we top out next year on June 20th.

It’s not that I mind going downhill into this dark nick in time. Every day’s a gift, and I’ve said often that November’s long sightlines make it my favorite month. But like all my breathing brethren, I like also the light that rims each growing day, and I like the easy warmth it suggests may come.

Mostly, however, as I imagine my part in rolling this light up toward the sky, I like the direction – uphill is all about life; climbing is living. And so being put to this stony task seems also the greatest gift imaginable. Who wouldn’t go gladly, day in, day out, to this work?

What is funny, I reflect while testing shoulder to stone, rocking it a little, is that the old gods thought they’d devised the perfect torment when they set me this work. They thought it all added up to nothing. But they, in their haste, gave me a stone that’s round and weighted nicely to my strength. And they gave me – bless them, foremost – a hill to climb. And then, as if those gifts weren’t enough, I got also two days of pause, this near one down here at bottom, the other in the high country of summer light. Solstices.

And I get to do this forever.

Second Solstice Story

The season’s low-angled sun

The other evening, as a rare (for this year) cold front blew in, we went to a solstice party. Even as we took the narrowing roads that went finally to dirt, the lid of darkness slipped over the land; strings of lights stirred and winked in the wind. The house was warm and food-filled, and the small percussions of exclamation and laughter added to that warmth. We burn words too against darkness.

Later in the evening everyone bundled on coats and trundled back outside…for a celebration of light. A fire burned in an outdoor chiminea, but the wind quickly snuffed the candles and lanterns we carried; a few headlamps flashed on. We listened to the sweet voice of a child as he joined his mother in singing a nursery school song about light. Then, we held copies of a Wendell Berry piece aloft to catch the headlamp light and read together about an enduring sycamore he knows. Our murmur of voices threaded the wind.

Our eyes turned then toward the yard, where our host prepared an unsanctioned evocation of light that he promised would bring “slightly longer days starting soon. Just watch,” he said.

We looked up, as if from the bottom of a long well; the half-moon slipped behind a flying cloud; it was gone. Then, in rapid succession – green, red, blue, gold, gold again – little orbs of light raced up into the sky, where they blew into bright cinders that arced slowly back our way. The Roman Candles gave way then to the fizzing rise of three streaks against the night’s slate, and, above our upturned faces, each opened with a soft pop into starburst. Again, again, again.

Evocation of light drifted over the dark pines and settled down, seeding our minds.

Reading to the end brings this little reward

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Posted in Arts, Environment, General, Henry David Thoreau, Living Deliberately, Nature, News and Events, The Roost, Thoreau Quote

Opened after 110 Years – Advent Pages in Thoreau’s Journals

Posted on December 15, 2015 by Sandy Stott | 2 comments

It is clear that I have never been here before – this early winter, 1860 section of my 1906 edition of the journals is rife with uncut pages; drawing a knife carefully along the joined edge of two pages is a little like opening a present or finding a secret glade. I have never seen these words, these observations, before; and yet each is a little window into a world I’ve come to know, to anticipate.

Like many children who grew itchy at time’s slow passage as Christmas neared, I liked the advent calendar. December’s dark days seemed a sort of tunneling toward magic, and the calendar’s little windows lit the way. My more religious grandmother had given the calendar to her somewhat-wayward son’s family, and in one season I had memorized each window’s offering. Still, until each window opened and its little painting appeared, the future felt like mystery.

Modern Advent Calendar

Now, as I reopen each in memory, I realize that they were refreshingly free of religious iconography, that most of the tiny paintings behind the doors showed birds, pine cones, trees and snow; our calendar was paean to the world beyond the windows, and, during the short days of waiting for first snow and the 25th’s presents, that’s where I went to pass the time.

That you could only open one advent window per day kept time tugging at its reins. The fifth, as I recall, featured a Christmas tree, and sometime during that week, we too got our tree, which then spent the obligatory 48 hours in a bucket of sugar-water outside the backdoor. The candles along our mantle mimicked the green and yellow painting of day eight. Double figures neared, then arrived.

Now, I no longer have an advent calendar, but the habit of countdown remains; I imagine little woodland scenes behind the door to each day; then I go looking for them. And in this season of small windows, I confess that I have been bad, a little. Each day, when I’ve picked up Thoreau’s journal, I have opened more than one page, read more than one window’s words. That turns out to have been unavoidable, because after December 4th, Thoreau recorded little of that December.

The largest door in my remembered advent calendar was, of course, that of the 25th; behind it lay the day toward which we had been counting. The 25th doesn’t appear in Thoreau’s 1860 journal, but the 26th bears mention of what must have been a present received on the 25th. That year Thoreau’s 25th opened to an owl: “Melvin sent to me yesterday a perfect Strix asio, or red owl of Wilson, — not at all gray.”

And, in the next paragraph, Thoreau’s fascination with the details of his gift are clear. As ever, the windows of Henry Thoreau’s calendar opened to the natural world, even when it was brought to him as a present. And this gift-owl was part of a local habit wherein Thoreau’s neighbors brought to him their findings from the woods when it opened its windows to them.

Long-eared Owl

In my long ago calendar, we too had an owl; it was painted into one of the early December days, its large eyes looking out in anticipation. I didn’t know then these little paintings of the owl and the fir tree and the snowy path led to the present I’d receive over a lifetime. But perhaps, when she selected that woodland calendar, my grandmother intuited it.

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Posted in Arts, Environment, General, Henry David Thoreau, Literature, Living Deliberately, Nature, News and Events, The Roost, Thoreau Quote

Up and Down – Slender Christmas Tree Story

Posted on December 9, 2015 by Sandy Stott | Comments Off

Got a white spruce for a Christmas-tree for the town out of the spruce swamp opposite J. Farmer’s. It is remarkable how few inhabitants of Concord can tell a spruce from a fir, and probably not two a white from a black spruce, unless they are together…How slender his [the villager’s] relation to the spruce tree! Thoreau, Journal, 12/22/53
In the town hall this evening, my white spruce tree, one of the small ones in the swamp, hardly a quarter the size of the largest, looked double its size, and its top had been cut off for want of room. It was lit with candles, but the starlit sky is far more splendid to-night than an saloon. Thoreau, Journal, 12/24/53

As a boy, I saw the arrival of our Christmas tree as a great event. It signaled a nearness that lit the nondescript (as I saw them) gray days of early December, when my trudge home from school exhausted what was left of the daylight. It was the stockpile of wrapped boxes around the tree that excited me, really; no religious fervor swept through out secular household. The nearest church was a half-mile walk away, and we didn’t make that walk in any season. But the season seized us all.

We bought our tree from a used car lot that gave up on autos after Thanksgiving. My father spent long (too long, I thought) minutes combing the lot for “the tree,” standing them on end, having me reach in through the prickles and hold the trunk upright, while he stepped back and did an appraising 360 of it. “This one’s good, dad,” I’d say, and he’d reply, “Set it down. Let’s look at that one over there.”

That changed when I turned eleven. That year, my parents, after much hemming and hawing, bought an old, wood-heated, unplumbed farmhouse in midstate New Hampshire. Some years and much work down the road, it was to be their retirement home, when they left the school that housed us. Across the road from the house was a deeply-furrowed, failed potato field. That summer, my father announced that that field would, some years future, fund my brother’s and my college tuition. “With potatoes, dad?” I asked.

Not with spuds, it turned out. Instead, during three hot days, we four planted 1,000 balsam fir seedlings, and, as we watered them against summer drought, we waited for them to grow. Each year, while we waited, we thrashed about our new woodlands, selecting a “wild” tree for Christmas.

That wait stretched over some years: college tuitions rose faster than the trees, and it wasn’t until I was a junior that we were able to sell some to the local Lions Club, which, in turn sold them in town. The few hundreds of dollars realized helped buy some gifts, and then, suddenly, the remaining trees were too tall.

As a new-fledged adult, or no-longer-kid, I still drove north each December, and, along the field’s fringe found a tree to cut, haul and decorate. At some point as I hovered near actual adulthood, I decided I would have one last tree and then stop cutting them. (Now, for example, we string lights on our Christmas driftwood, a pale pine branch stripped of all its bark and delivered by the sea, but with its fine fingers intact.)

Foundling lit

For this final tree, I looked up and thought, why not a treetop, with its symmetry and leader-finger pointing at the sky? Later that day, small bucksaw in hand, I climbed a 25-foot balsam (yes, one that had been a 6-inch slip in that long-ago July field) and figured on taking its top 8 feet. It was a bit of a struggle past the thick branches, and I had trouble staying close enough to the trunk to climb, but eventually I got there. This top will look good lit, I thought, and I set to sawing, holding on with one hand, cutting with the other.

As many will attest, the crown of a balsam fir is…well…its crown, and, as I completed my cut, I made sure to get a grip on the top 8 feet so they wouldn’t pitch over and land crown first, thereby fracturing and ruining the crown effect. (Perhaps you can spot trouble on the way.)

I finished my cut, lifted the 8-foot section up and tossed it out so its butt would fall first. Then, I looked at my hands: one held the saw, the other held nothing.

Like Wily Coyote, I had time to register that there was a problem; then I looked down. I grabbed for the tree, but already I was falling back. Even as I picked up speed, I had time to think, Wow, this is Darwin-worthy, or, if I wanted mythic, How Icarian. Then I hit the earth.

Post-descent note: an early 6-inch snow had arrived a day before, and so my landing was cushioned; also I hit a flat, mossy patch of ground, had only my breath knocked from me. I lay there looking up; the tree looked down. Since then, I’ve kept to the ground and every holiday “tree” has been a foundling.

Against the dark

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Posted in Arts, Environment, General, Henry David Thoreau, Living Deliberately, Nature, The Roost, Thoreau Quote