Night Walk: Part III

Posted on December 28, 2014 by noellevignola Standard 4

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The skies have just a few wispy clouds accenting a moon a third full. In the distance a blue glow eminates off the Hogbacks now fully swathed in a winter blanket of snow. Stars wink in the depths of the heavens and it is surely a perfect winter’s night.

The moon is enough to cast my shadow long upon the snow. Unfortunately, not bright enough to highlight the black ice leaving me committed to walk on the crunchier, and thus, louder snow. Years of yogic balancing now my only means to avoid landing loudly on my backside as I head down the north path. I fear I’ll see no wildlife tonight, but I am not the only noisy beast out this evening. Children whose parents are dining and drinking in the warmth of the house down the lane have taken to playing on the porch in the Christmas lights. It is clear they delight in hearing their giggles carry across the pond and echo off the houses on the other side.

I shift direction and take the deeper path Northwest and plunge into the eight or so inches of snow. My nose may be frozen but my feet are warm and dry in my trusty winter boots. I pass the house of the spirit fashionistas aglow in white Christmas lights and the ambient warmth of stylish living room lamps. I have been passing this well dressed house with its beautiful furnishings and art work for more than a year. I have never seen a living human inside it or decorating the outside. I have given this an embarrassing amount of effort, craning my neck and walking nearly into their yard. I have come to the conclusion that the ghosts of dead editors for Architectural Digest live there.

Once at the open fields and the marshes the world changes again. Deep snow and black tree trunks pepper the hillside and the moon turns it all into a storybook scene. Shadows of tall, snow-capped cattails break up the marsh in patches of midnight blue and I hear the ice crack on the farthest side. My coyotes are nowhere to be found and in this light I could see a mouse cross the marsh ice. I stay here a long time until my fingers ache with the cold.

Night Walk: Part II

Posted on December 27, 2014 by noellevignola Standard 7

Enchanted Nature’s Facebook page

Free Bing Photos

From Enchanted Nature’s Facebook page and Free Bing Photos.

On Christmas the snow had been more ice. It came down tapping the forgotten leaves of fall still hanging on the trees. Tap, tap, tap, but not like rain. More like rice thrown at a wedding, softly. It was the only sound I heard along the trail. Tonight, the ice now lays underneath and my feet crackle as I walk, but the night is much quieter under the fluffier flakes of this snow fall. At first, the cold air has me withdrawn into my coat, but as the trail winds on I slip out further from the hood, a rabbit leaving it’s burrow. The sad tragedy is we have too many lights at night and so it is never truly dark. The wonderful benefit of this sad tragedy is the city lights cause the winter storm clouds to glow. A ghostly sight of orange, gray and cream colored apparitions floating across the sky. I sometimes feel as if I have entered a surrealist’s painting, with the way shadows move at night. As a child, I remember standing very still in a wood, turning my head ever so slightly to make out the shadows along the wooded path I traveled for home. Now, there is so much light, it creates a very different sort of play of shadow both on the snow and along the horizon. Obvious and yet peculiar all at the same time.

The wispy clouds moving steadily eastward are only eclipsed in beauty by the two coyotes who dash across my trail. Unlike foxes, coyotes are not as curious about humans. A fox, if you stop to watch it, will often turn and watch you. Even moving a bit closer to sort you out. Not a coyote. They are wild through and through. It will be mating season soon and the pair travel close together. One almost as black as the night should be and the other like the cattails they run through across the frozen marsh. They stop deeper in the wood and watch me. Cattail doesn’t move and stares back at me. I feel, for some irrational reason, that he must move first. My breath sounds uncommonly loud standing there. I imagine he is listening to every breath, while I pretend to stand a statue. I realize he is much better at this and likely in need of a meal. I am delaying their night hunt, which given the snow may be more work and so I move on.

The night is always the same. It holds the same serene pace it always has had. No, it is me that changes along the path. I grow increasingly peaceful and in harmony with the night and the cold and the slowly falling snow. I wonder at times that I am alone. The nights are so beautiful like this and yet there is not a soul in sight. This possibly, more than anything, has drawn me out again and again each evening, no matter the cold. The night is mine and outside of my coyote friends rarely interrupted. So even as I am perplexed by man’s loss of interest in the mysteries of the night, I am as delighted as a child to have these snowy footfalls all to myself.

Merry Christmas

Posted on December 25, 2014 by noellevignola Standard 3

Re-posted from Enchanted Nature Facebook page

May today bring each of you good cheer, loving company, warm meals made with care and enchantment to carry you into the New Year. It is an honor to be in your company.

Christmas Eve

Posted on December 24, 2014 by noellevignola Standard 9

Re-posted from Enchanted Nature’s Facebook page

Christmas Eve is upon us, laden as it so often is with darkness, mystery and old stories. The shopping is done and the fires are now lit. The last of the decorations find their way to the tree and the scent of meals half prepared for Christmas day fill the house. There is a wonderful quiet that comes on this night. Children are for once off to bed eager for the morning. Exhaustion from the preparations leaves us hole up in chairs sipping brandy or venturing out into back lanes for one last, silent walk in the winter’s air. Candles remain lit upon tables and music, rather than television fills the late hours. There is a pause on this night not felt really at any other time or evening of the year. A willingness to be quiet and allow the mystery of our spirit to take over our otherwise rational minds. We can’t explain it really. Just a feeling of something larger than ourselves, even for those who don’t celebrate the holiday. A “something” about this silence that affects most of us in a wondrous way. Leaves us with the ever so subtle feeling that maybe, just maybe, we are so much more than we think we are.

Peace, goodwill, and joy to you all. May the mystery of this night fill you with the spirit of the child you have, in fact, always been.

Prairie: Series II

Posted on December 22, 2014 by noellevignola Standard 2

Rabbits, field mice and voles scurry in the brush. If I sit long enough the prairie dogs quit their yelping and the rabbits return to nibbling on winter grass. The crows come and go. They walk amongst the scrub and short cacti with a strut fit for a banker. They seem fat this year, as do the prairie dogs. All that summer rain has left them all fat on seed and grass. They do not rejoice in their bounty anymore than they complained in the drought. They make good what is given them and leave it at that. My lesson for today. Make good on what is given me and today it is an open field, a decent winter sun and fat rabbits.

The Bench

Posted on December 19, 2014 by noellevignola Standard 19

Couple at Johnston Lake: Photo by Noelle

It is not a loss of passion toward the end. At this level, you appreciate the subtlest gifts of time together. You need do little more than sit in silence enjoying the geese and you are made a bit more whole.

Prairie: Series I

Posted on December 18, 2014 by noellevignola Standard 9

I came to Colorado for the Rockies rising powerfully off the prairie and capped in white much of the year. I love to hike as well as sit listening to wildlife moving amongst the trees or along cliff ledges. Thus, I often hike alone. Curiously, though, as the years have passed it’s the prairie that draws me most. I love the openness and the huge skies. Rolling vistas, beautiful grasses and skeletal tumble weeds. I can meditate for sometime on the waves of tall grasses moving as a great ocean to prairie winds. Driving along an interstate or passing a field you know well on your way to work can leave you thinking its all the same. Nothing new there. You have to spend time in fields and prairie land to discover their subtler beauty. Mountains are easy. They’re grand and spectacular in their sweeping majesty. They are beauty without effort and I’ve discovered, as a result, there’s no effort from me in that. No growth. No push in my vision to see more. The prairie pushes my understanding of what beauty is. It asks me to work for it. It demands I look more closely.

Story in Mud: III: Clarity

Posted on December 12, 2014 by noellevignola Standard 8

Mud: Photo by Noelle

I touch the surface with my fingers. I find it’s kind of an artist’s Braille. There’s something about the craggy mess, especially when there is moist gooey mud underneath that captivates me. Sometimes I wonder if what I’m really looking for is a picture of Elvis or Jesus to appear. “Look… Don’t you see? Right there next to the half squashed dragonfly and below the willow stick. If you turn your head slightly to the side you’ll see President Putin’s face.”

I don’t know what I’m after honestly. A great masterpiece in earth and water. In my smartphone apps you can clarify a picture, which is to say you can pull forth all of the color and light available in an image with much higher clarity. It doesn’t add what isn’t there or detract, it just shows you the mass of what is available. I’ve had photos of pink and purple mud, blue green and so forth. The camera pulls up the conglomerate of minerals and rock debris in the mud. Sometimes it has algae mixed in or red stone sediment and voila! we have something completely new.

Clarity in all things is like this. The clearer I see myself, circumstances, other people and events, the more I perceive the depth of light and color in each. I see who I am, really, in the presence of all of these other things. I understand the mineral make up of my mud. A great masterpiece in earth and water.

Night Walk

Posted on December 11, 2014 by noellevignola Standard 8

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We think splitting an atom is the most powerful thing we humans can figure out or do. I’d argue breaking a habit is. Without focus and discipline changing habitual patterns isn’t just difficult it’s nearly impossible, because the very nature of a habit is you don’t have to think about it, you just do it. This is great for driving to work in the morning, but if you have a habit of eating too much or never giving yourself nice things, it’s a problem not a help. Of interest, however, is inside our well-worn habits is the power of celestial black holes. When we break out of them it’s a bit like releasing the energy of a quasar. This, of late, has become my focus. I’ve challenged myself to break a few of my own.

Tonight I went for winter’s walk. I often step out onto the deck and think I should walk the neighborhood before bed. The air is crisp and clean and it always feels like there’s magic in all that darkness. Invariably though, I talk myself out of it with such pressing matters as there’s lunch to pack for the next day. I’m in cozy socks. It’s late and I have to be up early. I decided tonight I would make a different choice. On death beds all over the world are millions of people lamenting the night walks they never took and the sunsets they forgot to appreciate. That shall not be me, I decided. I left on my cozy socks and slipped on my sneakers.

The air was, as I expected, crisp and almost electric. Christmas lights dot almost every house and as I walked along the lake the colored lights lit the water. I heard the geese commenting on my passing, more than I could actually see them. At this hour, there is so much quiet that the subtlest rustle of leaves could be heard. I held my keys, as even their jingle in my pocket seemed a marching band. What I think may have been an owl flew over my head as I stood on the bridge that crossed the creek. The coyotes in the field beyond the houses announced the start of their night hunt and I listened to them yelp for several minutes before moving down the path into the wood.

To experience the night, it’s movement and its odd manner of light; stars, a crescent moon, street light reflections, is to awaken something truly mystical in your soul. I am certain it was this mystery that so often whispered to me as I stood on the deck. A mystery in me I can only feel when I walk in darkness and allow the sounds of the night to move around me. There’s power in allowing yourself to be partially blind. To accept the way isn’t all that clear past the next few steps. That you can be happy in all the black uncertainty. It’s curious that when we meditate it can feel hard to silence oneself, yet take a walk along a deserted lane at night and it is as if your skull has become the most beautiful chapel, your thoughts saffron wrapped monks bowing to the moon.

Little Light

Posted on December 10, 2014 by noellevignola Standard 10

Prickly Pear at Bear Creek Lake: Photo by Noelle

Old limb: Photo by Noelle

Little lights dot the slopes in the crevasses of rocky crags and the meetings of hillsides. I see them winking on the edges of prairie grasses or from a thin strip of spring ice. So small a thing yet it holds me fast on the trail. I will change positions, lie in mud, and contort myself ridiculously to capture even a wisp of it. Mindfulness at its best. Who doesn’t love a sweeping landscape and my camera is full of those, too, but the little lights demand my full attention. They don’t come obviously or easily. Flickers on baby’s breath and shafts seeming to eminate outward from an inner source I can’t see. Prairie land in particular is full of such light. In all that rolling sameness are small plants acting as beggars to a regal sun.