Wassail, traveler, and welcome to The Gable Grey -- a place of retreat, of renewal, and of resistance: a tree-shaded refuge in Dark Times. Now pass the threshold, and rest from journeys! For a cold wind is blowing; and here, if you wish, you may hear tidings of the world without...

Monday, November 28, 2011

Foradan

Literally "north-man."  Here, the meaning is more Winter-man.  Sindarin, of course.  Simply Sindarin.  I did not bother to look up the Quenya.

The trees slip deeper into sleep with each passing day.  Some still hang on, mainly the younger ones.  Their green leaves will be frostbitten soon, and they will not forget it.

I slow down as well.  I am done for the year.  No more big projects, aside from getting through this month's madness, to quiet, contemplative January.  I am Foradan, withdrawn as the December sun.

I realized that I have given myself a divorce from my country.  I hardly recognize it any more.  I am more familiar with the natural world:  the ebb and flow of natural energies, natural rhythms, sighing earth, listening trees, seasonal suns, and my own place within the great Ring.  Doctrine, dogma, rhetoric, debate, are all rendered pointless, insignificant, by the whir of a chickadee's wings.


Wassail, friends.  And bon hiver.
Whiles carried o'er the iron road,
We hurry by some fair abode;
The garden bright amidst the hay,
The yellow wain upon the way,
The dining men, the wind that sweeps
Light locks from off the sun-sweet heaps --
The gable grey, the hoary roof,
Here now -- and now so far aloof.
How sorely then we long to stay
And midst its sweetness wear the day,
And 'neath its changing shadows sit,
And feel ourselves a part of it.
Such rest, such stay, I strove to win
With these same leaves that lie herein.

-- William Morris, from
"The Roots of the Mountains"