Month: January 2021

Galunaissance: Snowdrop Time.

On By seasonalightIn Neologisms, PhD, UncategorizedLeave a comment
Snowdrops. Photo by me.

 

Candlemas bells, Galanthus, you still sound just north of the Levant, drifting across the northern shores of the Mediterranean Sea. You came to me via the piety of Benedictines serving the faith in rejection of most else—they brought you from Renaissance Subiaco on foot or on horseback, in canvas bags tucked inside leather satchels— and they poured you out into the sunlight, then buried you in chimes a stone’s throw from their dark nocturns and early morning prayers. They did love their gardens, the monastics, as they loved God. They must have loved you.

The candles that were lit in these cold, stone buildings each February, where congregations gathered to beeswaxed pews from all corners of the shire to pray, now spill into the graveyards in the form I find you today on the Goggin, all the way from the Abbot’s fields of Lazio. Now you are the candles and the incense burnings along the lane, up on the mown verge. You ring far beyond the Church of England walls, and we are glad, pushing up the hill into the coppice. You are the flowing immigrant to enshrine the earliest of Spring, the short days of hibernation breaking into longer spells.

The light and the change-ringing is coming back, in you.

Your little bell-bulbs are set strong in the hedges and woodlands, and even your seed will sprout if the Queen Bumblebees are early. We love this kind of campanology, and the shadows you cast on crushed, rusted bracken, when the early sun rises low to the East, and your heads bow low to the breeze that swings in from the Baltic and then from the Irish sea. The glistening cells of your petals are clean vellum in that light. You are a bright manuscript awaiting attention; the illuminations of that life, the gold leaves at sunset.

Thank you for it all, dear snowdrops of the Galunaissance. Your familiar sound is a salve for me. If you didn’t ring, what terrible sign that’d be. My genes chime deep in the Brythonic, pre-Roman. But Celts too hailed from elsewhere, from the South. You are an Islander bell, just like me, and all incomers, aged and new. We all wash over these lands in the change-ringing. In the time we are here, best to care for it all.

 

Note: There is no certain origin, as yet, for the introduction of snowdrops into great Britain. I am making a calculated guess, is all.

Audio: MP4

 

Audio: M4a (apple)

Medambulare.

On By seasonalightIn Fluminism, Neologisms, UncategorizedLeave a comment

BarefootintheWoods_vm

We know the forces for good in walking as part of nature. And I do it myself. So I have been considering a word for it.

Walking doesn’t have to involve legs, let me just say. It might mean all kinds of devices as extensions of our bodies ~ enabling. Moving through time/space at walking pace.

Med ~ PIE root for “take appropriate measures”.  Also root for meditation.

Ambulare ~ latin for “walking”.

Medambulare ~ walking as welldoing for wellbeing. Also, the closer within nature’s flows we are, the growing fluministic love we have for all life, the more we will defend and protect. Soul food.

The School of Medambulare.

Verb ~ to medambulate.

As a study, medambulology.

 

See also “going in for a walk“.

 

 

 

Out-Foxed.

On By seasonalightIn FluminismLeave a comment
Wye foxes, out-foxed. Photo by me.

 

Foxing along the riverbank, you two orange drops stop still at the scar that leads to the water. Lowering your heads, take a deep draw of matter through your nostrils; this cleaved soil is where all the scents of the hill fall from its westerly face before hitting the water. The cold hangs low just here, sunk into the light on the edge, trapped between cracked willows. Much of it smells of duck.

Everywhere you turn, my eyes look to what you are interested in. I want to protect those things, for them and for you. We are all running with them, in flows.

The moorhens are struggling to hide from you: one is quiet beneath the fallen willow. There are the tiny beings we both cannot see, even with your amber cat-like eyes, drifting without and within. You can smell them, they are now in your blood; raise your noses in nods to the big, open sky.

But you aren’t bothered about the moorhens, are you. You might be if they were injured, or old. There will be young here in a few weeks time. This scar gathers new blood way below the brick and glass houses sitting on the ridge with their oil tar road; a bleak spine on the way to Mordiford.

Meanwhile, where the warm January rains scour into this red sandstone point source, you continue to cross it with little leaps on your padded paws every day. Weave your scent ribbons together in the air, nose all the mallards out from reeds into a wide, silver Wye-flow. It is a meeting place, of hunter and hunted, and all the lives that support the moment.

Further on, near the railway bridge, you meet a concrete edifice, where that human spine has twisted down to the water’s edge and the strip gardens have evaporated. The river is supposed to be protected from mortgages and building contracts. Yet they are poured and bolted here to blunt your linearity. Who gave them consent? You never did. Nor the willows, nor the mallards, nor the moorhens.

Out-foxed, you are forced back along the riverbank from where you came, and all the food has vanished. And that is your daily trouble. Where to go next? You are both quite thin.

My whole house now smells of fox. Your den, of hunger.

~~~

Audio:

Pridhem.

On By seasonalightIn NeologismsLeave a comment

 

A small act of resistance. Versions 1 & 2

On By seasonalightIn Ecophilosophy, PatientismLeave a comment
Hawthorn berries (or botanical pomes).

She’s there. I can hear the familiar peep of Blackbird, even under low light. I can just make out the colour brown and not black, and a dullish beak, so she is female.

Small by comparison to others perched in this same gnarly hawthorn, she spies all the berries as she flicks her tail feathers and hops from twig to twig. Mine is the quietest of observations I think is possible. Hers is an instinctive judgment of self within the whole floloca, and an internal vision of the safe movements required to get from where she is now to the red haw ‘pomes,’ to put one in her beak and then inside her belly. I call this patientism. Then, to fly in a straight line home. I love everything about this little bird. There is a glint in her eye.

Her presence is the result of the devotion of several birds before her. The crowd have scoured for bounty, found it, and tested it for ripeness. They have spread the news: they made signs. And now she knows to be here, that bright UV light, a fourth primary colour we simply cannot see, on waxy fruits that are good this Winter. The waxy shine on the berries helps. If you rub it off, birds don’t find them so well. Unlike some red berries, pomes, or drupes, these ones are safe to eat. They will help her to store energy in every cell of her body until early Spring, when she will thrive on worms and emerging insects, and lay her eggs.

I try to match her devotion, in that I stand perfectly still, staying present with her quickness and intelligence. I try really hard not to distract, not even to raise my phone lens this time. This food is too important.

I gaze at the jungle of twigs and am in awe of the birdish ability to fly through them with ease. Birds see unlike us ~  and this UV sight helps them to navigate complexity without injury. I wonder how UV reflects off of me.

Blackbird suddenly dives for the berries, plucks two from their skinny stems with her beak, and launches away with a familiar “tweet de tweet twit twit” melting into a darkening night. She leaves her droppings of earlier morsels (and seed) on the twigs below for lichens to grow. A small feather that grew soft on her breast this summer drifts to the ground to be foraged as nesting material by a long-tailed tit early tomorrow as the sun rises.

I am not afraid to tell you, I care for her, and all these lives, as I care for this place–a happy place–down on the banks of the River Wye in Winter. I care for the microbiota and the symbiotic relationships that sustain all the lives that exist right now, though the majority I cannot see nor hear. This love means more than one might think. It’s not a totally selfish act, but specific for this place linked in flows to all places, and little to do with my brain’s reward centres—though there is that. It’s just I understand that this flow is part of larger flows, that are part of the flows of life that distinguish planet Earth from all else yet known. I wish people would stop talking about entanglements. It’s still so separating–dividing–as if we are simply a knot to be undone. I was once a paraglider and learned to untangle entangled lines very quickly. After a while, it’s too easy. Death is something else.

The things that creep in and out of the water, the things that never enter the water, the things that never climb trees, share everything through drifts in the nagorasphere. It is felt by evoking the imagination. This is a process too. Being a fluminist is a process. Are there any objects, ever? All is process through time and space. I have come home to write about this encounter in all hope that others may wish to protect the interests of these beings as a community in a constant flow, and to remember that this flow between all lives is a true beauty to celebrate and protect. I hold this place, and this tree, this bird, these berries, and the lichen that will grow–these processes–carefully. I share with hope for a unified love of the exquisite nature of natural moments, everything joined at the hip, undivided, and for the continued liberty of life and the living. It is, in a way, a small act of resistance.

Audio:

 

Now for version two (second person, as suggested by my Director of Studies, PhD)

Are you there, with your familiar peep of Blackbird under low light? I can just make out your browns and a dullish beak, my avian kin.

Small by comparison to others perched in this same gnarly hawthorn, you spy all the berries, flick your tail feathers, and hop from twig to twig. Mine is the quietest of observations; yours is the instinctive judgment of self within the whole floloca; an internal vision of the safe movements required to get from where you are now to the red haw ‘pomes,’ to put one in your beak and inside your belly. You are a patientist. Then, to fly in a straight line to your January nest in the scrub thicket below the dairy at the end of my road. Everything about you is loved by me, little bird. There’s a glint in your eye.

Your presence is the result of a flight of magnificence, from misty Baltic birch slopes to this moment by the Wye slick and threatening the city with flood. The crowd who came before—some resident, others transient—have scoured for bounty and found it. They have tested it for ripeness. They have spread the news: they made signs. And now you also know to be here, pulled by that bright UV light, a fourth primary colour we human sisters simply cannot see on waxy fruits that are good this Winter. The shine helps. If it should rub off, you won’t find them so well. Unlike some fruits, these ones are safe to eat. They will help you store energy in every cell of your body until early Spring, when you will thrive on worms and emerging insects, and lay eggs.

Ah, sister, to match your devotion! Standing perfectly still, staying present with your quickness and intelligence, my distractions would be unwanted, not even to raise a phone lens. Your food is too important.

Your birdish ability to fly through a jungle of twigs with ease is for all to see, and fewer to notice. You see unlike me ~ and this UV sight helps you navigate complexity without injury. How would the expanse of North Sea shine as you fly high over rough waves and whale backs, concrete ports and all those chimneys, to where my human sisters there, the foresters, speak Latvian?

How does UV reflect off of me?

You suddenly dive for the berries—no sparrowhawk about—pluck two from skinny stems with your beak, and launch away with a familiar “tweet de tweet twit twit” melting into a darkening night. You leave droppings of earlier morsels (and seed) on the twigs below for lichens to grow. A small feather that grew soft on your breast this summer drifts to the ground to be foraged as nesting material by sibling-long-tailed tit early tomorrow as the sun rises.

I am not afraid to tell you, I love you, and all these lives, as I care for this place–a happy place–down on the banks of the River Wye in Winter. I love the microbiota and the symbiotic relationships that sustain all the lives that exist right now, though the majority I can neither see nor hear.

Fluministic love means more than they think. It’s not a uniquely selfish act, but specific for this place linked in flows to all places, and little to do with the brain’s reward centres—though there is that. My life is an expression of your way in the flow, you as part of larger flows, that are part of the flows of life that distinguish planet Earth from all else yet known.

To my human kin, less talking about entanglements, please, still so separating–dividing–as if we are simply a knot to be undone. My paragliding days were filled with untangling tangled lines very quickly. Things that are entangled tend to start separate and end separate, and after a while, it’s too easy. Flow runs into itself and all matter, even in death. This is the truth continuum.

Blackbird, the things that creep in and out of the water beside us, the things that never enter the water, the things that never climb trees, share everything through drifts in the nagorasphere, as you do. It is felt by evoking the imagination—you have it, like the herons and the little egrets. This is a process too. Being a fluminist is a process. Are there any objects, ever? All is process through time and space.

Now to write about you, in all hope that others may wish to protect your interests in this constant dynamism, and to remember that flow exists between all lives, the true beauty of life to celebrate and protect. This place is held close, and this tree, you, these berries, and the lichen that will grow–these processes–and care-fully. We share hope, in our kindship, for a unified love of the exquisite nature of natural moments, everything joined at the hip, undivided, and for the continued liberty of life and the living. It is, in a way, our small act of resistance.

 

Audio:

 

 

 

Trisense ~ an essay in three parts.

On By seasonalightIn Ecophilosophy, Fluminism, Neologisms, PhDLeave a comment

1. Emily
2. Lynn
3. Ginny

 

Emily

1

 

It’s barely possible to imagine the hem of her black or white dress resting close at the knee of a leather boot belonging to a soldier with so many children borne to another woman.

Metallic scents of expensive ink on expensive paper linger not in her room, but in her father’s office downstairs. She writes by hand, of course, in her bedroom, at a small, crafted desk and seated on a chair that is cut and waxed from some of the grandest trees of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. The glories of lilac and generations of bees flavour an ordinary lead pencil, maybe a sharp knife too, laid on the desk to carve a point. Her neck is long and pale, black hair wrapped into itself at the nape, and pinned.  The line of her spine drops plumb as she breathes quick and anxious.

In bitter winter, Emily looks down through her window at a horse raising his snow-dusted hooves through drifts, the wheelwright’s toil rolling behind. They travel along the road to a neighbour, delivering to the town’s elite. Her brother’s children, released from next door, laugh in these memory grounds beneath the cold, white blanket surrounding the yellow house. She’s observed robin search for his worm at the edges, pecking at the frozen leaf piles. Her secret lover makes boot prints through her father’s garden to his place of work. He glances up to her window with a wry smile beneath his flamboyant well-groomed moustache.

Spring has raced through this year—the bulbs bursting with colour in the borders—purple crocuses, yellow daffodils with orange hearts, and pink and blue hyacinths—and then abandoned her. How must she feel? The petals have shaped her thoughts into words, but she is anxious that it will all end soon. This keeps her in with her thoughts.

In a summer heatwave, the warmth of wet soil in clay pots, and spiced leaves, drifts into her hair, and Emily throws open the conservatory windows. A bead of sweat runs across her brow when the nights are sultry. And there is fresh-pressed lavender-scented linen on her bed when thunder comes, especially when the leaves redden and fall to the first frosts.

Emily writes each letter one at a time until they make words, and lines like tiny rivers on the back of used envelopes, and orange telegrams—Baltimore orioles—and any scrap paper she can find. There is a slant of light, of truth, yes; that bright New England kind that contrasts even the palest patterned walls and white skirtings.

She writes again in her beautiful garden. Blue jays are gifts, red cardinals shock. The loud warbles of tiny Carolina wrens float along the perennial borders of the Homestead under an orderly, painted, hickory fence. Even the Magnolia tripetala leaves swelling through the winds of the Fall gently vibrate that same, perfectly hand-stitched hem just when their rosy red fruit cones are in their prime.

For now, thanks to Austin, I read they flourish beyond Homestead northward about two hundred miles from their native range and a degree of centigrade.  You are all visionaries.

Emily mouths her own words quietly and sends them silently to a huge appetite denied in public spheres. The repression bubbles up, coded in decorum. Blood flows to her lips and through her fingertips. Skin on skin, under the skin of him, and her, then through the hand; hand through wood and lead; lead on manilla, and into her pocket. She can keep him there constantly, and no-one would ever know. She smiles, politely, at Lavinia.

If Emily had split a lark herself, somehow without harm, and peered into the microscope, she’d find her neighbour Lynn searching for the slanted truth, and source codes, and yellow, deep in a cell and the organelles. This place is where all the energy is, and all that lays in her pocket.

 

 

Lynn

2

 

She’s young on her wedding day—nineteen, like my Mum. She looks happy, swept into the folds of intellectual love. As a child, she has a bright mind free to roam the woods, unhindered. Now, it’s a strong will to study, and to be with him, and to inspire. They have a child together—Dorian. They divorce.

We divorced.

From the liberal arts to a passion for the inquiring, challenging mind, science history, she keeps her hair tied, or short. And she cycles to a humming lab where she dwells on processes, where the black and white microscopes stand in rows. Soon, she is eye-deep in the cell and the organelles through the glass—the glascella—where she splits the minutiae larks, to think and theorize a new understanding. It’s that slant of light falling across all those pale, patterned neo-Darwinists with her rolling-into-words, honey Illinois.

But she takes all her nature in with her; all of it. Worms, termites, termite gut bacteria, birds, slimes, eukarya. And she knocks on the doors of the journals and they turn her away, until one day, the world just gently shifts on its axis. Life, it is proven (until disproved) is to be less anger, after all, and more love; an inter-kingdom of unions and sex and symbiosis, not war.

And Lynn falls in love again. We all do if we’re fortunate. I did. Two more children, all now flourishing, then another divorce—she’s a dedicated first-class scientist and author.

She writes her notes by hand/in type. Spirochetes spin their corkscrews in white cups, and she looks to all those men again and gently laughs. Her time is big moves, from Chicago Chickadees to the Dark-eyed Juncos of Berkeley and back again to the East. And more, to NASA, to Russia, to international councils of men, and time with mics in studios, and interviews with great writers. She’s blazing trails to lecture halls the length of the land.

Finally, Lynn finds her way home to Emily’s town and the grandfather’s college, where she is content as a botanist can be. She has moved next door to those Dickinson memory grounds. And they meet somehow over the hickory fence. Spring has raced through very fast this year—the bulbs bursting too late in the borders—and as Lynn writes through finger tips and plastic keys and memory boards in a summer heatwave, a bead of sweat runs across her brow. This is her place now, her Amherst. It’s friendships, yes Lovelock’s rainbows on Hungry Hill, and the geosciences where they also make art for her, and this is magic for her: an Earth so in sym as to be the sum.

As her children’s children laugh, her love grows for the sauce code in decorum written on manilla and chocolate wrappers just next door; Emily’s yellow. I’m listening to you, Lynn, as you swim forever wild in your Puffer’s Pond.

 

 

Ginny

3

 

I have two lives. One is before Mum’s suicide and the other comes after that. Before, I am steered by the great events of those I love. After, comes a life of trauma and healing. In healing, I emerge, though trauma is never a singularity.

As a child, I have a bright mind free to roam the Herefordshire woods and streams, and listen to larks, unhindered. My hair is long, until the chemo, tied back into a wild bunch. We meet at college, where I design with black ink on whiteboards and read Zevi. He maps gold and reads Lopez. Then, in Welsh borderlands, he gives me tandems, and our dog, and daily walks. And I know these hills like the memory grounds. After walks under rainbows on Hungry Hill, our daughter comes, and life seems the best adventure. We go to that New England light (Chickadee) and wade through Pacific waves under the Aotearoan cloud (Tui). And I still love him for that. Big moves.

But the after comes, and terrible trauma brings anger and control, and it takes a long time in the city between the Taff and the Ely for me to leave. But I do, and I find new, deep love. And so to this intellectual bird love—of  Cardiff Dippers and Albert’s Lyrebirds—I too receive a wry smile—and the hems and leather boots are in symbiosis with visions of a new epoch itself. I have scribbled in pencil on manilla envelopes our word, mirrors. They also know before and after, a lonely place to be.

How dull would life be without you, Emily and Lynn, and I pocket all the slant light and symbiogenesis I can mine in your words, forming my own thoughts and words, pushing all the hickory fences back. I mouth my own words to a huge appetite denied in public spheres. Love is never sentimentalism. Blogs (light of all the seasons) are my instruments—plastic keys— and Twitter, though there is control there and it can make me unhappy. There’s a beautiful book too, thanks to my friend Riechmann, in a language my daughter knows well. And I relish, too, the visceral art with Lyons under Welsh sleet ~ ah, the Elan horses.

You see, I grew up in my mother’s rambling garden with hardly an edge into the wild of the wood and the streams. And I tended a glasshouse, just like Emily, the warmth of wet soil in clay pots, and spiced leaves in my hair. I climbed mountains and even flew them (the Red Kites). But it was Dad who always tasked me to question. We cared for each other in the after, and I held his hand as he breathed his last. I miss him.

And to abandonment and cancer ~ how must I feel? I am still here above red sandstone, standing at the confluences. Deep down here, there are all the five Kingdoms in symbiosis spreading to cover the entire Earth. I can’t tell you, Lynn, what ten thousand miles away means, and what ten thousand miles back feels. Straight down, beneath my feet, all of time. And then to record them, and the loss ~ each mile ~ with my tiny, black mic, pinned to my pale, patterned blouse.

Daughter’s voice has grown strong in justice and language, like the river, and I learn from her. Meanwhile, I wait and write, and walk each day to Kingfishers and Goosanders, with Heron-like patience; at other times none at all, like the gleam of a Peregrine’s strike. I live Rilke’s questions, searching along my own Amethyst Brook or Connecticut—The Edw and the Wye—  imagining all the spirochetes, searching too for the light beneath my own versions of Magnolia tripetala and all their subsoil mycelium lovers and sunshine. Nothing is separate: All is flow, my rivers, yellow, and that gentle shift of the axis.

Lynn, you asked me for new words, a source code, so I give them to you. Emily, I understand you and the blood to the lips. I feel like we are the lichen on my Mum’s grave, the trisense; it takes three in symbiosis—the alga, and two types of fungi  (an ascomycete and a newly identified basidiomycete yeast), but all three must have that colour.

 

End.