froth of white blossoms galore on the hillside, sacred to venus aphrodite, i’ve been thinking to garner them for the last week… but was waiting until the moon was waxing rather than waning… when you don’t know what your doing always helps to make it up
broadly take some scissors and snippety snip the flowers and tender young leaves, above the woody bit basically, i was nibbling blossoms non stop and such a refulgent pong!
shove flowers into a demi john, souse with the cheapest wodka lidl can provide… hide in a dark cupboard for a month (tincture not me!)
Rachmaninov! you know its going to be good when named after a melodramatic Russian piano noodler!
ah i love writing the same post every year! seasonal circular… but hawthorn, may, member of the Rose family, the best medicine for a broken heart and most other cardiovascular conundrums!
oh listening to this its got that ‘all by myself’ melody, blooming Rachmaninoff ripping off 1970’s soppy ballads
possibly one of the dullest snaps i’ve posted (even by my not exactly exalted standards!)… here/now up in the loft next to my computer …. but but but… also one of the more exciting! seeds galore! the perplexion of potential… too da max! nature abhors a vacuum (i’m not a great fan of hoovering myself)… all being well… with a little sunshine, periodic watering and my singing to them … rainy night in georgia being todays fave in a few months, all will be glut and abundance. sow seeds now! tis a revolutionary act! this batch toms, chilles, courgettes and lettuce… mostly stuff which has loitered forgotten about from last years crop, that and some from the marvelous seedy sunday this year i am cheating slightly… shop compost, my home produced wonder stuff… size of a cow… will be for when they go out into the cruel harsh world as with mine theres always random nettles growing through… too many years of nibbling away playing lettuce or vetch… usually vetch i retch anyway eventually it will stop raining? easter blessings y’all xx
katie: This is definitely not dull!! It’s brightened my day no end…the seeds sown and Randy Crawford on a rainy day in Seaford. Thank ou
ha! better than a Seedy day in Rainford… my pun-tastic brain wants to say, hope your all getting on swimmingly!… pop in some day soon, and will keep ya posted if theres any socials up at the garden xx
hannah b: Of course you know Katie Hall, Richard Basgallop ! Haha. I also like your seedy pic, need to get going with mine bit involving a toddler in the rain makes it more of a daunting task than usual… 😉 ! Need to meet up soon xx
ha! my tentacles are everywhere… get going with your sprouting, tho yeah must be many toddler-esque distractions! we should all rendezvousvous… now that all be spring xx
megan: I have started lots of mine too. Nothing I can think of provides more hope and optimism than this!
growing galore! life fills me with profound astonishment… with the caveat that just as well i don’t have to survive solely on the shoots i tend, ha… hope all be glorious in that most beautiful of cities xx
‘Our Angel and Lady of the Dance’ I love St Nicks, a beautiful, ancient, sacred place and a fab space in which to boogie. we are blessed It’s fun, at the start of the evening to unlock, then swing back, the old wooden door… Church as a place of Sanctuary else last thing at night, by the light of a single candle, hollering a solitary Ommm up into the vaulted ceiling above It’s a church of many marvels, rich in objects and stories, from numerous ages for today tho i want to center stage this beautiful and occasionally overlooked statue (well technically i guess it’s a relief) apologies i had to teeter atop a chair to take this snap with my phone It’s from 1830, a memorial of a wealthy aristocrat to his dead wife… and hey, thats all i know 1830 tho, the year also that the Prince Regent (George IV) died, the domes of the pavilion are still fresh, the smell of wet plaster… and brighton is swinging, in the pomp of it’s first and most preposterous heyday! whats more, tho a country of horrendous inequality… the Chartist movement will rise up within 10 years… it’s a land burgeoning with confidence and power. the Railways are coming. swagger. not a place that would entertain the notion of kitsch. so why should we Our Aristo had probably been on the grand tour to the eye opening wonders, the classicist glory of Rome and Italy… in fact I’d guess the marble was carved in Italy, seems too delicate and exquisite for the more artisan efforts of contempoary English carvers? I feel he probably loved his wife, and was geninely mourning her, that she was young, beautiful and possibly died in child birth The sculpture is also profoundly influenced by Romanticism… Keats, Shelley and Byron are all also dead… but it is they who hold sway on the imagination of the day… ‘half in Love with easeful Death’ the ethos is very much one of beauty, eroticism and yes death… to the modern mind, it’s a curious blend… look at the diaphonous nature of her gown… that sensuality probably won’t be seen again till the 1970’s ponder too the mastery of the carving, how do you tap away and create transparent garments in reluctantly yielding stone? the poise, mastery and focus to create such a piece… one wayward chip and the whole thing crumbles to catastrophic ruin… no payday then ha! so much of context, what do i feel? Is it about transformation? the angel is female, mbe our heroine is like a caterpillar transforming into a butterfly, the transcendance of flesh into spirit but no, for me, of course, it is a dance… yes, the woman is rightly reluctant and fearful of her death, yet there is a softness of touch, the way the angel reaches her hand to linger gently on an arm, a supple intricacy of movement… but mostly it’s the yearning… in their faces, reflected, as i dance, here in my soul i sat by the pillar the other day, a little bored, it happens sometimes, and watched the statues from a distance, through the cheerful turmoil and press of bodies so yes usually in my stodge plod movements i am clodhoper, quagmired in earth, marooned in the dreary realm of judgements and thought… but for all of us, sometimes we catch the breeze of spirit and soar high above yep yep plump plum lavish of words, poesy… but hey they’ve stood there nigh on 2-0-0 years… world flows through us, hopefully they will remain when we, and all that we cherish and love, are but cheerful worm fodder wah gwaan! a sculpture languid with obdurate beauty
ginger turmeric ninja! before my morning bike ride and the mostly pleasant work drudgery… juice of fire! juice of immortality! ha, well certainly a colour and zing beyond even… err… custard! and look my mung bean sprouts are on the cusp o erupting… so eager to nab a suitable selfie i neglected to notice i’d dunked a stray dread in the juice somehow tatses better slurped from an antique 90’s crusty dread?… and yes, yes ninjas may sometimes require stealth, but this one has rather succumbed to louche flambuoyance
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ha! mostly the turmeric has stained ma soul… but with that colour, well, i’m embracing my inner oompa loompa this week the juicer has taken a mustard bashing, but i mostly like things only when their a little dog eared and battered
yep, yep dread slurped, plenty of vintage micro nutrients and strength particles sequestered away in there!
and turmeric nodules always make me think of some weird alien caterpillar grub like larvae… one day will hatch into a dragon! x
Sapna: Marigolds -an excellent idea! You are a turmeric master
brass monkeys out there today! an easterly that will eat yer face. bone gnaw, but buffeted by the gentle, sporadic swirl of dandruff snow… dandruff, such a 1970’s affliction! all middleaged men, leer sleazy in polyester suits. anyway quaff of ginger, shoo kids out of the house about their various missions (a miserably hungover son, i so don’t miss that). Then don muddy gardening glove gauntlets and hop on my bike! such a joy to be outside… bike finally mended… after a few weeks of it being in a state of disrepair, strewn across the kitchen. hurrah! the few folk you meet all greet you with a wave, everyone like an over enthusiastic volkswagen beetle driver… a jogger, 2 stray dogwalkers… and one fellow, towell, jam roly polyed under his arm, clearly away to cavort in the sea! blimey! … oh and the icicles! they’re from the weekend… saw them dangling above me, like the proverbial sword of damocles, from the cliff top on high scrambled up to get a better look, and grok the view, interestingly, if i’d clambered over the lip of the cliff from above, i’d have been terrified, but as i wriggled up from below felt rather safe anyway don’t let the icicles skewer you from above, trepanned, soul opened to the endless flood of spirit from above …euripides tho he was killed when an eagle dropped a tortoise shell from on high upon his bonce! greek tradgedy … as often the way, nothing to say, but do enjoy saying it
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ah yes, every morning all of us sing the world into being! x tho actually i went to singing on saturday, huge fun as always, yet my contribution, even after umpteen years practice remains a dismal caterwaul… sometimes i hit the right notes, but being a little tone death i’m not always sure when that fortuitous event happens
ooh only just noticed this was up! not everyday you get to play lead watering can in a hair metal video! 🤘 RAWK! 🤘… well not exactly pleasant, serendipitous congruency: a few weeks back, on a sunny winters day up at the permaculture plot in stanmer… where i sporadically volunteer… Em and Malik, unite the beat, friends from our ‘share your story’ group were leading a workshop in found sound huge joyful fun, we got to flap away at the spinach, bash and bang on everything! then blindfolded meander about the plot, navigating by being tuned in to the aural properties of the space …and the result, this beautiful, lovingly hand crafted promo video for the plot ah to be working in community outside in such a beautiful space on a lovely day! on with me code
season of the hazel catkins, bringing a genuine benign softness to the woods at this time of year, apparently sacred to brigid, irish goddess of inspiration (ajna and aquarius?)… and her feast just passed a pleasant weekend in the sunshine at the lovely festie at emerson… such a beautiful sacred landscape around there at one point i meandered off for a sunset walk, found a swing hung from the branch of a huge old beech tree to play on, in the low evening sunlight you could see how every clump of grass was connected by the glorious shimmer of spiders skein so much else happening in the world, whilst we blunder bumble along with our tired thoughts ephemerera continually arising into being then fading away again. a delightful granualarity… if we but find the stillness to watch
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…………… … and to babble further… i quite like it that folk seldom read far the next day a family of rats playing in the garden, steiner biodynamic rats at that!… of course quell the initial loathing, ancient enemy, man and rat have been neighbours for ever both our familiar and similar, alike in their curiosity and querrelousness… normally you just see the hairless tail of one scurrying away from view but these just hopped about, poking their noses into everything. dudes!
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a dusk time stroll up towards the castle, i rounded a corner just at the moment a fox pounced out, the whirr of feathers midst the melee, as 3 plump game birds scrambled skywards
Rufus exultant. Magnificent. for a second he paused, then nonchalant turned tail and bounded back into the thicket. not your mangey down town fox, but tawny sunset gloss of pelt
always in the woods there is the sense, if your imagination allows, that just around the bend, the laugh, the tantal-o-o, the joyful shrieks of the wild wild fairy hunt
but with hazels, they always seem like the spirit of a sweet young boy… and with him, forever nearby, walks the white lady of the woods, snowdrops and anemones flowering around her gown
oh and spent some of lunchtime reading about hazel in my tree book… tree of quicksilver wisdom!… the salmon and the legend of Finn McCool… probs some of that in these links? … starts with the yeats, from the christy moore song too
out take from grand budapest ‘otel, or some other lushly coloured scene from wes andersons* oeuvre!
me, magnificent in ‘not nettle’ green outside maries palace o marble… tried adding a filter… but all of them merely decreased the glamorous sumptuousness… so just plain
*apostrophe somewhere here… but, for me, a bit like grammar pin the tale on the donkey!
