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!
‘i been talking with the man in the mirror’… brutal cold day here, snow fell this morning, but didn’t settle, i am nursing my poisoned elbow and glugging tons of turmeric, cayenne and echinacea tea! thoughts, as often the case, turn to our Neanderthal cousins, wondrous hominids, if your european twixt 2 and 6% of our dna comes from them (substantially more if you’ve ever been a member of Oasis) during the last ice age, they roamed and even flourished on the frozen tundra around about here, they’d have been munching muchly on mastodon bone marrow… and would probably have made light of my enchanting grumblings trying to channel some of their qualities… obv sad that both those creatures are no longer part of this world, but just, how do you hunt a wooly mammoth? how! why with brawn and stubborness, yes, but much more importantly with ingenuity, guile and cunning… and beyond even that, with the help of our friends! being human, we amount to nothing without each other. mahayana baby
aw and of course, all i know of neanderthals… and much of what it means to be human, one of the best of books!
beauty dwelling on loss… ah the 5 of cups, always one of my favourite tarot cards, came up in a reading for a friend a few weeks back, then i was telling my sis about it, so have been mildly pondering minor arcana, so on a pleasantly worldly scale, none of the overwhelming grandiosity of some of the trumps, but to my eye also profound as a daydreamy cancerian i’m drawn to cups, the suit of water, of emotions… often the problem of procrastination and pondering… emminence grise is always keats, with his beautiful melancholia this card always makes me think of hamlet, the black prince, tho the Rider Waite Smith image is possibly a bit ‘scottish widows’ a figure contemplates 3 cups spilled, in the distance a bridge leads across a pleasant river to a tree thronged church, the sky is light grey and nondescript as the figure has its back to us we naturally associate with them, are drawn into their world, so are inclined to ask, what is it that we have lost? it’s actually a fairly benign card, in this moment she has neglected to notice the 2 cups left standing, focusing rather on that which is lost (‘And no more turn aside and brood / Upon love’s bitter mystery’), yet we all know that in time, she will pick up the remaining cups and proceed across the river to whatever new adventures will unfurl where will that path take us? from the image most likely a warm and human place So a gentle reminder that however bleak things may seem, it may well not be as bad as we imagine? even the forbidding cascading black cloak has subtle hints of blue and heart chakra green… Sorrow, but not quite despair… and if it is despair, which often it may feel like, that is not all the energies that are present curiously when i was thinking about the card on my bike ride i remembered it as 2 knocked over and 3 standing (the other way around!), so have tended towards a rosier interpretation it’s a useful card for anyone of middle age… waaggh so many things that have been lost! ha, just thinking now, theres something of gloomy introspection here, keep expecting her to glance around and smile… often when i am sad i go off to some amazing natural place, but despite the introspection, theres always a slight element of ‘hope someone notices how poetically beautiful i am’ i think many folk would be infuriated with her… ‘stop your moping, get on with it’, but hey the ‘live in the moment gurus of perpetual positivity’ are ten a tuppence (inflation used to be a penny) sometimes the past is important It is only cups, which, with a rich beguiling brew of dreams and memories, reminds us, that yes, there is sadness, but nothing which we truly love can ever be lost fractal hologram realm, sweet ponged perfume of the myriad petalled Rose of the Heart
big noses, big heads… a bust of a homeric hero… and er, a well chiselled lump o marble oh and with the beautiful hathor one, there was a somalian-esque museum attendant working nearby, she was rocking an amazing head of lush fountain flowing hair, egyptian queen regal!
triffid! er triffid-odil? crocodile? daffodil! had almost forgotten that yes green things do-eth grow… then up pops one of these nod head sunshine flavoured smile emojii’s… pic is a bit grainy, a la the big foot ness monster… but ya get the idea seems remarkably early? another sign that the seasons are scuppered… but at least hope that the long plod through darkness may not be entirely endless … lovely afternoon away from work up at the permie plot in stanmer, unite the beat were running a tactile and funky sound workshop too good fun, i was on lead watering can… slosh splosh rhythms, plus you get to soak all your fellow band members too!
snowdrops keep falling on me head… tra la la
James: Exciting ~ the wave will spread oop north from you before we know it. I’ll get my speedos out the loft 😄
murk. yes murk, presiding deity and chief emotion of the season the beach a rhapsody in beige, demerera sand, sea of uncouth sewage, sky? indistinguishable, but a tipple more grey yet, reluctantly shrugging off my dislike, soft landings, a glowing, form summons forth from the soup!… bask in this subtle candescence, world, and mind, abides in a richness of pattern … couple of pics, then head to lidl for chocolate, beer and pistachios! ha, yet, woke up this morning, with the intention of full heartedness, like when singing? then found myself sobbing whilst juicing vegetables no harm. sorrow, grief, loss – a certain sweetness, inevitable and natural part of our humanity… acceptable poster boy, for the horsemen of low mood? plus, the salt of tears adds a taste frisson to the brew of beetroot and broccoli stalks meditation, yoga, tax return, a robin singing atop a bush, first small stirrings of green, rummaged down, there amongst the mud. murk
aw hugh masekela has died, abiding memories of being on a kibbutz, aged about 20, hanging out with the SA hippies, Luke, Anna and Carrie, working in the kitchen… cranking Wimoweh up to full volume, grooving to the trumpet solos, flinging saucepans and dishcloths to each other in time with the rhythm! bizarrely all we ever listened too was pat metheney and hugh masakela. will be playing all day. RIP back to work!
