Wanders in the wintering woods...

The last lingering colours of autumn in the wood... and I feel as wordless as the woods sinking into the quiet of their wintering, so this may be a post of more pictures than words.

These pictures were from the last days of October... now in late November the leaves are a rich copper carpet underfoot and the branches are almost bare. There is the slow undertow of water in earth, entangled roots deep grasping, dying down of bracken and briar. Winter sun low and golden.

 The birch trees are so beautiful in every season, layered in light, delicately trembling...

Birch in late October

 Birch in November floating in layers of gold lace

'I whispered to the birch...
My breath crept up into a world of shudderings.
Was she veiled?
Herself her own fountain
She pretended to be absent from it, or to be becoming air
Filtering herself from her fingertips,
Till her bole paled, like a reflection on water,
And I felt the touch of my own ghostliness...'

- From 'Trees' by Ted Hughes

The Oaks too I love.
Our woods are full of tall ancient oak trees - mossy-coat giants breathing to their own deep slow rhythm.

 

 

 

And because I never got around to posting these next ones at the time, here's the woods back in September and some of our adventures in them...

Just had to show you these huge skies.....

Elswyth (above) loves the woods and often wanders her own way singing beneath the spreading boughs...

While Elora finds adventures around every trunk...!

A creative circle, a creative life.... of music, ink and oaks...

 I was inspired today to finally break open a new sketchbook and take up pen and ink by my lovely husband Tony... I'm always frustrated by how little time and energy remain to me for anything creative after the needs of work and children have have run their course for the day... but it is very easy to say 'I'm too tired, I'm not feeling focussed, I'm stressed, maybe tomorrow...' and then let the frustration mount.
I have felt more and more out of touch with my creative self as I let these things dis-empower me until I feel seized up and disconnected. I seem to live frustration. But this is the way my life is set out right now and there is no use waiting for time that will not come...
Tony showed me today that living a creative life need not be pushed aside by what we are obliged to do and bound by from day to day, that it is up to me to stop bemoaning my lack of time and energy and to make the most of the moments and hours I do have in the fullest way...

 I sent him home from work today - he's not been well and our air compressor bust a valve at the workshop so we could not underpin any frames anyway until its fixed. By the time I got home I found that even dosed up on antibiotics and feeling rotten, he had written another really brilliant new song on his 12 string, and I thought... if he can compose music and lyrics whilst feeling like that, then what really is stopping me from getting on with some drawing and writing? Answer of course, only myself.
Unfortunately by the time we returned home again from collecting the children he had forgotten
 precisely how the rhythm went, but hopefully it will come back, it was a good one!


This is a pen and ink sketch of my favourite Oak tree in the woods behind our house, and I really enjoyed drawing it, to have only ink and twisting patterns of bark flowing through my thoughts and watch it grow from the blank white page...

I went walking in our woods a few days ago in the dappled sunlight with a cool breeze that smoothed the lines from my brow as I walked and soothed my cares away.

The meadowsweet smelled as sweet as its name...

And a special treasure waited for me to find it in the field on my return. I'd been watching a big pale buzzard quartering the field this week now the hay has been finally cut, and she left me this fine feather. Beautiful isn't it - a gift from a Sky-dweller...

Hopefully I have broken the creative deadlock and I will make efforts to do something creative everyday, whether words or images, or even just ways of thinking.... to remind me, here is a poem I have on the first page of one of my sketchbooks that I like (I think I may have posted this before somewhere maybe?):

Remember

That just to have the eyes of an artist,

that can be enough.

The ear of a poet,

that can be enough.

The soul of a human

just pointed in the direction of the divine,

that can be more than enough.

I tell you this to remind myself,

Every gesture is an act of creation

Even empty spaces and silences

can be the wings and voices of Angels.

- By Michele Linfante

The Tale of Raw Head and Bloody Bones....

I'm very excited to announce that my brother in law's first novel is now available for pre-order, here! So of course I am shamelessly plugging it! Jack showed us the bound proof copy today which looks amazing.... quite a hefty volume too with Jack's name on every page header!
Here's how the publishers described Jack's book...

"An explosive, transgressive, ambitious, wildly imaginative debut from a major new writer"

How's that for an introduction! It's been so exciting watching Jack going through the process from being picked out by a major agent during his MA to finally seeing this work in print!

Here's the Synopsis from Amazon's site:

The year is 1750.

Meet Tristan Hart, precociously talented student of medicine practising under the legendary Dr William Hunter. His obsession is the nature of pain and preventing it; the relationship between mind and matter and the existence of God. A product of the Age of Enlightenment, he is a rational man on a quest to cut through darkness and superstition with the brilliant blade of science.

Meet Tristan Hart, madman and deviant. His obsession is the nature of pain, and causing it. A product of an age of faeries and goblins, gnomes and shape-shifting gypsies, he is on a quest to arouse the perfect scream and slay the daemon Raw Head who torments his dark days and long nights.

Troubled visionary, twisted genius, loving sadist. What is real and what imagined in Tristan Hart's brutal, beautiful, complex world?

I believe it will be released in January, can't wait to get my copy!

I am not in Jack's league, but I took my wordhoard gathering out into the woods the other day, notebook in pocket, eyes, ears and heart open to gather the skeins of thought blown on the wind.

 I took my camera too and must show you this Rhododendron hidden in a dark and shady hollow that seems more flesh than wood. Its the most human looking tree I have seen...

 The boughs look muscular, arched back, arms up raised, breast, armpit, navel....

 It made me think of all the myths and tales of people who have taken root and transformed into trees, either driven by grief or trapped by a curse or pitied by the Gods...

  Amazing nature, strange indeed...!
I ended up gathering some good stanzas that I thought to share here, but afterall I might hang onto them a while yet to weave into my story that is gaining its own flesh but needs yet to re-order its bones. I feel its becoming poised like an indrawn breath, leaves all a tremble waiting for the lightning to strike. Other things keep emerging too, wanting to become a part of the story, almost like it has a life of its own beginning to awaken. I think there will be much of the woods in this story...

 I seemed to have chosen the wettest, muddiest path home through the woods with my wellies that have split all the way round and are no longer water tight! But was truly rewarded by following briefly a jay, flitting bright-winged from tree to tree ahead of me, a jewelled flash of colour in a dancing game.
But best of all, in the low green valley between the enclosing arms of the woods, I saw two beautiful Buzzards sky dancing overhead.
They circled one another on languid wings before clasping each other's talons and spiralling gracefully together, down, down, down, faster and faster, with the sun flashing on their wings.... then at the last possible moment they separated and skimmed apart, wing tips brushing the very tops of the wheat. They circled away and rose back into the sky to soar one after the other above my head.
That I stored in a quiet place next to my heart.

 And before the drenching rains returned, we managed a last picnic tea in the woods after school yesterday beneath a gathering of oaks overlooking that same valley. Much better than cooking if you ask me!

Walking to meet the King of the Wood...

 Would you like to join me for a walk? It might be a long one mind!
 With the lovely fair weather we've been having lately we have had lots of soft summer evening walks before the children's bedtime... off through the woods and fields behind our house. The children have been in their element chasing sun-shadows beneath the leaves! Its done us all good.
This particular walk  happened on a rare afternoon off while the children were at school. We took a picnic and a flask of tea and headed off over the garden wall...

 Our new home seems to be all about Oaks... we have a younger Oak at the bottom of the garden, while the field we look out onto has entire clans of grand old Oaks striding across it. I love them! In this picture below you can just see our little house between the trunks...

 I love their twisting expressive gestures and the writhing textures of the bark...

 Across the fields and through the shimmering sea of wheat crop, eddies of sun shining on the swell of the breeze making the field sway in a constant  motion like the land's very breathing...

 And down into the leafy shade of our 'Badger Lane' - not its true name but one we like to call it by for the large neighbourhood of badger sets in its banks... I love the unfurling of fern fronds glowing like green candles in the sun...

A squirral's dinner table

 Come now into the woods... we walk all along its green feathered edges...

 ... and spy a tower through the trees...

We watched crows flying in and out of the small holes going up the tower's stem and could hear the rasping croaks of the young birds cawing for their parent's meal.

 This tower, a Victorian folly put up by the Lord Hilton of the time, reminds me of a tale and an illustration in a book of Grimm's fairy tales I had as a child, where to thwart some prophecy of disaster a King bricked up his daughter with only her Lady in Waiting for human company inside such a tower. Of course in the way of such tales when finally a passing hero broke open the tower, generations had passed and although she hadn't aged, the Kingdom of her father had crumbled and fallen to dust, his attempts at avoiding fate failed. I can't remember all of it or what it was called, but the picture of her emerging in bewilderment from the broken prison of her tower, dismayed at all that had passed to dust, stays with me still.
We just learned this week from a customer that a wealthy builder's merchant who once lived in the next row of terraces to ours, had at the time this tower was built by Lord Hilton, built one of his own that no longer stands today, just to outdo the Lord he made his tower taller and had a tea room underneath!

 Here's where we stopped for our picnic beneath a magnificent mighty Beech just beyond the Tower... would you like a cup of tea?

 The view across the valley from here is so peaceful, I'd like to come here alone to write sometime...

 Then home again through the birch wood, a gleaming net of sunlit leaves for a roof where a hushling leafsong whispers and sighs...

 On the way there is a true King of the wood, I was staggered when I first saw him, such ancient strength, such power of root and limb. This one below seems to me to have arms raised in some incantation or wild gestulation...

 And open armed, a powerful Monarch addressing his woodland subjects of Ash and Birch...

 At the top of this track (pic below) on the wood's edge we paused to look back down over the valley and watched a Kestral hunting below us. She took her kill to a treetop, when to our amazement a massive splay winged bird sliced into her skyspace to try to steal her kill... the sun flashed along a deep red back and there was no doubt that this was the enormous Red Kite that flew over our house when we first moved in!
But not to be outwitted, our tiny Kestral furiously mobbed the Red Kite with such tenacity that she actually saw him off back to the woods... just goes to show...!

 I hope you enjoyed coming along on our walk... thanks for joining in - it was too nice not to share, and we have a whole summer more of walks to look forward to and lots more picnics too!