travel // when I die

Tags

2019, 7*, accountability, afterlife, afternoon, architecture, bardo, being, black, brick, brown, buildings, capitalism, century, clouds, crane, data, death, decades, dedication, depth, doing, echo, fields, floating, green, ground, Have, height, horizontal, identity, industry, interdependent origination, iteration, length, lintel, London, magenta, mind, notice, orange, passing, perspective, pillars, presence, purple, rain, rainbow, red, reference, ripple, rooftops, russian vine, samsara, sandstone, sapphire, self-cherishing, self-grasping, silence, sill, sky, sound, speech, Thames, thought, tide, time, train, travelling, trees, Uckfield-London line, utility, walls, white, world, writing

                                                                                travel

                                                                                noticing
                                                                at all is a product of
                                                                shifted perspective
                                                                related to behold;

                                                                when I’ve nothing to write
                                                                I’ve lost any perspective,
                                                                cornered by both these walls
                                                                I’ve walked along

                when I die
                this mind will no longer whorl about this pinchèd self
                in a world of diminished return and profusion of iteration

                                                                cranes atop
                                                                pulling them further up and up
                                                                from the ground on which they
                                                                balance on receding point;

                                                                communities of them
                                                                each taller than the last and the next
                                                                all along the wharfs
                                                                of endless account

                it will be expansive
                high and up in industrial and sandstone sky
                it will fathom all the deep of brown kelp in shifting purple

                                                                kilometres long
                                                                courses of brick
                                                                grimed black and utility-studded
                                                                updown onoff foothold and wire

                                                                ripple along nicely
                                                                across right-angled centuries
                                                                and occasional shot bolts
                                                                of deepest russian vine

                with no sound
                save diminishing echoes of a pleading late self
                having nothing left to refer to and nothing left to here, and

                                                                believe it or not
                                                                a rainbow exponential
                                                                to the white arch of Wembley
                                                                we’ll chase for miles

                                                                orange shimmering to
                                                                magenta through staccato tides
                                                                out and over flat roofs
                                                                on and into the fields

                all data wiped –
                suds off my hands from my shoulders –
                and did I back enough up for some grander vector to reach?

                                                                where trees grow from ground
                                                                shaping over decades
                                                                green-flamed cupolas
                                                                clamped to the sky

                                                                and from perspective passing
                                                                of open field
                                                                turn – creak –
                                                                the whole world

                I may well
                have built pillars of cleverness and thought:
                plinthed, fluted, capitaled and giddyingly architraved …

                                                                and there
                                                                Lancashire red brick
                                                                with high and whitey
                                                                sills stale and lintel

                                                                before washed-out
                                                                sapphire-afternoon of steely sky
                                                                and horizontal fingers of
                                                                scud-rain

                … but they’d just
                floated there upright in space ‘neither use nor ornament’
                straining on the string in my baby-fat hands, I’ve

                                never really
                                made stuff happen
                                and didn’t have to try

                                more than let more and more
                                of stuff happening anyway
                                happen through me

 

train trip; East Sussex to London to Lancaster to Ulverston, Cumbria; where we lived for three years and started a family; stay at Swarthmore Hall; visited Conishead Priory where we lived for 18 months after marriage and graduation; notes and observations on the journey, sense of bridging 32 years of lifetime(s); notes > (maybe) two poems, but two which could nevertheless not be separate, although distinct, like train tracks; three years retired, still processing if I achieved anything in this capitalist and samsaric world …; London centuries old, still processing …; architecture as the stage-scenary of endeavour; the ‘here’ in the 9th stanza is definitely (sic); this is, positive

 

 

^{————w}(O)rmholes_________________________________|—–

afternoon & sky wormhole: The Boats of Vallisneria by Michael J. Redford – Sky
architecture & thought wormhole: “And anger it is that lays in ruins / every kind of mental goodness.”
being wormhole: 11/1 by William Carlos Williams
black & sky wormhole: Lapping Reflections [Deep Within Waters] – valley
brown & green & walls wormhole: The Boats of Vallisneria by Michael J. Redford – The Valley
buildings & crane & rain & red & speech wormhole: riders of the night
capitalism wormhole: `whappn’d!
clouds wormhole: at Kreukenhof
death & identity wormhole: psssssh
doing wormhole: writening
echo & mind & passing & sound & time wormhole: – creak —
Have wormhole: on facing the Have
London wormhole: The Boats of Vallisneria by Michael J. Redford – An Old Piano
orange wormhole: ‘don’t look at it …’
purple wormhole: Lapping Reflections [Deep Within Waters] – I took my camera into the fields
rooftops wormhole: Great Bridge, Rouen, 1896
samsara & trees wormhole: breakfast
silence wormhole: window
Thames wormhole: London, 1809
train & travelling wormhole: beneath
Uckfield-London line wormhole: early // Minoan & Mycenaean Exhibitions in the British Museum – diptych
white wormhole: 10/22 by William Carlos Williams
world wormhole: none and all
writing wormhole: Lapping Reflections [Deep Within Waters] – sooner; / and later

 

– creak —

Tags

2019, 6*, church, dome, echo, hoping, kleshas, listening, mind, passing, quiet, sitting, sound, talking, time

                                                sitting
                in St. Ludwigskirche again
                      five years on

                                                hoping
                for the quiet of mind free of overlapping conversations
                      passing like pedestrians

                                                someone
                explained something quietly echoing
                      across the dome

                                                so I listened
                to the German vowels and consonants
                      proliferating everywhere

                                                understanding
                nothing, I sat comfortable in the pew
                       – creak —

 

a return to: St. Ludwigskirche all those years ago

 

 

^{————w}(O)rmholes_________________________________|—–

church & mind wormhole: The Boats of Vallisneria by Michael J. Redford – Sky
echo wormhole: breakfast
listening wormhole: Lapping Reflections [Deep Within Waters] – valley
passing wormhole: distance
quiet wormhole: The Boats of Vallisneria by Michael J. Redford – Rain
sitting wormhole: eyes like petals
sound & time wormhole: The Boats of Vallisneria by Michael J. Redford – An Old Piano
talking wormhole: ‘don’t look at it …’

 

breakfast

Tags

2019, 7*, blindness, blogging, branches, breakfast, breathing, canopy, coffee, dark, echo, energy, eyes, flash, gooseberry, ground, growth, jam, leaves, life, light, living, monkey, path, reaching, reading, samsara, seeing, shadow, sound, sunlight, toast, trees, walking, way, wind, woodland

                breakfast

                these shadows on a long walk
                through the woodland with only occasional sun

                all there, underneath the undergrowth
                cannot see the ground, the stems that grow from it

                branches reach, leaves envelope everywhere
                from nowhere; weave

                and grow round and entwine each other;
                if I lift the leaves to see my way forward –

                searching for light, searching for life
                to grow, to continue – and if I break the smaller branches to

                make way
                I will scratch my arms, sap will sting my skin, my

                eyes, I cannot see, I cannot see;
                and I won’t see; some trees

                are quicker and older (than me)
                they hold the path and reach wide,

                and creepers make them fat
                and vines hang like curtains of water;

                the canopy above, maximised
                to greatest energy, sent back down through rough wires;

                only when the wind leans
                or a monkey leaps, is there a flash of light, gone by the

                time I’ve looked back down to the path
                blinded, to see where I am

                there must be so much light somewhere
                out there, if only I weren’t stumbling around and bleeding

                … really; I come downstairs
                and breathe coffee and spiced home – made gooseberry jam on home – made toast                           

                while reading my posts … yes,
                a thousand hacks and sap in the dark

                where I cannot see
                and cannot know where I am

                a thousand ‘choks’ deferred
                the undergrowth too dense to echo

 

Bodhisattvacharyavatara chapter VI, verse 12: How can I attain happiness when the causes for happiness are obtained only through great effort and very rarely, and when the seeds­ of pain and sorrow are so prevalent, relentless and multifarious that they are realised easily and without any effort? And yet it is only from suffering that the thought and longing for escape and liberation from the suffering of conditioned existence will come about … therefore, O my deepest mind, hold yourself strong, patient, steadfast!

 

 

^{————w}(O)_{rmholes________________________________|—–}

branches & breathing wormhole: blue sky high
coffee wormhole: green and / luminant / to behold
echo & path & walking wormhole: the Bodhisattva set out / for the Seat of Awakening
eyes & life wormhole: eyes like petals
leaves & living wormhole: everything is caused by something, which / something is caused by something else, nothing / stands alone where all pass as phantoms
light & trees wormhole: Lapping Reflections [Deep Within Waters] – sooner; / and later
reading wormhole: {reading right to left}
samsara & sound wormhole: at Kreukenhof
seeing wormhole: A Solitude by Denise Levertov
shadow wormhole: alabaster balustrade
wind wormhole: The Boats of Vallisneria by Michael J. Redford – The Valley

 

the Bodhisattva set out / for the Seat of Awakening

Tags

2019, 7*, Arya Lalitavistara, Bodhisattva, Buddha, calm, dark, demon, earth, echo, elephant, food, ground, happiness, light, lion, lotus, mindfulness, mountain, omniscient, past life, path, plateau, power, river, samsara, spontaneity, stars, step, three poisons, Tree of Awakening, view, walking, wheel

                so he bathed in the Nairañjanā,
                he ate the food, his strength

                returned, and he began the walk
                toward the Great Tree; he walked

                with easy gait, grounded
                as a mountain, each step gained

                and graceful with no fight, dream
                or idea; the placement pad of a lion,

                the calliper-swing of an elephant,
                a stride that touched not the earth

                but left perfect wheels
                upon the ground, a step that echoed

                across the plateau, a step that
                levelled mountain paths, each step

                that lead to happy lands,
                each step sprung from past lotuses

                of love and stable intention,
                that rendered demons powerless

                that calmed all view, that evanesced
                the darkness and stopped the

                endless endless rounds; his
                walk outshone the distant stars,

                his walk becalmed the rulers;
                the walk spontaneous, the walk

                omniscient, the walk mindful
                of every ancient step, with such a gait

                the Bodhisattva set out
                for the Seat of Awakening

 

from the Arya Lalita Vistara Nama Mahayana Sutra – the life story of the Buddha – originally using the words from the translation by the Dharmachakra Translation 84000 Committee which is freely available online here (for which thank you, thank you) and then other words once my gaze had settled into the image; the ‘Nairañjanā’ is the river by which the Buddha practised his austerities, the ‘food’ was that given to him by Sujata

 

 

^{————w}(O)rmholes_________________________________|—–

Buddha wormhole: Sujātā
echo wormhole: so, how long is, a piece of string?
light wormhole: The Boats of Vallisneria by Michael J. Redford – Sky
path wormhole: alabaster balustrade
power wormhole: in turgid reflection
river wormhole: Great Bridge, Rouen, 1896
stars wormhole: 11/1 by William Carlos Williams
walking wormhole: Valentine’s Day 2019

 

so, how long is, a piece of string?

Tags

2018, 8*, anger, being, Bodhisattvacharyavatara, cause and effect, change, conditioned existence, doing, echo, enemy, event, existence, ghosts, identity, interaction, karma, knot, mind, others, practice, pre-existence, samsara, self-grasping, speech, talking to myself, tangle, thought, uncaused, untangling, web

                so, how long is a piece of string?

                always somehow, and ever somewhere,
                in a thousand different ways and
                a thousand different times, I set myself up,

                I set my self up
                to be the clever one, to be right in the end, and inevitably,
                like a thousand different echoes,

                someone comes and stands
                right in my way, or kneels in a ball behind me while someone else
                shoves me backwards

                so that I fall like a prat, and then someone else points
                and says ‘ha; ha’ in a thousand different ways; where
                do they all come from,

                do they just shimmer out of nowhere
                like ghosts just to frustrate me –whooo!–
                do they come out of nature,

                naturally unjust, naturally evil; are they just there
                existing from their own side, like a sharp bend in a long stretch of road
                {oh, come on,

                 no, they’d have to pre-exist in order to
                 come into existence, which would involve
                 a change in something which cannot change

                 because it is pre-existent, and therefore
                 causeless, so that it would have to stop being what it is
                 in order to be what it isn’t,

                 you know that, don’t you}; no, everything
                is conditioned, yes, and nothing stands
                independent by itself, so everything

                I have ever done or said or thought
                has been conditioned already, ok, but also,
                everything I have ever done or said

                or thought has also set up a
                whole web of further conditions
                which have had, or are nail-tapping waiting to have,

                an impact on other events
                and people; and yes, that’s ‘me’ in the corner …:
                the endless twists and turns I have made,

                and still making with every move and word and thought,
                which bind me in, tightly or loosely,
                to everything with which I interact –

                completely and utterly tangled:
                I hope I acted cleanly and carefully,
                but I’m afraid I didn’t – I’m … going to have to face my

                whole knot – a universally big ball,
                so much bigger than l’il ole me
                that it doesn’t seem to have much to do with me, but it does,
                it, all, does;

                and I’d better stop pulling and tugging away at it
                to get my own way and
                start untangling, and start untangling …

…I had a tangle of garden-wire to sort today; it had been wound round a dispenser but some of it had crossed over, become entangled, yanked, and a whole middle section had come away; then it had been worked on, to untangle it, but impatiently, and without thought, and so whole rolls of it had become furled over and through themselves, some bits were knotted, some bits were hanging out in great loops; being garden-wire, it kinked where it had been bent which also caught other strands as they came close to them in their tangle; and it had been cut for a quick solution, and so I had more than two ends that I could make any sense of; it took time untangling it, it took willing to give up on some progress I had already made on seeing that I’d started too far in, or too peripherally; it meant keeping hold of the thread I was starting with and turning the whole tangle around it, rather than working through the tangle, knowing that I was making problems for myself further down the line but I couldn’t worry about that yet; it meant having to abandon my initial thread sometimes to concentrate on further-on loops before I could return to it released; it meant I had to think ahead a bit to loosen the tangle in all the ways that it would, even if it meant unravelling the newly-wound initial thread I’d already sorted, a little; I had to take a rest every once in a while because I was concentrating too tightly …

                no, these enemies they’ve
                been ‘here’ all along, right in the
                back of my head, long forgotten,

                but from the time I crossed them
                in a thousand different ways
                and a thousand different times,

                they’ve been waiting, relentlessly,
                for a body and a circumstance to come together
                to respond:

                “there you go, mate, I owed you that”
                and inexorably I’d been setting myself up with just the right conditions
                to receive it

 

Bodhisattvacharyavatara chapter VI, verse 47: Impelled by my actions – [drawn out by circumstance, incited by the heat of the moment, prompted by hearsay, provoked by trigger, instigated by design, mobilised by obligation, shoved by control, summoned by role] – those who cross or hurt me, those who do me wrong just appear, right in my way and do what they have to do. And because of their actions, they will end up fallen and consigned to the infernal realms … surely, isn’t it actually me who have destroyed and damned them, haven’t I just been the mirror to magnify back to them their harm?

and, yes, that is a reference to the REM song, losing … something

 

 

^{————w}(O)rmholes_________________________________|—–

being & mind wormhole: …zzh-vvttP*–… … …
change wormhole: on facing the Have
doing & speech wormhole: ‘ouch’
echo wormhole: St. Erasmus in Bishop Islip’s Chapels, 1796
ghosts wormhole: what wounds have you got?
identity & others wormhole: there will be ovations
practice wormhole: ‘there, …’
samsara wormhole: glamour of saṃsāra
talking to myself wormhole: SPRING AND ALL VI by William Carlos Williams
thought wormhole: horizon

 

St. Erasmus in Bishop Islip’s Chapels, 1796

Tags

2019, 6*, cathedral, cold, echo, footsteps, light, passing, shadow, sound, stone, William Turner

                light inhabits the stone
                that contains it,
                colder in deep cloisters,

                warmer as footsteps pass
                the transept, the shadow
                rinsed and broken across fieldwork paving slabs

 

St Erasmus in Bishop Islip’s Chapel, Westminster Abbey exhibited 1796 Joseph Mallord William Turner 1775-1851 The British Museum http://www.tate.org.uk/art/work/TW0378

St. Erasmus in Bishop Islip’s Chapels, 1796 by William Turner

 

 

^{————w}(O)rmholes_________________________________|—–

cathedral wormhole: low afternoon
echo wormhole: to let be
light wormhole: allowed all gain
passing wormhole: Dulwich College, London, 1871
shadow wormhole: pursued
sound wormhole: Lapping Reflections [Deep Within Waters] – pageant of the trees
stone wormhole: on facing the Have

 

to let be

Tags

2018, 6*, allowing, being, change, echo, identity, letting go, looking, meaning, mist, Mum, prospect, purpose, putting out, retirement, rhetoric, school, shopping, space, streets, voice, wisdom

                                so I stopped working
                in an institution that couldn’t converse within its own rhetoric

                                couldn’t find a voice
                to navigate through all that drifting mist, and got lost, so I

                                no longer comb
                through shops and streets looking for echoes of a lost chord

                                that would weave
                my lives back together (couldn’t find it in all that looking),

                                all that
                                anxious putting-out
                and prospect, finding everything changed and nothing done,

                                and no monument
                that I was ever really there other than the space through

                                which the change
                happened glorious to allow, nothing to behold, everything

                                to be, a lot of
                history to let go – it was obstructive of me to try to solidify

                                there anyway,
                I should have stayed with the wisdom I inherited before

                                I was born,
                allowed the acceptance of my mother’s wisdom: to let be

 

 

 

^{————w}(O)rmholes_________________________________|—–

being & identity & meaning wormhole: SPRING AND ALL VI by William Carlos Williams
change wormholeL The Boats of Vallisneria by Michael J. Redford – Trees
echo wormhole: La Route de Louveciennes, 1870
letting go wormhole: beguiled / desire
looking wormhole: SPRING AND ALL XI by William Carlos Williams
mist wormhole: early // Minoan & Mycenaean Exhibitions in the British Museum – diptych
Mum wormhole: Plumstead – Woolwich – Plumstead 220211
retirement wormhole: Lapping Reflections [Deep Within Waters] – old George
school & streets wormhole: THE LONELY STREET by William Carlos Williams
space wormhole: space for probing thought

 

La Route de Louveciennes, 1870

Tags

1870, 2018, 6*, autumn, cart, echo, electric, evening, grey, industry, land, leaves, metal, orange, passing, pink, Pissarro, quiet, roads, sky, sound, sun, table, time, town, trees, wheel, white, wood

                the cart’s wheel will roll
                metal-held and ungiven down
                the hard-pressed road making echo

                only between the sides of its empty
                bed, slatted and turning; some-
                where in the oranging-grey town

                were stables to rest and evenings
                of sounds at the wooden tables;
                most leaves have already fallen,

                industry slowly arisen over the
                wet land, the white sun, quiet
                in the dirt-pink sky, but electric

                between the bare trunks

 

La Route de Louveciennes, 1870; Camille Pissaro

 

 

^{————w}(O)rmholes_________________________________|—–

autumn wormhole: presence
echo wormhole: Lapping Reflections [Deep Within Waters] – old George
evening & time & white wormhole: ‘… and yet I think I am so modest: …’
grey wormhole: SPRING & LINES by William Carlos Williams
leaves & roads & trees wormhole: SPRING AND ALL I by William Carlos Williams
orange wormhole: space for probing thought
passing & sun wormhole: early // Minoan & Mycenaean Exhibitions in the British Museum – diptych
pink & sky wormhole: The Boats of Vallisneria by Michael J. Redford – Trees
quiet wormhole: allowed all gain
sound wormhole: THE GREAT FIGURE by William Carlos Williams
table wormhole: coterminalism – there is nothing happens by itself, / 070118
wood wormhole: transferring

 

Lapping Reflections [Deep Within Waters] – old George

Tags

2018, 7*, branches, breeze, brother, child, clouds, cuckoo, dust, earth, echo, Essex, green, hands, home, journey, land, lark, life, meadow, mind, pink, poem, retirement, scythe, shirt, Shropshire, silence, smell, speech, stone, time, wind, woodland, writing

                                old George

                long retired from land, unable to
                keep soil from his boots, continues
                working, earth and life, picking up

                branches and stones; the blades
                cut clean, men in the meadows
                sway to the rhythm of scythes,

                stems fall graceful to swathe and
                green aroma, the diminishing island
                cut to the last, magnified by

                silence, a lark high above the
                dust; the breezes will dry the
                stalks to rustle and the distant

                woods will echo – cuckoo; it is
                then the child places the building
                block on the nursery floor when

                there will be no time, day after
                day, save for forks of pitch and
                hands that burn pink and stalk

                of shirt and sweat, constant under
                minds of approaching storm cloud
                before the last journey home; old

                George had removed his jacket
                picking out fluff from the corners
                of a pocket, “…used to be my brother’s;

                lived in Shropshire … didn’t
                find no pound notes in it, just fluff,
                a few hay seeds,” flung them

                to the Essex wind – scattered
                poems and stacked essays,
                typed up and waiting to behold

 

read the collected work as it is published: here
this is an appliquiary to: The Boats of Vallisneria by Michael J. Redford – Making Hay

 

 

^{————w}(O)rmholes_________________________________|—–

branches wormhole: presence
breeze wormhole: chuckling
child wormhole: next unexpected step
clouds wormhole: that
echo wormhole: The Boats of Vallisneria by Michael J. Redford – Making Hay
green wormhole: PASTORAL by William Carlos Williams
hands & life & retirement wormhole: beguiled / desire
mind & writing wormhole: scintillating to mind’s content
pink & stone wormhole: TO A SOLITARY DISCIPLE by William Carlos Williams
silence & speech wormhole: new blue porsche
smell & time wormhole: LOVE SONG by William Carlos Williams
wind wormhole: TREES by William Carlos Williams

 

The Boats of Vallisneria by Michael J. Redford – Making Hay

Tags

1967, blackbird, branches, breeze, chaffinches, clouds, cuckoo, echo, fields, grass, green, hay, June, land, lark, linnets, Michael J Redford, scythe, silence, smell, soil, sun, talking, the Boats of Vallisneria, thrushes, tits, trees, wagtail, weather, work

Making Hay

“You’ll have a nice cut o’ hay here,” said George.   The wizened little old man, long since retired from the land, stood beside me in the gateway of Garden Field.   He has come to remove the debris that had fallen from the trees to prevent damage to the mower.   Like most retired land-workers he is unable to keep the soil of the fields from his boots, and one can find him in every village throughout the British Isles hedging, ditching, clearing odd corners of scrub with scythe and sickle and caring for the vicar’s garden.   To these men, there is an attraction so binding to the land, that to continue working thereon has become essential to their very existence.   It seems they draw the very essence of life direct from the soil, just as the unborn infant draws its life direct from its mother, and if this contact, this life-line is broken, so also is his life.   One has merely to talk with these old men for an hour to sense their affinity with and philosophy of the land, and I am convinced that it would quite literally kill many of them if they were to be taken from it.   An acquaintance once questioned the economics of employing these old ‘jobbers’ and suggested that it was merely a charitable act that enables the old men to feel useful, and I thought of old George ambling around the perimeter of Garden Field picking up dead branches and stones.   In the first instance the old man had given me half an hour of time to attend to other more pressing matters.   Secondly, his action of clearing the land of obstructions was quite possibly instrumental in preventing a broken mower knife or con-rod, and when taking into account the precarious weather conditions under which hay is made in this country, any delay could mean the difference between a field of good hay and a field of bad or maybe even a complete loss, and with good hay sometimes fetching £15 per ton and more, this could result in a considerable saving.   So what price an old man’s labour?

There is a great satisfaction in using a clean cutting tool, be it a pen-knife or a scythe.   Now unfortunately, the less harmonious clatter of a power driven mower has long since dimmed the sweet song of a scythe and men in the hay meadows no longer sway to its rhythm.   Nevertheless, there manifests within me a great sense of well-being each time I see the graceful stems fall into neat swathes as the mower encircles the ever diminishing island of standing green.   The pollen lifts and the wagtail follows close behind feeding upon the moths and gnats that are started into flight upon a day sweet with a green aroma. Soon comes the last sweep of the mower in the centre of the field.   It is an act full of purpose and symbolism that makes me hesitate before felling those last few stems.   It is I think, that the finality of the last cut brings about a sense of completeness, a completeness that is magnified by the silence when the mower has ceased to clatter and the tractor engine is switched off, when the only sound to be heard is the song of a lark out of sight, high above the dust laden air.

The following day, when the June sun has lifted the dew from the fields, the grass can be shaken up to let in the drying breezes, and it is towards the end of a good drying day that the green harvest begins to ‘rustle’ and emanates that exhilarating aroma of ‘making’ hay.   There are many jobs to be done on the farm some of which are dull and monotonous, and I must confess to a tendency of leaving such tasks to the very last minute.   But hay-making is not one of these jobs.   Even at the end of a hot, dry day of turning, tedding and windrowing, I reap a great deal of pleasure from strolling alone between the dry, fluffy rows, inhaling the richness, listening to the linnets, tits and chaffinches close at hand, and the distant echo of the cuckoo in the woods.   Also in the woods the Blackcap, much mistaken for the nightingale, sings sweetly at this hour and is a welcomed guest upon my solitude.   There are many such enchanting moments tucked away at odd intervals throughout the year, sandwiched between the bustle, toil and noise that nowadays fills most of our lives, and too often they pass unnoticed and without appreciation.   The baler is the transgressor that ends these few hours of peace at hay-making.   It is a great red monster that crashes into the calm, scaring the blackbirds and thrushes and littering the fields with bales of green, just as the child litters the nursery floor with his building blocks.

If there is one task on the farm nowadays that demands sweat and aching limbs, it is the pitching, carting and stacking of bales of hay.   No time can be wasted in bringing them home for should the weather change, the feeding value could be washed right out and hay made fit for only bedding.   Under a blazing July sun the throat becomes parched and the palms of the hands become calloused and shiny from gripping the pitch-fork.   Hasty swigs from a brown bottle concealed in the cool shade of a hedge ooze forth seconds later as sweat.   Hay particles stick to the body and gnats and flies buzz and bite. At times (if, for example, in a race against approaching storm clouds), the pace becomes so hectic that the sweat runs and blinds the eyes.   Seeds and pieces of hay fall into the shirt and make their way down to the trouser belt where they stick and prick and scratch each time the body is bent to life another bale.

This work, weather permitting, continues day after day, and to those involved it seems like eternity, but sooner or later the very last bale is heaved upon the trailer, and the last, slow journey home is made with swaying load and creaking ropes.

Last year, Garden Field was put aside for the cows and old George was helping me move the electric fence.   It was almost dinner time when we finished and we sat upon the headland whiling away the minutes in idle conversation.   He had removed his jacket and was picking out the fluff from the corners of a pocket.

“It used to be my brother’s,” he said of the jacket, “he lived in Shropshire but passed on a few weeks back, and as I’m the only one of the family left, I had all his bits and pieces sent here.”   He studied the jacket ruefully.   “Didn’t find no pound notes in it though, just a bit o’ fluff and a few hay seeds,” he said flinging them into the wind.   Now, as I stand staring at the bales stacked under the dutch barn, I find myself wondering how many stems of Shropshire grass there are within, and if left to ripen, how many seeds they would have produced.   I often stand and stare, much to the annoyance of those around me, and think my little thoughts, for little thoughts quite often lead to bigger ones.   This is, in fact, just how this essay came to be written.

 

read the collected work as it is published: here

 

 

^{————w}(O)rmholes_________________________________|—–

blackbird wormhole: Plumstead – Woolwich – Plumstead 220211
branches & green wormhole: Sheffield Park Gardens
breeze wormhole: 1964
clouds wormhole: and ‘naerrgh’ a mention of a seagull’s call
echo wormhole: with all love released
silence wormhole: The Boats of Vallisneria by Michael J Redford – Working
smell wormhole: travelling // arrival
sun wormhole: tremule
talking wormhole: green and / luminant / to behold
trees wormhole: Lapping Reflections [Deep Within Waters] – reaping
work wormhole: next unexpected step