Long Shadow

After the dark mornings of mist and rain a frost has arrived. The silvered landscape of grasses and leaves, crisp in the new sunlight, cannot escape the oncoming winter. Across this cold earth I silently move, reaching over ploughed furrows and emerging corn. A glossy backbird on scarlet hawthorn watches me from above as the golden light brings brilliance to the fiery colours of tree and hedgerow. I reach out to the wary pheasants, the chattering fieldfares and hunting buzzard. Beneath the cloudless blue sky I belong with the sunrise for a few minutes before I gradually retreat back to hold the frost in the hollows and shade.

I am Long Shadow.

Inspiring Writing

I have just finished reading "The Spell of the Sensuous" by David Abram (Vintage Books/Random House, 1996). An interesting book though rather a heavy read. It looks at the disconnection humans have from the natural world. This is partly due to the development of language and the written word which has enabled us to somewhat dissociate ourselves from active natural experiences.

Here are three passages I liked. They have been slightly paraphrased and edited.

As the technology of writing encounters and spreads through a previously oral culture, the felt power and personality of particular places begins to fade. For the stories that express and embody that power are gradually recorded in writing ...this renders them separable, for the first time, from the actual places where the events in those stories occurred. The tales can now be carried everywhere...

Once the stories are written down, however, the visible text become the primary mnemonic activator of the spoken stories - the inked traces left by then pen ... replacing the earthly traces left by animals, and by one's ancestors, in their interactions with the local land. ... The stories and myth, as they loose their oral, performative character, forfeit as well their intimate links with the more-the-human earth. And the land itself, stripped of the particularizing stories that once sprouted from every cave and streambed and cluster of trees on its surface, begins to loose its multiplicitious power. The human senses, intercepted by the written word, are no longer gripped and fascinated by the expressive shapes and sounds of particular places. The spirits fall silent. Gradually, the felt supremacy of place is forgotten, superseded by a new, abstract notion of "space" as a homogenous and placeless void.

Also:

 ... The new recognition of nonmythological, nonrepeating time by the Hebrew scribes can only be comprehended with reference to alphabetic writing itself. Recording cultural stories in writing ... fixed the storied events in their particularity, providing them with a new and unchanging permanence while inscribing them in a steadily accreting sequence of similarly unique occurrences. A new sense of time as a non-repeating sequence begins to make itself felt over and against the cycling of the cosmos. The variously scribed layers of the Hebrew Bible are the first sustained record of the new sensibility.

Lastly:

In the interior of the island, in the depths of the forest, things are quieter. Huge and towering powers stand there, unperturbed by the winds, their crusty bark fissured with splitting seems and crossed by lines of ants, caterpillars and beetles of various shapes and hues. A single woodpecker is thwacking a trunk somewhere, the percussive rhythm reaching my ears without any echo, absorbed by the mosses and the needles heavy with water drops that have taken hours to slide down the trunks from the upper canopy (each drop lodging itself in successive cracks and crevasses, gathering weight from subsequent drips, then slipping down, past lichens and tiny spiders, to the next protruding ridge or branch). Fallen firs and hemlocks, and an old spruce tree tunneled by termites, lie dank and rotting in the ferns, the jumbled branches of the spruce blocking the faint deer trail I follow.

September

The cool dark evening holds my thoughts for once. After the busyness of work I have found a time to sit in the summerhouse and welcome a time of peace and reflection. I haven’t been here much this year and the summer has been a time for doing many things and not much has inspired me to keep my journal or to take time out for formal writing. Now the nights seem to have drawn in quickly and the feeling that warm summer days - what few we had - are now a thing of the past.

Writing, for me, is about being inspired by something. Tonight I have the light of a candle flame and a gentle breeze brushing through the trees to give a sense of peace and calm after a long day in front of my computer screen getting artwork ready to print. Places inspire me. My summerhouse inspires me, unless I am driven back indoors by the cold. Here I am detached from all that I have in the home and at work. Usually I will write in my sketchbook, but today I have decided to compose directly onto my laptop mainly as a disciplinary exercise. Here I am open to anything that I feel led to write about. Distractions are few and I can focus on the act of creativity in a space of my own.

In the past few weeks I have surrounded myself by odd bits of reading material: an online subscription to ‘Resurgence Magazine’; two books - ‘The Spell of the Sensuous: perception and language in a more-than-human-word’  by David Abram; ‘Deep Ecology - living as if nature mattered’ by Bill Devall; and the ‘Economist’ magazine. I am trying to get my brain thinking again and so looking for things that bring ideas into my focus rather than just dipping into the internet in an unstructured way.

Trying to live a spiritual life isn’t that easy. In some ways I think there are three paths that I could follow. Firstly there is the ‘supernatural’ type of path that has a deep sense of connection to an otherness that could take the form of any type of spiritual awareness of other beings, entities, powers or happenings. My Christian background has seen much focus on this and subsequent meetings with other people have also shown me how people view a more tangible spiritual world in other contexts too. Secondly, and a path that I find more easy to follow because I can identify with it more is a ‘personal development and well-being’ sort of path that looks more at how the person fits within the world around themselves. The supernatural element is not seen as obvious but yet not denied as it seems to account for a more mysterious, poetic, natural, observational and mystic approach. Thirdly - give up, grab hold of the ‘God delusion’ and forget about trying to touch the non-existant. This seems so tempting at times!

I want to carry on. I feel there is more for me to contribute and to learn about than I can currently grab hold of and I don’t want to pass it all by. There are genuine people out there who want to follow a path for no reason other than to better themselves, to find a place on this fragile earth, to gain a sense of well-being and to find a way of dealing with all of humanities successes and failings.

I Am Still Here

Last week we went on holiday to the Gower coast in South Wales. We had been there last year and this year we went back to stay in Port Eynon, just  a few minutes walk from a beautiful beach.

On leaving, I was surprised to find myself grieving over the leaving of a piece of landscape. I am fond of places in Herefordshire, but I can’t remember finding myself becoming attached to a place elsewhere to such an emotional extent. There is a coast path that leads up from just above Overton westwards along the top of the cliffs towards Mewslade  and Rhossili. I explored the area last year and recall writing a poem about the ‘Edgeland’. On one side of the path are small cornfields with high stone walls and fences that are a reminder of the small scale agricultural history that once covered much of our landscape. Then there is like a plateau of common land -sheep-grazed grass, bracken and gorse that then gives way to the limestone cliffs that drop down to the rocky sea shore below. I had heard about Paviland cave and tried to find it, but as it was tucked away in a location that required a bit of certainty about tides and sure footedness I decided not to risk the search. The cave is one of the best known prehistoric burial sites in the country and so I sensed a deep sense of mystery and history in the area.

I took no photographs of the path, which I now regret but, really, there is not much to  focus on. It is just a wide path that carries wandering souls along an edgeland between the land and sea. It has been a week since I left it, but yet I feel part of me is there part of me has felt a deep sense of belonging to that place. It was a place of peace; a place away from the intense concentration of computer illustration work; a place away from the demands of modern living. A place of freedom. 

I know I have only visited the place on warm sunny days in the summer so my experience of it is slightly biased to the positive, but perhaps carrying this intense memory of the place is a subtle lesson to me. Perhaps there is something I should be learning or remembering here. The words that came to me are “I am still here”.

The tiredness and headaches in the first few days of being back at work are a reminder of how draining sitting in front of a computer screen can be. I spend much of my day focusing in on the digital necessities and interests that fill my life. On holiday I longed to just walk and explore and free my body of the confines of my desk and sketch with freedom and my genuine personal creativity. With little spiritual inspiration around me I have not had much on which to focus and I seem to just be waiting for something to revive me again. “I am still here” is perhaps a subtle whisper from the Nature that inspires me. It held me close for a while and now we have parted. I must not loose sight of things that inspire me and should seek out ways to enliven my spirit particularly now that the summer will soon draw to a close and the year will start to turn to harvest and autumn.

Croft Ambrey Sunset

Writing based on notes made Thursday 5 July 2012
I’ve just driven up from Bedfordshire and now, at  around 8.30pm I have parked at Croft Castle. It is a superb evening - warm, some sunshine between the clouds and everywhere is so green after all the rain we have had. Little did I know that the next day would bring a day of almost continuous rain and many flooded roads.

I walk up onto Croft Ambrey and sit at the western promontory. The sun is a glorious bright red and within a couple of minutes it has dropped below the western welsh hills. I manage to do a quick sketch on my iPad of the view before the light begins to fade too much.

The top of the hill fort is awash with soft grasses and pink foxgloves. The ground is so wet and as there are no sheep grazing here at the moment the place is beginning to look a little overgrown. As I walk back down the hill three strong scents surround me. Bracken, barley flowers and freshly mown grass. In the dampness it seems as though the fragrances are almost overpowering. They fill the air which is saturated with the smell of nature. It is very quiet here - almost unbelievably so. How different to the inherently scentless towns we live in that only create their own smells though the activity of humans. In a place surrounded by bricks and concrete we create the smells of car exhausts, cafe’s, rubbish, cigarettes etc.  There is no innate natural fragrance. Only nature has the power to generate such things - and primarily it is the plant kingdom that has the upper hand here.

Often people seem to talk about the search for God. Where is he? How can I know Him? To me, when I am in a place like this there is no need to search for God. God is all around me. It is the natural world - its essence of being. The meaning of life becomes the gift of being able to enjoy its beauty and to share in it. Yet through selfishness we often seem to want something more aligned to a consumable faith.

Modern towns and cities are far removed from a sense of ecological living where small scale, low impact sustainable communities can live in harmony with the natural world without being dependent upon the superstructure of imported consumables and the problems of mass waste production. Unfortunately the demands of a massive population and economies of scale favour modernism rather than the ecological.

Roses

Hedgerow full of wild roses near to where I work. Seem very prolific this year.

Unresolved Conflicts

It is almost the longest day and yet summer doesn’t feel s if it has arrived yet. Today was pleasantly warm and I decided to spend the evening doing some drawing up on the allotments. However, after about half an hour the rain began and I have had to retreat to the garden summerhouse and now I am typing this but I am not sure what I want to say.

This afternoon we visited a local ‘Open Farm’ which was interesting though, as usual with these things, it made me question what am I doing in life. Changes at work are still in the process of being adopted and I am unsure how my future will look. I am not worried about it, but it has given me the impetus to perhaps start re-evaluating what I am doing. There is a tension between the ‘Outdoor Me’ and the current necessities of the financial security of work and the ‘Indoor Me. This may be a conflict between male archetypal identity - but that is a personal journey and not for exploring here at the moment. I wonder how much this psychological tension could potentially cause ill-health? It is a tricky one to solve as you can’t easily just give up one job and try another life path just to see what happens - unless something extraordinary happens in external influences or personal abandonment of the status quo.

We have to deal with where we are at. The grass may look greener on the other side but we can often have misguided perspectives. We can only ever be in the present though we can try and influence what may happen when we reach future present moments. Life is full of unresolved conflicts - the things we want but can’t have; the things that happen to us that we can’t change etc.