I enter the green light of the forest and I am in the Otherworld.
Wren speaks in my chest; I feel the rush of wind in the wingpits of my buzzard self.
As wild St John’s Wort I hold my many faces to the sun. I am the green thought driving the idea of bilberries towards their fruiting.
I’m the leaning rock and its twin towards whom it leans, my feet deeply buried in the good soil. As moss, my green pelt gently coats the stone.
Am hazel. I exhale in spring and my thousands of leaves open. Through summer’s dreaming I let my fruits swell into slow new life. I inhale in winter, give away the fruits, let drop all my leaves back into the rich earth.
I spill with the waterfall into the little pool; I become body of otter, fish, dragonfly, deer, badger, boar who lap, breathe, sip, lick, suck and drink me in. Drink us all in.
I spin through the canopy with my fellow goldcrests.
Movement. A flicker of lightdarklight. Sniffing the air, I freeze, then bound with my kin up the steep track to the lost glade. I breathe out the breeze; I breathe in the small summer rain.
I am here, now, and I’ve always been here, or there
or everywhere.
© Roselle Angwin July 2016
Walking the Old Ways : nature, the bardic & druidic arts, holism, Zen, the ecological imagination
from BARDO
The stars are in our belly; the Milky Way
Is it a consolation
is star-stuff too?
– That wherever you go you can never fully disappear –
Tree, rain, coal, glow-worm, horse, gnat, rock.
Roselle Angwin
Oh Roselle, this is superb. A true, exhilarating inhabiting of land and forest, flora, fauna, mineral, water, air. Everything. And you may well be aware of the synchronicity: last Saturday's Guardian features an essay – The call of the wild – by Paul Kingsnorth. I mean to read more of him. Have you seen it?
ReplyDeleteEver since our nocturnal walk on Iona (was pleased to appear in your last blog – also superb – in the Tai Chi 'dance') I've been thinking of writing myself inside the wild much more. Difficult thing to do well, though. You've certainly done it!
Thanks and love, Miri.
Hello Miri - thank you! It's actually an excerpt from the new book (well, manuscript) - but atypical. I have a lot of pieces like that but they don't often have a public airing.
DeleteThis also gestures at the work I'll be doing with my Trees course next year in the Foret de Huelgoat.
I didn't see that edition - I was in Brittany sans sufficient internet until yesterday evening. There was an interview with him a week or three back in the G too- but I imagine you don't mean that ?
Now I'm back, probably still without sufficient bandwidth in good old Devon, I'll still attempt to search it out. Thank you for alerting me.
Yes, we've read most of his work, and I contributed to many of his excellent Dark Mountain anthologies.
Love to you both
RX
Miri, it was in the New Statesman, not The Guardian. Must have been end June/early July I think. x
DeleteVERY beautiful - and a good read before diving into all the 'noise' of the day (from people's opinions to cars passing). Reminded me of Taliesin meeting Anne Dillard :-)
ReplyDeleteChristopher, now THAT'S a compliment! Am very inspired both by the Taliesen stories and Annie Dillard's work. The Taliesin original story is about the only story I truly know by heart!
ReplyDeleteAs I said to Miriam above, this is an excerpt from my newly-written book (though not typical in style), and also a pointer to work I'll be doing under my Ecosoul (www.thewildways.co.uk) workshop banner in Brittany next year.
So all in all I'm delighted it spoke to you! Thank you for making the time to tell me.
All best
Roselle