Wishbone Soup Cures Everything

It is the Longest Day in more than one way. Work is an indoor fug of bad smells on a muggy day. I get in my car when the shift is done; it is stuffy, and probably smelly but I’m too used to it to really care- it has a vegetable tinge. Opening the windows lets in a healing draft of fresh vegetation; field grass, hedge flowers; this is the beginning of getting my Solstice balance back.  Bird music shimmies from tall trees. High in the sky, set in blue, is a shining half-moon. I park up, and walk down a smooth skinny lane, swapping troubles for details- here grows a rose, here a pretty shadow falls. Here is a beach of fine sand. Low to the left, a blazing eye of sun casts over a silver-blue sea. I hear the lazy roll of waves, the gulls, some children laughing. And now: cool water on my longing skin. I swim out. I find perfect balance. I draw it in through sensory contact, I make a space for it within.  Holding my head up in the gold light I ask the sun for a blessing. Even as I'm...

Heartened by signs of spring we had begun to hunt for summer. It had hid so well, under days that stretched out light but not warmth, we began to worry. When it pounced it was glorious and shocking: still in our cold weather clothes suddenly the alchemy of heat swept through everything.  Butter was a liquid, our icy, cavelike bathroom was a blessing, the roads were lava. Grass grew taller than fences. Strawberries got fat.  On my commute, cars became carapaces catching sun, shining scales on a snaking neck. Road kill was crow jerky in roadside dust.  Ox eyed daisies lifted up, radiating cool petals, signalling hope.  Signalling remember: signalling balance. Death feeds the carrion birds, and the earth; it becomes the soil to nurture roots.  The sun can both love and blister you.  And then, as the calendar turned to the first month of summer, rain came; it was dumped by the bucket, it washed away the heat, made mud from dust. It suckled the flowers into bloo...

I am watching hazel leaves shimmy in a breeze, they are keeping time with the buzz of nettle stings that run from my fingertips to my elbows. It feels like I'm wearing gloves made of needles; why didn't I just wear gloves to clear the nettles from the raspberry hedge? But I like to know the plants, how they grow, how they smell, how they stain and sting, what bugs shelter in their leaves, what grubs and gastropods nestle at the roots. How the roots sneak under weedblocks, moon-pale, and over open ground where they are purplish, bullish.  I like the work to affect, I like interactive life.  It has a little pain and a lot of interest.  Not all the nettles are gone, of course, some must be left to house caterpillars, and they are a healthy vegetable for people too. Today’s crop is for compost though, to feed the soil, the miracle stuff from which this abundance grows. How could I not wish to be close to that?  At home I have a shower, scrub my sore hands- and still I sm...

It was hot outside, cold indoors. When we were freed from the hall I opened my car thinking oven gloves might be required for driving. I was weary. I was lined up for a row of shifts- but the evenings are lighter now, and the beach was calling. I drove a wiggly route to Veryan (the road I chose was closed) and down to Carne Beach. Since I had checked the weather the wind had turned easterly, and the tide was in. There were waves smacking over a disappearing line of fine sand. Undeterred I wriggled my swimsuit on and went to play in the foam.  Neither air nor sea was particularly cold. Blue and cloud patterned sky, blue and turquoise patterned sea, flowers blooming and swooshed by the wind, and the warm brown crags of rock: to be here was to be directly connected to the source of all existence.  Home time was foam time, and vice versa. Afterwards I sat in my car, door open, eating a square of dark chocolate, watching the white flecks and trying to work out if the dark dot was a...

To have a day undriven by plot, how gentle that is on mind and body. I will get things done, yes, at an unforced pace - I will be moved like water by gravity, by tide; these natural magics will be my energy today.  Stirred to waking by birdsong.  Resting awhile listening to the hedgebirds, to the whisper of soft rain before rolling up the window blind to see tree tips swaying and a sky of such pale grey it seems invisible.  I want coffee so I make some. Fresh, strong. Chilled fingers wrapping a warm mug. More song and chatter from the city of birdlife. Somewhere a tractor rumbles. I review a list of chores.  All the way from my toes, tucked in wool socks, a smile rises. It goes up and up into the invisible sky, I don’t care that it’s raining. When the description is the narrative, it is enough, it is everything.

I'm not sure this poem is quite right, but out it goes. I keep writing and forgetting to post any of it- today I remember a very beautiful ghost, a YOLO blend of care free and care full. She would be- she is- rolling her eyes, pretending not to love the attention. Fare thee well dear one, wherever you wander you are settled in our hearts xxx

Sunshine and cloud that piles up, up, up in spite of the pushy breeze: treetops bobbing, washing flailing on the line. It is warm behind glass. Croscomias poke up leaves of flaming green, the daffodils are in full voice, celandines and primroses proliferate. Here and there a tulip ventures, and hyacinths trail heavy scent. Blackthorn blossoms, hawthorn comes to leaf. Whether the cold comes back, as it does some years, echoing winter, the earth is awake, daylight hours are stretching and ready for the buzz of pollinators, for the nesting of birds, the bloom and boom of spring.

Daylight is grey light, filtered through yet another damp sky.  I had to drive Mr's car to work due to the back box of the exhaust pipe falling off my car.  It is fixable and no accident occurred so the worst of this could have been the broken radio robbing me of music for my commute, but the wind kindly blew haunting whistles through the roof rack all the way.  Roadside daffodils swayed and bent- they could have been laughing or crying, depending on who was looking.  They wouldn't care.  Neither weather nor mood can change them, they are always daffodils, harbingers of spring.  I am applauding and they are taking a bow.

Mizzle is the Cornish name for the fine, fine precipitation that craftily sinks through your clothes and gets your skin wet even though it does not appear to be raining. Today the weather is mizzling, milder, softer, stealthy. Spring is whispering closer, though I drove to work down some old lanes that took me back in time; hundreds of years of hedges and fields, of seasons turning; here no flowers had yet even come to bud- it was poised in winter- it was like being shown someone else’s memory, like history was layered- like the mist. You could reach out a hand, feel it soak into your bones. It was peaceful. A reprieve. So when I reached the next village and the verges sang with flowers, I sang out with them- the song of seasonal lineage, the song of Winter-Spring. 

It hasn’t rained every minute of the day, only most of them. At lunch, I walked back from the shops again (went to try on leopard print shoes but they pinched, came back with a lamp that didn’t work, returned it; bought two candles instead, and a consolation avocado) with my grey striped hair loosely tousled,  in my black faux fur, looking like some kind of damp forest beast.   Before the rain I listened to birds sing, trill, caw and call- the sound of gulls involuntarily invoking winter sea dips- I could feel the waves swoosh at my calves, the soft salinity, the foam-fuzz.  In the rain, I listened.  The percussion of it, the white noise of it, the way it wraps you in your space.  I was a soggy happy beast hugging an avocado, dreaming of swimming and candlelight.  Later I will drive home, it will be dark. Whatever the weather, the car’s headlights will scan over green verges and the spring flowers will glow. Everytime they elicit awe- real, edge-of-the-phys...

In-between the mixes of rain we managed a little work on our land. Mr cut staves from the Middle Hedge to mark out and support another length of dead hedging along the westerly side of the tree corral. I wrestled cardboard and clinging weeds to put a first mulch layer around each tree in the Durnford Hedge, to give them the advantage when spring sets off her starting pistol. In the Dragon Hedge we attempted and failed to save the storm-stomped rose arch (the rose itself is unharmed) and pruned back a few stems of rugosa. Behind a clump of primrose, which offered up two flowers, a pheasant skull was loitering. In the Middle Hedge snowdrops had appeared, and fancy frilly ones at that. Things are budding, growing, creeping up, including the names we arbitrarily applied to areas. The Middle Hedge is named for its location, the Durnford Hedge for the grower of the seven oaks that started it, the Dragon Hedge for the spikes of the rugosas and raspberries. The old paddock land is being claime...

This morning, Wednesday 4th February: at 6am the alarm woke me from patchy sleep. This isn’t terribly early but Tuesday nights are always late so I knew I would be tired. Everything was prepped, including the coffee. All I had to do was boil water and pour it; wait a little, plunge the pot, then take my mug of dark, wonderful sorcery back to bed and bridge the gap between reluctance and acceptance.  By 7am I was driving, admiring even the sloshy weak light- I saw two magpies, auspicious, then two-thirds of the waning moon loitering over astronomic clouds. Making good time I took the sea road where the view rolled out and out over slate grey, white topped waves- and yes, I am tired but I am thinking about the good stuff: a quiet brew, coastal scenery, tokens of luck.

Today was a pop of spring in between rain warnings- the ground and air damp, the sky blue and white, the sun imbuing warmth- like a rainbow, it held promise. I walked awhile and noted where branches had snapped, where floods had swept stones and mud across roads, where spring bulbs and stems ne’ertheless pushed up through winter’s mulch.

The sky is all shade, no colour. It looks flat unless I stare, then I see evidence, no more than smudges: here was a cloud, gone now, rained out. The sky is ghosts. But the horizon is alive with stark beauty: winter trees, the silhouette of a lone crow. 

This morning we managed to finish the latest line of deadhedging on our land, the one that will catch the icy flow of air as it sneaks down into our tree corral, that will be excellent cover for the frogs we hope will soon find our first mini pond. At home snowdrops drift up banks- ants carry their seeds, they are gardeners too. Daffodil hordes begin to raise their colours, heralded by bold crocus. Evenings are light for longer, bit by bit, and though the weather wearies of surprising us, doubling back to storms, we are heartened, we are sturdy in the whirl and lash of winter’s middle month.

Homewards, I drive. Fog makes heavy work of driving, makes you concentrate to find the road. It gathers like a paste in the valleys, dissipates on peaks. As I guide my car up onto Bodmin Moor the view expands beyond the expected. A bridge of startling light all across the night sky, a bridge between worlds! The Aurora Borealis has me questioning my sanity until I'm home and everyone else can see it too. Even monochromatic it swells with magic: through a camera lens all the colours that a human eye can't catch are there.  We pull on boots and warm coats and walk into the middle of a field to see the whole sky open- and then clouds close the show, and cold pinches our skin. But we are satiated, happy to return to the cosy hearth, hearts full of wonder. 

It’s a misty commute. In several spots visibility dims to fog levels (less than 1000 metres if you are curious about the definition of fog) but there’s morning sun so it’s a bright obstruction. In fact here and there the air clears and sunlight is the cause of extreme squinting.  Last night’s journey was hazy like some weirdness was erasing the landscape- perhaps I would arrive home to find nothing there? I was intrigued. In the obscured I feel wrapped up rather than separated. I am in my hermit era. I am a soul happily cackling in the mist, on my own path.  But!  Every now and then I connect with outside life and a question sneaks out- What does lie ahead, beyond the fug of modern uncertainty?  And the answers bounce back like this:  the only place we can influence the future from (or the past) is the present: the best place to begin is here; the best time is now.  Small stuff adds up.  What seems set in stone forever is swept away by weather; certain...

Mr and me sit on our two piece sofa, one either side and each with a damp dog huddled beside. It has been healthy chaos here. Muddy prints spiral from the front door, soggy chew-toys are draped over carpet and tile.  Mr has been bundled up, fighting off a cold with rest and home remedies, while I have pottered through a rare day off: hid upstairs and remade a lightshade, boxed away some Xmas clothes, daydreamed. Downstairs, remade the fire, served up leftovers for lunch, walked the happy houseguests.  Mr drops into sleep, rumbling snores. The dogs begin their dream twitches.  If the clock worked I'd be listening to its tick. It does not work so we have set it at midnight to summon moon magic. So, in a way, the clock is functioning perfectly. 

Daylight feels cold, the ground is frost crusted. Underground, into this chill murk, spring bulbs are stirring. All the seasons have their transformations of course, but this the time when people also look ahead and make plans and hope for change. Which is why I am also reflecting on the opposite, on why some people put effort into avoiding, why they prefer to fester... and these are my notes- Because if you try, you might fail. Because the work to change is difficult, it makes you tired, and you might fail. Failure is the loss of what you could have been, over and over. And there are some who would rather be a liar than a failure. If you are not humble, and do not see a small life as a beautiful achievement, if you would rather pretend that this not-trying is a grand adventure, a thing beyond the ordinary, this is avoidance. If a plain life seems beneath your ambitions, you don't feel the need to try: this is avoidance. But you will be stuck and afraid and angry that we see you, t...

First we had the coffee, then we did the thing. An orderly beginning, especially as the thing was a list.  A list is one of my favourite structures. It should be (ours is, hurrah) simple, fluid, evolving. Ticking off items is dopamine rich. And if at the year’s end there are tasks leftover you can burn that nonsense and start again. Failure is only failure if you refuse to start again, again, again. (Yet some folks fear it so much they can't even begin.)  We aren't thinking ‘New Year New Me’ we are more taking stock of where we are, checking our route to where we'd like to be, taking note of seasonal chores. Lucky us, already on a journey. Doesn't mean we will never feel lost. But if we do, okay, maybe first we mewl and curse, but then we brew the coffee.