Herefordshire & Australia

A piece of writing has been rattling about in my head for a few days now. It's May, the heating is on, it cold, windy & raining outside & hot custard featured as part of the evening meal. And yet, at the forefront of my mind are eucalyptus trees & parrots!
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My mind insists on creating parallels between Australia & Herefordshire. It may be because recently I have noticed a small number of magnificent gum trees growing in my area - tall, slender trees with pale trunks & delicate leaves making a distinctive open, grey-green canopy. There are several species of eucalptys sufficiently hardy to thrive in the UK - the only one I recall seeing for sale in garden centres is the Cider Gum (Eucalyptus gunnii). I am not sure what variety the elegant ones are that I see as we drive about our business. I have been trying to decide whether one would grow well at our church site, whether it would look right & whether it was really appropriate - perhaps a good companion to a unidentified redwood- that creaks & groans in the wind and looks unbalanced missing it's partner, long since dead.
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As is often the way when themes occur, I opened at random the book I am currently reading (Wildwood) to a chapter entitled "Cockatoos". In it the author describes being awaken by screeching cockatoos "as they barrelled through the gum trees" and later he describes the ghost gum as having the "fluidity of a dancer" - all very exotic. Then quite surprisingly he says "it reminded me of the ash tree at home in Suffolk: smooth and pale skinned, with the graceful sinews of a dancer in the wind". So I am not alone in travelling so far, to a place with an alien flora & fauna, and yet finding an unexpected link with a familiar friend - an ash. At the entrance to our ruined church stands a magnificent ash & within the church yard itself we have preserved a 30 foot ash; through some expert crown reduction. Although we don't have cockatoos & galahs calling us to wakefulness, there are flashy raucous jays, yammering woodpeckers &, quarrelsome jackdaws nesting in the ruined church tower. Just once I have been to Australia & I find it odd that like the author of the book - the magnificent Roger Deakin (Wildwood A journey Through Trees) - I seem to have formed an emotional link between the two countries. To me the call of the jay always makes the word "parrot" appear before the word "jay" & similarly with a yammering woodpecker, the word "kookaburra" forms first.

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Perhaps the link is to do with movement, freedom, adventure & surprise - our church site certainly provides all those. Or perhaps it is to do with still feeling a newcomer to this lush, tree-filled county of Herefordshire - my birthplace is a dry part of the UK that according to some definitions could be classified as a desert - in fact rather like parts of Australia!
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Ghost Gum picture Flickr aussi-gals' photostream.
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May Bank Holiday.

Sometimes it feels good to be busy, with a long list waiting to be done. Other times it is not so good - when your natural rhythm at that point in time says "nice & steady", "take time to sit & watch". Before I met-up with Mr PoppyM it was easier to follow my natural rhythm. Now of course there are two natural rhythms to get into synchronicity - sometimes this is easier to achieve than others.

The April rain has finally arrived so it's time for a "breather". The ground has been rotavated & the potatoes, parsnips & first batch of chard are planted. The mini-greenhouses are filling well with brassicas, lettuces, some annuals and, the summer bulbs are planted & shooting. There are still packets & packets of seeds to plant, gates to install, fences to build, but tomorrow will be a rest day, one for planning & dreaming.

I've just started to read "Wildwood" by Richard Deakin - what a brilliant nature writer. In it he describes the joyful & restorative nature of nights spent in his shepherd's hut or railway sleeper, both positioned in fields away from his house. They resonate deeply with the experiences I had when I lived for a while on a small boat. The closeness to nature, candles illuminating the darkness, the leaving-behind of the clutter of a house, happy days that I think about most days.

The next big phase of our church restoration project involves the building of a workshop-cum-over-night accommodation. I am so looking forward to spending at least a few nights there listening to the owls & night sounds & waking-up to birdsong and the sound of the wind in the trees. One of the many advantages of owning a piece of land is being able to grow your own woodland. It's next to impossible to get any form of permission to live in a wood - the only way around the planning restrictions I have found is to grow the wood around your home & that is essentially what we are doing.

It's May Day - time for the Maypole Dance. Photo from Jane Williams photostream Flickr

Time for sleep - time to visualize my sleepy parsnips seeds waking & putting forth shoots, time to remind the potatoes & chard that frosts are still possible for another fortnight. I fully expect to have the fire going tomorrow morning - a real British May Bank Holiday weekend.

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Buttons

Time & space at last to sit & think & write.

Buttons

Over the last few months I have tried to buy some basic buttons and been unsuccessful. When Mr PoppyM asked for some for his trousers I thought it would be a simple case of vi sting a wool-shop - and sure enough, they sold a variety of buttons but for exorbitant prices. I turned to supermarkets - all they sold were pre-packs of tiny buttons probably aimed at shirts. Oh to have a John Lewis on the door-step. It set me thinking about why I hadn't suitable buttons, I used to have a tin-full of them, all sorts of sizes & shapes. These were gleaned from clothing that had come to the end of their life & some came from charity shops, where occasionally big, mixed bags could be had for around a pound. My mother, her mother, my aunts and friends all had tins of buttons too. The tins were usually biscuit or cake tins with a pretty picture on the front. Inside were buttons from a variety of clothes along with zips & clasps snappers and safety pins, often there'd be part-skeins of embroidery silk & empty cotton-reels. They were fascinating to a small child, almost as much fun as a jewellery box. Looking back I can see that they held clues to family life - I guess my tins have become lost during my many moves. Back to the search for the trouser buttons- I found a great site on the Internet - The One Stop Button Shop. Here are buttons as I remembered them - 35 ordinary buttons for around £3.50. Of course they also sell pretty buttons. The moral - don't put -up with the paltry offerings that some shops offer!

I've had a quick look at the history of this everyday item. Purely decorative, functional, status symbols, objects of legislation, highly collectibles, humble and valuable.

The fabulous picture is by Rima Staines - thehermitage.estsy.com

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The snow has gone

What a difference a day makes. Today I took the big dog for a walk, taking in a visit to the chicken pen. The hens were out & about scratching & strutting in the sunshine, for most of the previous snowy week they had been huddled in their houses just coming out when a person appeared to see if anything tasty was on offer. Today I looked back at the view & all was green & full of bird song. Last week, after a slow & slippery walk up the hills & footpaths to this same spot outside the hen pen, I looked and saw white and heard muffled distance sounds.

Normally I stride-out, walking fast to a view-point & then stop and look and listen. The big dog trots along beside me or out front when it is possible to use the full-length of the long lead. For the last few days, with snow & ice on all walking surfaces this has not been possible, we've both carefully picked a non-slippery way up to the end point of a shortened outing. The big dog is designed for snow with a thick coat, large body size & decent-sized paws &, a nose that can pick up an interesting molecule at at thousand paces. The snow has brought so many exciting smells for her - I wonder if they are new scents or familiar scents emphasised in some way by the weather. The ability to scent a pile of horse-poo under inches of snow has been a wonder to behold, the following game of toss-the-poo a great laugh. I'm going to miss the snow ploughing with the nose followed by rolling in the snow & chasing round in circles leaving great pock marks on the pristine snowy surface. Life is one big change!

We visited out ruined-church site 2 days ago, no flooding there. The Froome, that runs just a few meters away from the boundary wall, had risen about 2 metres and was racing along, especially as passed under the nearby bridge. At this site there is about a metre to go before the banks are burst - it did that in 2007, moving large bales of hay & straw around the adjacent fields like footballs. I read today that the TS Eliot poetry prize has been awarded to a work that focuses on the River Severn - I'm being to appreciate why one river could provide sufficient material for such an enormous achievement (Philip Gross).

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Horse Power

Yesterday, for the first time in months I watched some dressage-to-music on TV. The sound quality of the music was awful but the horses & some of the riders were magnificent. I have seen exquisite thoroughbreds & Arabs, coats gleaming, beautifully turned-out, moving with grace & confidence. I have watched countless cowboy movies with the cowboys cantering & galloping horses of various shapes & hues, & the Native American's head-tossing, spirited,bare-back mounts. Innumerable beloved ponies, hacks, cobs & riding-school mounts have passed before me. Without doubt, the only ridden horses that make me stop-in-my-tracks to watch them are beautifully schooled dressage horses, of any level.

Dressage horses at the top of their art, at Prix-St.George level & above, are truly the elite athletes of the horse world. Those trained to this level with sensitivity, care, patience & real knowledge are a joy to watch, happy in their work. Partner this with a skilled, sensitive & courageous rider & the potential to see the magnificence of the horse shine through is there. It is possible to indirectly sense the power of a movement, as a breeze accompanying the passing horse. It is possible to visually witness the grace of a well-executed manoeuvre, a pirouette, a piaffe, even a high-school jump. But only when the horse & rider are working as one joyful, moving partnership is it possible to feel, as a spectator, the essence of horse. It's heart, it's purpose, it's life-force, it's power. All the sensory components may be there, but these alone do not reveal what a horse is - witness the near-impossibility of finding a horse portrait, sculpture or artistic representation that has "life". Horses are creatures of movement - as a car only comes to life when it moves, it's soul is released & revealed in motion, so it is with the horse. The colours, nuances, range, limitations, magnificence's are teased-out & predictably displayed by a master driver & rider under precise, testing conditions. My own personal make-up attunes me to certain aspects of physical & "spiritual" power", it's grace, poetry, scale. A top-flight race-horse is no less an athlete than a top-flight dressage horse but explosively-released power travelling directly from A to B, this revelation of power does not affect me in the same way as a balletically-moving horse. I love dance & music and in these too I respond to grace, elegance, order and that most elusive of virtues - beauty. I can appreciate most types of dance but only get pleasure if beauty is there whether it be in the interpretation of the music or the story, revealed in the lines made by the dancers, or more rarely & magnificently, when the essence of the whole performance becomes known. Like that moment when a poem stops being words & leaps out as "thing" - the word, sound, smell, person, place, object that IS the poem. And so back to the dancing horse & rider - my own little grey mare is now semi-retired but I know that inside her will always be that essence-of-horse all horses share but only some can reveal to us limited humans.

(I've lost track of who owns the photo of Goldstern)

Listening

While I was taking the large dog for a walk yesterday I stopped to listen to a bird song. It was a song that I haven't heard since moving here - the distinctive pee-wit pee-wit of the lapwing. Sure enough in the distance I could see a small flock of the birds -distinctive with their black & white wings & odd flight. I associate these birds with Nottinghamshire farmland - great flocks of them whirring in the sky filling the air with their shrill, whooping-whistle call. I checked out details about the bird and was surprised to discover his huge range over the UK - I thought it was a bird of the South & midlands - it's like finding an old friend that you left in a previous home (http://www.rspb.org.uk ).
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Today I went to look for the lapwings but they had moved on. instead I was treated to two great sights. I threw a piece of left-over Christmas pudding into the hen pen. Only Alfie the cockerel expressed any interest in it, the hens wandered off pecking at the grass & other bits I had thrown in. Alfie stood by the pudding and on the other side of it stood a crow. Three crows regularly patrol the strip of land the hen-pen sits on, they normally only fly into the pen after scraps when humans leave the area. The pudding must have been a great prize as not only did the bird stay put whilst I was just a few feet away with the small dog but, it marked it's prize while Alfie hovered about beside it undecided what to do. Then the bird pecked at the lump & tried to fly away with it but as it must have weighed at least 3x as much as it did, satisfied itself with a small piece. Such bravery inspired by a left over piece of Christmas pud!

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Half an hour or so later I was out walking the large dog when I stopped and looked around - I could hear the raucous racket only a groups of corvids can make. I spotted a small group at the top of a tall hawthorn. As I watched a buzzard lifted up off a near-by tree into the air & the crows mobbed it until it flew away. As it did so 2 other buzzards & another large bird appeared. The 3 buzzards circled in the air like vultures in a cowboy movie, lifting higher on a spiral & then disappearing from view. The 4th birds was not a buzzard, it's lower body appeared snowy white in comparison to the creamy/buff of the buzzards. While the buzzards soared in the thermals this bird dived away at amazing speed with broad, black-tipped wings and vanished amongst a stand of alders lining the brook. Seeing the two types of birds together in the sky clearly showed the difference between their movement, energy & shape. I am surer than ever that it was the goshawk I've caught glimpses of before. I know they are in the area as a few week back a local farmer reported seeing a dead one by the road-side. To think, if I hadn't stopped to look at the crows making a racket, I'd have missed that wonderful sight.

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Mr PoppyM is a local man & has a pronounced local accent & use of dialect. I'm trying to record some of his colourful life as part of a book-project I'm working on. I have no illusions that I am a writer of stories and certainly not a writer of plays. So it has been quite an experience turning someone else's tales into a written form. The first two stories have been a disappointment as whilst I can capture the plot everything else gets left behind - they become a soulless catalogue of events! The latest plan is write the tales out verbatim & to go from there - it can only be an improvement.

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The final listening thread - over the Christmas period I have listened to two radio plays - what a treat "The No1 Ladies Detective Agency" in Radio 4 & the "Wizard of Earthsea" on Radio 7. It brought back to me the simple joy of being read to! I'm now onto the "Adventures of Tin Tin" via the wonder of BBCi player - I can't recommend that facility highly enough.

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Be prepared for the unexpected!

I know the big wide world is out there, and I've even been to some parts of it. At the moment I am trying to semi-hibernating - spend as much time indoors as possible. This is almost impossible with animals & birds to care for! Sat indoors, watching the rain or out walking dog in a familiar landscape it is easy to forget what different places feel like. This was suddenly brought home to me one morning when I read a short piece sent to my in-box. I read the short piece and thought - wow - I have no idea how I would feel in that landscape it. In that one moment, with that one thought, my whole world expanded. I was catapulted out of the familiar into the fresh & new. All that from these few lines of text....

I live near Kilauea - a very active volcano. The other night we went to the end of the road and sat at the edge of the lava field.The only light for miles was created by the glow of molten lava.There was a crescent moon and millions of stars. The scene was magical.

Every so often the vent would send up an intense orange shower of light. Then many miles away the lava would light up the sky as it flowed into the ocean. The moon set directly over the vent to and it looked like Kilauea had swallowed the moon.

The wind was incessant, constantly changing direction while simultaneously feeling balmy, restless and at ease. We sat for along time and I was deeply moved by the incredible power of creation.

Last night the land moved. There were two earthquakes a short time apart. The mantel of the earth shifted as the undersea volcano Loihi expanded.

Mother Earth is doing just fine. She's busy expanding and twirling and living with passion. We can learn much from her if we simply take the time to observe, listen and get in alignment with her power and beauty. We live as guest of Mother Earth. Enjoy your sojourn on this magnificent planet.--

With love and aloha,

Susan

Dr Susan Gregg LLC po Box 1006kurtistown, Hawaii96760US

photo from http://www.glosmorrismen.org/

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