MY PLACE
Skilled in nothing
Except a drift of words
Trawled from the bleak waves
Of day and night –
Remorseless time
Measuring failed silences.
A scouring dawn wind
Polishes the cold moon’s disc.
A clan of crows, purposeful,
Flies westwards.
If I knew it,
This
Would be my place,
Rooted and sustained,
Full of small wonders,
Upheld
By slow breath.
—–
Last post of 2012. May everyone have a great 2013!
—–
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged belonging, cold, crows, moon, nature, place, Poetry, Winter morning | 9 Comments »
WINTER SOLSTICE
Shortest of days
Exquisite punctuation.
The golden egg
Hatching new time.
Birth-waters reflect still,
Cold blue skies.
Mist in the mountains,
Mist in the valleys.
Those that can,
Continue.
All others expire,
Release
Returning from the edges
To the centre.
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged beginnings, black and white, December, hiranyagarbha, light, nature, photographs, Poetry, polarity, return, solsice, Winter, winter solstice | 8 Comments »
It is now the few days of Winter Solstice, where the sluggish, low sun of the Northern hemisphere, appears to rise and set at the same place on the horizon. I thought it would be a good opportunity to have a virtual exhibition of a set of eight images that were created to express the dynamics of each turning point.
The style of these digital artworks is constrained by their component parts, which are largely symbols that I have created to represent (and transmit to the viewer), the dynamic qualities of different species of tree. For each festival a selection of tree energies was intuited, (alongside a few flower, gemstone and colour energies). these were combined into a mandala form.
The first image is “Light of Winter Solstice”:
The next festival occurs around the 2nd of February and is known in this part of the world as Imbolc. Here then, is “Light of Imbolc”:
This is followed around 20th March by the Spring Equinox; “Light of Spring Equinox”:
The 1st of May (or more accurately, May Eve), is Beltane. Here is “Light of Beltane”:
Around the 21st June it is the Summer Solstice. “Light of Summer Solstice”:
Around harvest-time is Lammas (2nd August). “Light of Lammas:
The Autumn Equinox arrives around 23rd September. “Light of Autumn Equinox”:
At last the year swing round to its starting and ending point, Samhain, (All Hallow’s Eve, Hallowe’en) at the 31st October. “Light of Samhain”:
So I hope you enjoyed the show.
(Just by-the-by, if anyone wants a close look or feels a yearning to possess one or more of these prints, they are available on my etsy shop : http://www.etsy.com/shop/TreeSeer )
Happy Winter Solstice to All!
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged autumn equinox, digital artworks, nature, spring equinox, Winter, winter solstice | 6 Comments »
OUR MUSIC
( for n. filbert)
Spiraling.
But up or down?
The heart moves in and out.
Its own rhythm.
Has no memory, no sorrow, no joy
(the wild geese cry, flying away,
Away to the horizon of light).
The heart has no words, no tears.
(What I cannot grasp – that resonant fullness
Of a dying chord).
The heart has no words-
The reason music is.
First words
laid down in thought,
Sketched, grasped
But lost.
The path between breathing in
And moving out,
A pull, a chord
A melody.
Formless form,
Existent for an instant.
Possibly enough to light a light –
A dying arc in the bubble chamber,
Proton, antiproton, quark –
A path measured but no longer
Reachable,
Signifying
What is no more.
(embellish, embroider, garnish,
In the end all stories are a rope
To cling to in our vast uncertainty).
The beautiful line of that decay,
Spiraling inward to surcease –
If it is not music, if it is not what is within music,
If it is not carried upon music,
It means less than nothing to the heart.
Attack, decay, sustain, release,
Attack, decay, sustain, release.
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged bubble chamber, emotion, exploration, fleeing, fleeting, heart, inspiration, music, Poetry, Prompt, taking a thought for a walk | 3 Comments »
OUR VOICE
Do we create
Or
re-create?
Remember,
Retreive,
Reconstruct,
What has gone before?
Ancestor’s
Back-brain commitees,
Manipulator’s of dream,
Or urge of the world’s word.
All, maybe, reaching for a hand, a tongue,
An instrument, sweet or loud,
To sing the old songs,
The forgotten histories.
A chorus, a fugue
Echoing through the aisles,
The wings, the ships, the stars,
Cathedrals of bone, temples of bone,
Resounding to the white noise –
The screaming sundering into time and space –
Nothing into something,
Something into something else.
Whispers of the first,
Pushing through to the last.
No choice, if the heart is beating.
No path, but rotate, expand, collapse.
No new view, no need for possession.
Nothing outside the Way of Heaven.
So give up this me and mine
Angst of name, fame, honour, like.
If the waves move through you
(Tides, tempests, zephyrs, whispers)
O Vessel of angels, defence of demons,
Inventor of nothing, commentator of mages,
Speak, write, shout, breathe.
Eyes that have seen everything
And forgotten,
Put it back
In our hearts –
The spark, the ember.
Every one of us-
A hearth of the sacred fire,
Never extinguished,
Ever-present light.
One of millions.
Small stars scattered,
Photons of cellular thought
There to glimmer eternally.
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged Big Bang, creation, creativity, language, little echoes, Poetry, speech | 6 Comments »
Night Watch
We shall learn to suffer the long dark,
Learn to melt with the short darkness.
As clouds cover the stars,
As the fire settles back
And the cats, relaxed, alert
Become still
( now it is their world).
The hum of voices, insistent, distracting, withdraws,
An undertow sucked into silence
(The spaces between things).
Roaming large and small:
The solid fears and frights,
Noises with eyes,
Snarl of unknowingness.
(Keep still.)
It is the edges that melt away
The words no longer mine.
The certainties belong to naive daylight
Not to this red tongue of dark beauty
Lapping synapses with galactic spin.
Enough to be breathing in and out
Enough to be watchful as sleepers sleep
Enough to shift weight slightly as the heavens wheel
Enough to know little, if nothing at all,
To rest upon the pulse and flow of veins
The warmth of cell and muscle
The opium castles of consciousness
(emperor’s clothes on a ghost of habit).
Keep dark the hours of darkness
Keep silence in the silent wanderings
The silent wings, the silent edges,
As silence is the only way,
The one sure way,
To find what becomes the centre.
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged abiding, cats, darkness, fireside, galactic centre, gazing, nature, night, Poetry, silence | 2 Comments »
Withering
Back to the bone.
Then, too,
The marrow
Drawing in.
Cease, surcease,
Silence.
Thread of life
Pulled tight,
Stretched taught.
Knotted, (dark knot),
To the past
Hoping to continue
Through this cold.
Even water, though,
Has turned
To rock.
Only one movement :
Slow,
Pendulum moon
Slides golden,
Hazy
Across
This winter dawn.
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged cold, contraction, dawn, December, moon, nature, Poetry, season, Winter, withdrawal | 3 Comments »
Rook-haunted woods.
Still skies
Crow-scattered.
Raven time,
Starling time,
Fog-drenched, silent.
A million leaves conjure
A beautiful demise,
Then fall into mud,
Crushed and grateful
For sleep:
Escaping from the growing cold,
This pinching of the candle of light,
The slip of degrees.
Skeleton time,
Unfleshed, sparse.
Silhouettes and shadows
Lost in dream:
Sky-rooted,
The taste of loam
And marl.
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged change, cold, crows, leave fall, nature, November, ravens, senses, time, weather, Winter | 3 Comments »
We recently travelled to the Isle of Skye and the Western Highlands of Scotland. October in Scotland is glorious and the weather was good – not too overcast, not too sunny – so that we were able to see the land in many of its moods and atmospheres. I have selected a few images around the subject of water. I hope you enjoy the visual essay.
Taken from a cafe window in Portree, Skye, early morning looking east.
Fron Ord, Sleat, Isle of Skye, looking across Loch Eishort towards the Black Cuillins.
Clouds reflecting in the still waters of a loch an near Kilt Rock, Trotternish, Skye.
Looking across the sea to Harris from Duntulm, Trotternish, Skye.
Ripples on Loch Bay, Waternish, Skye.
Dawn sky over Kyleakin, Skye. The view from our bedroom window.
Sunrise over Kyleakin, Skye. Waves of light.
Early morning mists lift into the sky over Glen Garry.
Mists, shadows, trees, Glen Garry.
Still waters, slow moving mists. Loch Lochy.
Sunlight enters the woods. Mist rises from the waters. Loch Lochy.
Water-worn pools, Falls of Killin.
Waterside willows, Loch Venachar.
The sky below. Loch Venachar.
The Waters of the World. Loch Venachar.
——
This world
is the Otherworld:
Silver and gold
in turns.
The road flies
to the horizons
where our eyes linger,
longing
for something
right
in front
of
us.
———
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged Autumn, Breadalbane, clouds, Cuillins, dawn, dawn sky, glen garry, hills, Isle of Skye, landscape, lochs, mist, nature, photography, Poetry, portree skye, relections, Scotland, sky, Sleat, sleat isle of skye, TheTrossachs, travel, trees, Trotternish, valleys, water, waves of light | 9 Comments »
could I carry
The words of aonghus macneacail
Safely in my head,
A basket of eloquence,
Then my own tongue
(And its roaming spirit)
Would never be silenced.
And my eye would be
Hard as nails, soft
As sea foam
Seeing all, feeling all
In sounds
Round and slap flat,
Like a bodhrain
Of the heart.
Wave-formed sound
Of how it is,
How it may be,
How it was –
A weaving of Time
And Space,
A knotting of nets
To catch the fast, glistening shoals
Of verse,
Clever creel to hold safe
All those
Camoflaged, scuttling notions.
For they are there
When I am in drought,
(lips cracked, tongue
Cleaved to mouth’s ceiling),
Angus, and Sorley, too:
Like sudden, hidden
mellifluous streams
Stumbled across
On the deserted, bleak
Black moors,
bringing fountains of words
Tumbling,
Roaring
For an hour or two
Until subdued
In bog and slough
Or drowned,
quenched,
Tumbling
Over the cliffside
To be lost
In the hidden rivers
Of the sea.
——-
(On a recent trip to the Isle of Skye I bought a copy of Aonghas MacNeacail’s new volume “Laughing at the clock” in Portree.
I have, there and since, been working on a poetic piece in many parts concerning the passage of Time, landscape, life, death, the secret commonwealth of the Sidhe, inspiration, Independance, freedom…..
It is not the usual way I work – a careful fishing for lines, a tentative accumulation of images, and the whole edifice rises and sinks over time like a mythical island. But when I think I have exhausted its potential, or become distracted by daily events, all I need to do is to open up a page of Aonghus’s, or of Sorley Maclean and then my head is filled with a flurry of muse’s feathers ( coming or going), which, if I am fortunate in giving the time to put down the phrases and ideas, can fuel many things.
Language is indeed a virus, it seems. And I am happy not to be innoculated…..)
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged Aonghus Macneacail, heartbeat, inspiration, music, musing, Poetry, reading, Sorley MacLean, the muse | 6 Comments »
simonhlilly 