Posted in Uncategorized, tagged clouds, Devon, Haiku-ish, hedgerow, lanscape, Poetry, roses, summer, sunlight, warm on June 27, 2013| 10 Comments »
THESE MOMENTS.
Hemlock
Clouds the hedge banks.
Light
Is high, a heaviness
And a stillness.
Slow air
Collecting summer,
A weight of green.
Pillow clouds
This light rests upon:
Grey and silver.
Content
To remain a veil.
The dry earth,
Warm and pale.
Nodding roses,
Damask scented.
—
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged art, art history, celtic art, Celts, design, magic, motifs, pelta, Poetry, shamanism, spirits, symbols, torc on June 27, 2013| 5 Comments »
If you look at the white pattern above, the peltas can be seen at six, ten and two o-clock, they resemble cross-sections of mushrooms.
1
TORC TALK (PELTA MOTIF)
Well, it was a long time ago that I covered Celtic Art in Art History, and I was never particularly happy with the name labels often given to Celtic motifs, so I suppose confusing a pelta with a trumpet spiral is to be a little expected (particularly when one can be made up of elements of the other). Nonetheless ,that error was mine. As I was playing with the comma-like form of the magatama it morphed into the cresent-like, arced, spiral-ended, mushroom cross-section known as a ‘pelta’.
This name, ‘pelta’ comes from a type of light shield used by the Greeks and Romans, deriving from an original used in Thrace. This itself tells us more about the natural territory and training of Classicalocentric art historians than about the direct connections between a Classical object and a Celtic motif. Look at the prevalent lines in any Early Celtic design and there is a predominance of curvilinear and vegetal forms. Add to that a predeliction for mirroring, reflection and interaction between foreground and background patterns and it is easy to see ‘pelta-like’ forms sprouting up in abundance. The logic of associating the ‘pelta’ motif with a meaning of ‘shield’ is stretched when it can so so much more easily be read as ‘tree’, ‘leaf’, ‘simplified palmette’, ‘reflected crescent moons’ or ‘horns’. In some Classically rendered and stylised imagery, this shape may indeed refer to a martial attribute. But to carry that meaning over onto a similar looking, purely Celtic motif may be far too simplistic, or just simply, inaccurate.
What drew me in the first place to look again at the pelta motif was the realisation that it, or its negative shape, closely echoes the shape of the neck collar or ‘torc’, a connection that I am not sure has been noticed before. Looking at a lot of Celtic art, and especially redrawing the imagery, one comes to understand the importance of what is not there – negative space, void, background….
2
TORC TALK- (FIRST THEN)
First then
There is no object,
No thing that does not trawl
A train of intent and opinion,
That does not feel,
Draw with it more of itself
From the invisible.
Nothing that does not speak.
(if you hear nothing but silence, go within it, find its shape and you shall here the words come in and out, for nothing, no thing is voiceless)
Nothing
That has not been born
From a before.
Everything
Has been born
From something else.
Nothing not jealous of its edges. Nothing that will not melt and merge one day into becoming somewhere else. Nothing, in essence, that does not hunger to remain, that does not hunger and feed.
Where to start? It makes no matter where you start. Simply begin. The road is twist and dip but leads to the same shining place…
3
FOR THE GODS ALONE
Beauty is for the gods alone.
This gold – no use for plough or warrior,
No use, no use on Earth.
Beauty belongs to the gods,
And to those who talk to them,
To those who speak to them,
To those who belong to them.
A torc, an open ring of twisted wire, often gold, with terminals, cast and decorated finials. Worn as a neck ring. Wires, strings, ropes, woven light, woven and woven, golden rope to tie the soul, to show adherence, obedience, obeisance,obligation to the spirits….
A circle not a circle, an arc, a passage of time, a record of space.
A perforation, the head pushed through
To the airs of heaven,
Upper world,
A division of head from body,
No longer just human:
Owned, illuminated,
Ardour, radiant.
The weight of it:
Not easy to ignore,
It is meaning, a glow..
If the pelta symbol is the negative space of the torc- its contained space – then the pelta occupies the same space as the head. Pelta is head. Head is home of spirit. Pelta is spirit. In some coins of the tribes of Brittany the horse rider’s heads have transmuted into pelta shapes.
4
HORIZON’S EDGE
I am the passage of the sun
From dawn to dusk
A woven line of light
To the top of heaven,
To the horizon’s edge.
I am the river of night,
Golden river underground
From dusk to dawn,
A gold thread
Through ancestors’ bones.
Torc is map, halo, sun glow.
A mirror moon, empty,
Crescent, full, crescent,
Empty. Woven around
Each other, silver, gold,
Day, night, copulated,
Seeded…
5
ENSOULED
Seed of the sun
Spilt at sunset
Mated with earth,
Gathered up, gathered up,
Cold made hot once more,
Melted, breathed upon,
Revived, ensouled,
Sung to, given song,
Given name, given sinew,
Given nerve, wound about.
Gold, giver of glory,
Animated, it whispers,
All the time, it whispers.
Should you know its spells
You will prosper,
Should you know its songs
You will be victorious,
Should you know its name,
You shall be returned home
Golden and ever-young.
For it has no end
And its wearer shall remain.
Its giver shall be blessed,
And blessed the receiver.
So how should one receive a torc? Many images show the torc being held in the hand. It is held at the centre, midway between the terminals. Displayed, it is held with open ends upwards toward heaven, like a cup to receive the blessings from above. It is shown offered in the same way, with open end towards the recipient. Is it taken possession of by the two hands grasping the finials? Does the giver carefully hold the ring so that the receiver can echo the hold on the opposite side, both joined in obligation for a moment,and then forever, by that golden link, like the passing of a goblet? Is the name whispered? The promise named? The duty proclaimed? In that moment one and one become roped, twisted, bound together, charged with divine power…
And as to the making: that wire beaten, stretched, thin and thinner. Taken with others, woven, wound, round, wrapped, mated, united. What spells added, what songs, what promises, what life, what given birth to. ( There are images of swords with dragon spirit beings attached -their sharp souls, snake fast, embedded, the metal a home for other life, given honour, given flesh food). Do the finials give face and eyes to the embedded spirit? Are they of one kind? Are they many? Are they moulded each to each, to be hunted out like fast hounds scent their masters, bound by similarity of spirit?
Here shall be a list,
A reckoning,
A call of names,
A summoning of spirits:
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged ash, ash dieback fungus, change, Derbyshire, ecology, elegy, landscape, nature, Peak District, perspective, photography, Poetry, time, woodland on June 22, 2013| 15 Comments »
Ash, my tall and graceful one!
My sky-sweeping, rooted one!
Pillar of the upland airs,
Feather-leaved and blowsy one!
May you live forever
On the green meadow,
The cliff-side wood.
May you not decline
With the eastern wind
That blows unwitting death.
It is not hateful, nor malicious,
That small spored thing.
It is itself, longing to live,
Breathing when given space to breathe.
Happy to flourish free.
But all eat the other.
Each food delightful,
A means to be maintained,
And who can dare say
This one form has more need,
More right, than that other?
These hills, sighing open,
Green-pillared with ash and maple.
Sky-open, crow and jackdaw,
Hare and hawk,
Were once oak deep
’til cropped for pit and forge.
We ourselves so keen to scrape
And burrow, scratch and gather up.
Those stone walls now, too,
Broke and deserted, wooded once more.
Our curse in time, our measurement,
Our expectation.
Climbing into the hill country, (warm air,
Cool breeze), time clicks backwards
In increments,
By hours, by days, by weeks,
By months, by years.
Midsummer here
And the hawthorn still heavy,
Chestnut red and proud.
And the stone, the building,
The road, they slip back
To a century, two centuries, ago.
Time slowed in the hills,
Time holding on.
Like the ash, time growing tall
And bending – green time, leaved, roofed.
Time cherished, built up.
Our habitual curse:
A narrow view on time,
A time of coming and going,
A fragment of patterns
Made larger than horizons by life.
A horizon invisible, but for you,
Towering ash, standing
So fair and tall.
Today is enough.
Today is forever.
Weep not for what will be,
What will never be.
The green shadow cools
Down by the Derwent,
A haven for the silk sheen of ducks,
Their quiet chuckling graze in grass.
The goatsbeard turning to sleep at noon.
——
This collected around a journey up north into the Peak District of Derbyshire, the beginning of the Pennine uplands that run up the centre of England to the Borders of Scotland. The highest lands are sparse fields, stone walled, crow-haunted, with windbreaks of sycamore and beech. In the high valleys, steep and narrow, magnificent ash trees grow tall and broad. Here ash and maple (sycamore, great maple) take over from oak as the main woodland species.
Chalara fraxinea is the rather delightful name of the ash dieback fungus, first appearing in the forests of Poland quite a few years back. Since then it has made its way westwards devastating ninety-nine percent of Europe’s native ash trees. Now it has finally reached Britain. There is a slight hope that natural genetic diversity will allow five percent of trees to be resistant. It is very difficult to know what to do in the face of such changes. Life is a delicate, though robust, balance. The rise of one species and the decline of another is due to so many factors, and is part of the way things work here. We may favour the presence of one species over another, but our human view is always prejudiced by our habits and preferences. In the longer view of time, ninety-nine percent of all species that have ever existed here are extinct, and yet it all goes on. Who can say what life-form has more validity than another?
All we can offer is our appreciation for what is around us. Wishing all well. That may be all we can do. It may be the best we can ever do. It may be our sole purpose. To care for. To wish well. To cherish. Each day as it is.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged dawn, Derbyshire, landscape, nightfall, Peak District, Poetry, Solstice, summer, the north, travelling on June 21, 2013| 4 Comments »
MIDSUMMER DAYS
1
Heading, slowly north from under the cloud. As the road stretches, the sun breaks through. Heat seeps down and reflects up from the ground.
Wild rose and elder
The bones deep in my belly
Warm and relax.
Lazy summer clouds.
2
By nine
The hills are hidden
Light rain by the lake
Swifts dancing low
By ten
The day dips
A long twilight,
Undecided whether
It will leave or stay.
Ducks glide over the waters.
A moment only
The lime trees by the stream
Seem to radiate light
Before a sudden,
Most certain darkness.
The earth, at last,
Chooses the sleep of night.
The sky, though,
Still open eyed,
Too awake for stars.
—-
Solstice morning.
Lost amongst sweeping cloud
The sudden breeze makes rain
Under every tree.
Rested upon ripples
By degrees peace infiltrates.
Ducks line the lake shore.
—–
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged ancestor, art, consciousness, cosmogenesis, cosmologies, doodle, dreaming, evolution, examination of possible meanings, expiration, histories, iconography, inklings, inspiration, magatama, mind, myth, origins, Poetry, power objects, psychometry, shamanics, sketch, spirits, symbols, time, universes, voices on June 20, 2013| 10 Comments »
MAGATAMA SAYS
Magatama says this is what you are, a wriggle in time, a wriggle in space. An eye that is hollow, a mind that is hollow, a space where, a vessel where, sentience pools and flows through. Embryo spinning round sun yolk. A distinction, a seam, a pebble, an accumulation of used data, a debris, a morraine, a momentum of moments lost, not quite forgotten.
A tube, sealed at either end with only hope. It will not suffer to remain. It too will distort amd become formed, reformed. The spin of horizons never long denied. A new in and a new out. A new edge, a new world, given names from somewhere else. The hollow eye, for the hollow eye does not see except what it has seen before. Somewhere there was a beginning, but it was not here, not here. Each key becomes a door, each door a wall, each wall a cell, each cell a wondering of me and mine, a selfish small delight, a harbouring of dream. Now the tide slips, the shattered, polished brilliance fades. We are left high, drying, the long keening of gulls, sandflies and bladderwrack. No more words. Day becomes day.
Scatter, scatter,
Ye stars!
Scatter,
Ye manifold living beings!
However so far
This home
Shall never become lost,
(though misremembered,
Though mistook),
So wrapped, so folded,
So entangled it is
Within your sheer fibre,
Your fluid, your feeling.
Flee as far as
Beyond the named,
Further than edge,
Farther than form.
Digging foundations for what walls exist, reconstructing our noble and grave histories, mirrors and clouds, equations, flocks of reasons seeking a roost, a reputation. The sun has hidden herself in a cave. Where is the sly shaman will entice her out with curiosity? Shiny things, laughter of others. Wrapped up in, wrapped around and upon ourselves. In becoming out, out in, the curve of edge, empty but for its own density.
The scratching, sketching reveals magatama is also an ear, an orifice that listens, that absorbs…..and so too, turns doodling into that ubiquitous Celtic mysterious icon, the ‘trumpet spiral’, or for the more botanically minded, the mushroom divided, or for those who watch the way waters weave, the rippled surface vortex……but the doodle as doodle, as gesture, as delight of wrist, it is an outward sweep, a slow arc, an inward sweep, conch consciousness, two shapes from one line, an ineffability, a mystery, a going out and a return, the shape of a soul. Spirit language. It is always tricky, always says more than it says. Clouds conversing with hills………
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged ancestors, artefact, Celts, japan, Jomon, magatama, Poetry, ritual, shamanic, sutra, symbol, torc on June 18, 2013| Leave a Comment »
MAGATAMA RETURNS
Tight arc
Hard as stone
Open eye.
Rigid curl
Weighed tight
Pulsing.
Foetal curl
Settled
Pulsing.
What is it?
What is it not?
Magatama.
Worn smooth
Rubbed
Inward.
Container
Contained
Key.
One skin
Rubbed smooth
Inner, outer.
Stretching
Taking form
Throbbing.
Rising head
Looking
Seeing.
Eagle beak
Bear claw
Worn smooth.
Incontrovertible proof
A previous universe
Magatama.
Worn away
All that remains:
First universe.
Hooked,
Held,
Harvested.
Hollow seed
Throwing curved edges,
Expansion.
Hollow centre
Regarding flow
Back to nothing.
Becoming precious
Passed down:
What remains.
Accumulating
One surface:
Time-space.
Oldest unknown
First limit
Convolution.
—-
Every now and then, the magatama awakes, whispers into half-sleep. It is a strange being, a shape so simple, so involuted. A seed, a genetic meme. Casting around, I wondered if there were other antediluvian icons that would stir that ancestral well so surely. So far, the closest approach is by the Celtic torc. Like the magatama to the first Japanese peoples, the torc epitomised what to be a Celt meant. A real, tangible object, an object of trade, of status, of power. I shall have to listen to their whispers also……
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged clouds, green, haiku summer, landscape, leaves, mind, Poetry, rain on June 18, 2013| Leave a Comment »
SUMMER RAIN
Summer rain.
It can almost be forgiven:
Warm, green air.
—-
Storm grey weight
Flowing grasses
Rabbit’s ears twitching.
—
Darker by degrees
Still air cooling
The first drops
Shiver.
—-
Still life
Hidden sparrows
Slow rain
—-
Slow rain
Hits every leaf
Syncopated greeting.
—-
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged birdsong, cloud, cuckoos, grasses, green, landscape, nature, Poetry, rain, resonance, summer, time, valleys, woods on June 15, 2013| 2 Comments »
THERE SHOULD BE CUCKOOS
There should be cuckoos.
The warm silver clouds
Low with rain
Sheeting the high hills,
Green and weighed down
With yesterday’s light.
There should be cuckoos.
Floating, echoing hidden
Like a gong, like a memory
Turning over the still heart
Melting tight paths of thought,
Manifest distance.
There should be cuckoos.
Inhabiting every wooded fold
Deep in the world
Now settled, fruiting,
Slowly inturning, indwelling
Heading high to solstice
And then the long
Slow burn to harvest.
There should be cuckoos.
Now the hay is turned and gathered
Now creamy elder scents the air,
Worlds in worlds, layered, established.
Angels barefoot down the lanes,
Honeysuckle fingers, messages forgot.
There should be cuckoos
Measuring this loosening, this hollow,
Replacing thought and song
Answering all, settling all,
Letting go, adrift and floating.
Low clouds, rain heavy,
Warm air’s slow somersault
The swaying grasses, the rippling grasses.
From the green world’s roof,
From its rafters,
There should be cuckoos.
—–
(Ornithologically suspect, as cuckoos here in England usually call most in April, but it was the thought of cuckoos on a warm, cloud-filled day in June, that inspired this flow of words.)
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged beauty, bliss, landscape, life, nesting, Poetry, Samuel Palmer, small things, summer, sunlight, William Blake on June 8, 2013| 4 Comments »
WARMING
(The ghost of William Blake conversing with
The ghost of Samuel Palmer, down by the apple
Orchard, perhaps)
Sunlight gathers heat.
Sparrows in the eaves
Flustered wings, feeding, fetching.
Small is the delight
That accumulates bliss, drop by drop.
The easy centuries
Of a cat’s sleeping breath.
It is a life of small moments,
A slow, steady filling:
Small moments noticed,
Not blessings to be prayed for,
Not dreams to be hollowed out from air,
Not glorious futures
Nor the wrinkled, cold hand of victory.
Upholding the fragile,
Precision of caring,
Peculiar coincidence,
Unexplainable connection.
No arrows of equations pinning certainty,
The sly, mad oracle of statistics,
Prophecies of bacterial bloom.
Summer storm
Here and gone..
simonhlilly 
Conversations with Invisible Friends 3
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged blogs, comments, existence, Haiku, mirrors, plum sake, Poetry, rain, robin, silence, storm, words, worms on July 6, 2013| 3 Comments »
Another selection of comments and pieces inspired by other’s blog posts or blog comments. (We orchestrate…..)
NOISE
Prayer,
confessional,
creed.
God or Godless,
we ramble to ourselves
within our own bone cathedrals,
echoing with sighs and curses.
There is a completely soundproofed room
in some MidWest University.
No one had yet managed
to spend more than 45 minutes there.
Hullucinations after a few minutes.
We are not designed for silence or darkness.
We bleat and howl in our own jungles,
bleat and howl….
—
GIFT
This body,
This world:
A gift from a million suns.
—
NIGHT RAIN
A rain of words
puddle the page,
tongue-mind umbrella unfurls,
tastes flicker neon image,
dream world,
dream world.
—
MIRRORED
To see ourself reflected in the smile of our love
Is the only mirror should be allowed
Not the rotated smudge of silver window
Nor frozen shadows unbemused, inanimate.
—-
SQUALL
Whose soft words
Sweeping through
My mind’s cool edge,
I wonder?
Sound of distant rain.
Sound of distant rain.
Something seems forgotten:
Cool emptiness,
A taste of sorrow.
A taste of sorrow
For no reason
That I know.
Mantra of compassion.
Mantra of compassion.
Wind and rain
Blowing away
Ephemeral things.
—-
A CAST FOR WORMS
Well better and betterer.
Words for worms!
( Diet of Worms?).
Worm world.
Worm holes.
Cast about, Charles Darwin
( worms, his first love).
Lumbricus terrestris.
The name itself
Segmented, wriggling.
Beneath us all.
We, at last,
Their own dinner.
Earth to earth,
Tasting earth,
Making earth,
Loving earth.
Our Masters,
Squirmy worms,
Fast food,
Slow food,
Love food.
—–
ART OF POETRY
This hybrid birth,
a form of archaeology,
digging as science,
the science of digging,
the art of concealing and revealing,
building and collapsing, that is ,
constructing,
hybrid construction,
a constriction of possibilities,
a constraining of maps,
quantum thisness and thatness,
leaving more out than in,
making a point,
missing any other view,
poetry: the straining for meaning
without even pretending success,
e.e.cummins and e.e. goins,
a vowel,
a vapour,
a string of pearls,
words making doors,
doors opening,
sutras,
stitches,
hints for hunters…..
—
ROBIN
Looking back:
The world-
Bright, cocked eye
—-
GRACE
A small thing
Is not the same
As an inconsequential thing.
A loud voice
Is not the same as
A voice to be followed.
In one second,
In less, even,
The world can be born
Or can disappear
In front of our eyes.
Each person made afresh
Each to see what can be seen
What can be sung.
No wrong notes
If we do not know the tune.
We shall diminish and wither away
Jumping to conclusions.
Falling skillfuly
Is called flying.
Stumbling elegantly
Is called dancing.
Moving gracefully
Is called living.
—–
PERCEPT
Plum saké.
Too much
Slurs the mind
—-
METRE
It has presence and voidness.
It has frozen processes,
exited time,
become apt, concrete,
paradoxically gone.
Here
and both there and elsewhere,
but only inside
does it play a tune.
Lithophone,
bone music,
skeleton key.
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