Hallowe'en...

The Eve of All Hallows, the Vigil for All Saints, a time when we remember that the veil between the seen and the unseen, the material and the spiritual, the gone-before and the now, is not so impenetrable as we are wont to believe...

The pumpkin carving was a family affair: one hollowed, one designed, and another carved. As day turned to dusk, they were put in places of honour (one in the window, and one by the road); and as dusk turned to darkness, they were lit. It was great fun to listen out for the childish chatter coming down the lane, and hear it suddenly turn to delighted shrieks of "pumpkin! pumpkin!" as they saw our jack o' lanterns.

Later, we sat eating buttered popcorn and home-made apple juice (from our very own apples), and watched the episode of Dad's Army in which those brave lads find themselves stranded in a dark, abandoned house, with the cries of ghostly hounds filling the air. Spoooky!

 

The dying of the year...

A fine mist has descended on the countryside, and with it a deep sense of peace born of acceptance, and submission to a power greater than its own.
For Nature's first burst of autumnal defiance is over; she knows now that she cannot stop the advance of winter. She is like an old woman who knows her work is done (and has the quiet pride of knowing it well done), and now she lays aside her knitting, and sits quietly in her chair by the fire, slowly rocking back and forth, back and forth, waiting, without fear, for the end. And yet she knows, this wise old woman, that it is not the end...

"I tell you the truth, unless a kernel of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a single seed. But if it dies, it produces many seeds."

Rotten trees and wild posies

Where the tree was...

Even before I look out of my window in the morning, the difference in the quality of light tells me that the tree isn't there.

Rotten on the inside.

I feel a little as though I have suddenly lost a close friend in a car crash. Every morning when I wake, the tree isn't there; and in the evening when I go to bed, the tree is not there. When I walk out of the front door I see in the empty expanse of sky that she is missing; and when I come home, she is still not there.
But she was a sick tree; and though it's possible that she might have lasted many years yet, it is also possible that the next storm would have brought her crashing down, and if that happened it would have been a miracle if no one (or no house) was harmed...

But life goes on, as my mother tells me. And though my tall, graceful sycamore has gone (and the red kites keep swooping over, with nowhere to land), the wild flowers are beginning to bloom in the hedgerows and verges. I went out yesterday and picked myself a posy, and tied it with a piece of grass.

"To see a World in a Grain of Sand,

  And a Heaven in a Wild Flower..."

  - William Blake

Black edging...

Dogmatix can't bear trees being pulled down

Black edging... That's what this post should have. You see, they are cutting down the great sycamore that stands opposite, and I don't think I can bear it. I feel sick in my stomach, as though a piece of me has been ripped out. I know the tree is rotten and dead inside, but that doesn't make it any easier. One doesn't refrain from mourning a loved one simply because their body was riddled with some awful disease.

The worst thing is being here while it's actually happening; every grind and roar of the electric saw as each branch is chopped off and thrown to the ground cuts me to the heart. I can almost feel it moan and cry.

My beautiful tree...

I think that I shall never see

A poem lovely as a tree.

A tree whose hungry mouth is prest

Against the earth's sweet flowing breast;

A tree that looks at God all day,

And lifts her leafy arms to pray;

A tree that may in summer wear

A nest of robins in her hair;

Upon whose bosom snow has lain;

Who intimately lives with rain.

Poems are made by fools like me,

But only God can make a tree.

                                     - Joyce Kilmer