Thursday 16th May

Yesterday I planted a new pear tree and an evergreen lonicera, except it is a shrub. The plum trees will not produce this year, maybe one or two but that is all.  My potatoes in sacks are up an running should be eatable by June, and the ones in the bed, if they survive the bantams scratching dust beds, are coming up.

Another glorious day, but the news is full of Jeremy Kyle.  Since when is the barbaric cruelty of putting people in front of the cameras and then tearing them apart going to stop?  The judge was right, it is just bear-baiting but there are other programmes that need fixing as well.

Well how are you voting in the European elections.  Did you get a polling card to start with? I got one because I had opted for a postal vote in the recent council election, but Pauls is absent for some reason.  It just shows the muddle this B***** campaign has brought to us, dates move on, and the country thinking we would be out, has left us once more dangling on a thread of not knowing.

Rather liked this, though delicate is not a word I would use for some art.........

A murder of crows

Two things plucked from yesterday;  A video of life in a Mayan village, following the principles of Permaculture.  When you know such words as swales, guilds of trees, forest garden and zoning of plants, then you will know what is happening here in Quixaya Heart of Water.  

In an idyllic valley these people who have inherited the land from the plantation owner (who went bust) now grow their food on the sides of the valley, accompanied by the musicial sound of water as it cascades down the valley.  But there is a viper in this paradise, and that is plastic rubbish from the outside world.  No answer yet as it also tumbles down the hillside, I am not sure how we in our world will address the problem either, the recycling lorry has been and just taken our rubbish but where does it go?

Interesting article on Wild Justice and Chris Packham, and most important of all the great Corvid flocks that dominate our landscape.  We have all been there the arguments between those that will save all animal life and the farmers and gamekeepers who kill to preserve different landscapes.

There are some who rate certain birds as rats, fill in your space here, from wood pigeons to seagulls, they need exterminating is the cry.  Crows and the whole corvid class are clever birds, and as an aside so are octupus, but they eat our crops, cause nuisances at the seaside, mess up our grouse moors, where is the right argument??

Potterings ;)

Well here I am dragging up this old blog. Why you may ask, well a couple of unexpected jolts from comments made me think, and so I decided to turn inwards for a time.  Paul also misses the old blog, he should come here and rest in poetry.

The truth of the matter is that a diary has to be attended daily, sometimes I can not find anything to write about, other times, as when I went into the garden this morning to feed the birds, the great rush of contentment at the beauty of the world around me.

Yesterday Rod and his wife mowed the lawns for us, and the garden sprang up from unfettered long grass to a smooth bowling green, edged with the promise of flowers to come.

Feeding the birds, I feed them on the front lawn and as I walk down the sparrows and collared doves follow, landing on the fence and flying down as I scatter the seed.  The great corvine flock also come down as I depart, and Lucy also demands  a scrap of bread.  All that is a routine, when it is accompanied by sunny weather, the promise of a good summer is there also.

So what have I been doing as I weave, well for a start plenty of fiction on the BBC you can find, listening to the rather pompous tones of Will Self on Youtube, I wonder when we will have to pay to listen?  Being famous for having opinions of course gets you into trouble, but Will Self did not hold well against the more measured intellectualism of Nial Ferguson.  Read an article about Alistair Campbell as well, you know the man we would groan about, but his depression and mental confusion was a stark reminder that we can't always judge people from press reports on the media.

Yesterday I went into Pickering, hopefully to buy some slippers, but Pickering is a bit low on slippers, the market man wasn't there, he comes from Manchester.  This I was told by the person who was selling odd pieces of vintage material (some of which I bought) and she was rather worried by his absence. Next I bought some crab, a scoopful to be precise, as one whole crab would have cost near £7 and I am not that keen, for a moment it reminded me of the village of Solva and the dressed crab for sale there.  Such a term as dressed crab makes me giggle, frilly dress or what?  Next was the wool shop, which also has an exciting display of old garden bits and bobs outside, I wanted some cottons for weaving.  Sometimes you wonder how shops survive, wool shops are not exactly making money hand over fist, but it is what makes people happy working amongst the tools of their trade.

Lastly the pet shop for a bed for Lucy, not that she has used it since, she spends a certain amount of the evening scratching up all the rugs, nesting I suppose.

Mid Wansdyke

Bath to London Roman Road

Vortigen on mid Wansdyke

1) From Kingsdown the Roman Road

2) Roman Road follows a straight path to Sandy Lane (Verlucio - Roman Station)

The Combe By Edward Thomas

The Combe was ever dark, ancient and dark.
Its mouth is stopped with brambles, thorn, and briar;
And no one scrambles over the sliding chalk
By beech and yew and perishing juniper
Down the half precipices of its sides, with roots
And rabbit holes for steps. The sun of Winter,
The moon of Summer, and all the singing birds
Except the missel-thrush that loves juniper,
Are quite shut out. But far more ancient and dark
The Combe looks since they killed the badger there,
Dug him out and gave him to the hounds,
That most ancient Briton of English beasts.

Landscape of the Daylight Moon by Jeremy Hooker

I first saw it inland,
Suddenly, round white sides
Rose through the thin grass
And for an instant, in the heat,
It was dazzling; but afterwards
I thought mainly of darkness,
Imagining the relics of an original
Sea under the chalk, with fishes
Beneath the fields. Later,
Everywhere upon its surface
I saw the life of the dead;
Circle within circle of earthen
Shells, and in retraced curves
Like finger marks in pale sand.

The print of a primaeval lover,
Once, climbing a dusty track,
I found a sunshaped urchin,
With the sun’s rays, white
With the dust of the moon.
Fetish, flesh become stone.
I keep it near me. It is
A mouth on darkness, the one
Inexhaustible source of re-creation.

A poem written about a chalk landscape

The Mountain Poems of Hsieh Ling-yün

Not a Chinese painting but one done by Heywood Sumner of the New Forest.

Climbing Green-Cliff Mountain in Yung-chia

Taking a little food, a light walking-stick,
I wander up to my home in quiet mystery,

the path along streams winding far away
onto ridgetops,no end to this wonder at

slow waters silent in their frozen beauty
and bamboo glistening at heart with frost,

cascades scattering a confusion of spray
and broad forests crowding distant cliffs.

Thinking it's moonrise I see in the west
and sunset I'm watching blaze in the east,

I hike on until dark, then linger out night
sheltered away in deep expanses of shadow.

Immune to high importance: that's renown.
Walk humbly and it's all promise in beauty

Poetry is a great healer of the soul, and reading Robert Macfarlane's, The Wild Places, I came across the Chinese poem above, to quote from the site the poem is taken...

"During the last decade of his life, living as a recluse high in the mountains of southeast China, Hsieh Ling-yün (385-433 C.E.) initiated a tradition of "rivers-and-mountains" (shan-shui) poetry that stretches across millennia in China and beyond, a tradition that represents the earliest and most extensive literary engagement with wilderness in human history."

The concept that flows through Ling-Hun poetry is of course echoed in Gary Syder's book - Mountains and Rivers Without End.

A fragment from Snyder's poetry, called "The Flowing.".

Headwaters

Head doused under the bronze

dragon -mouth jet

From a cliff

spring - headwaters, Kamo

River back of Kyoto,

Cliff-wall statue of Fudo

Blue-faced growling Fudo

Lord of the headwaters, making

Rocks of water

Water of of rocks

http://www.davidhinton.net/Pages/Hsieh%20Ling-yun.html