‘…the darling buds of May…’

On Tuesday 23rd April I wandered the garden, scooping up fragments of light.

I eyed them above me, where they were whole again – a wash of dazzling blue cast across the day. And found them pooled on holly leaves like offerings; shining coins quietly placed.

Some were scattered through trees, or had fallen amongst wood piles. One shimmered on a magpie’s wing – whilst others were caught by scant threads of damson blossom, each flower an open purse fraying at the seams.

As I watched, a queen bumble bee nudged bright edges out from the shadows, testing their resilience against the infant teeth of fresh, green nettles – and I willed her to found a nest in our small patch of earth. Manoeuvring her heavy body close to the open soil, she seemed, for a moment, ready to give up wandering and grant her approval to a spot not far from my feet. As I leaned in to watch her, the holly trees tipped their leaf-light amongst the primroses; let it fragment further in the dew.

Those holly trees are wanderers too; incomers cast adrift from a parent tree that keeps watch from our neighbour’s garden. They have a sturdy, reckless air – like someone who has found their place. Feeling comfortable, they sink into belonging – and give us a sense that we’ve been chosen. They adorn our place and make it more our home too.

Our damsons also arrived this way. Over the wall. They are the unfurling of fruits dropped by trees long since cut down by a neighbour; last chance investments deposited in our garden the year my husband and I were also newly transplanted to this soil. Now, these refugee, house-warming trees are over twenty feet tall, full of birds, blossom – more fruit – and a green-fire glow at sunset. They are gifts – beginnings and endings indistinguishable from each other.

Meanwhile, the queen bee is still taking her turn in the cycle of beginnings. She tests the territory, inches back and forth in a mid-air-drone, finds wanting the patch of earth below the damsons; gives herself up to a gust of air – and disappears over the fence and out of sight…

She leaves me scratching about in my own equally wanting soil – seeking words. Elusive things, like the peacock butterfly suddenly blown high over my head; a shadow extinguished from sight too fast to reveal its colours or pattern.

The significance of the day is uppermost in my mind; 23rd April – Shakespeare’s birthday, and death-day. An end swallowed by a beginning.

And Shakespeare – consummate spinner of words – can always catch what I ask for…

He throws it back to me like something plucked from a sunlit web – and I seize it, gratefully:

Polonius: What do you read, my lord?

Hamlet:  Words, words, words

(Hamlet Act II, Scene II – William Shakespeare)

Words. They can say so much and contain such power.They can capture and convey beauty – and be, in themselves, beautiful. They can be cruel, kind, magnanimous, insightful, inspiring, blunt, elegant, sinuous, glorious, hypnotic, ugly, obtuse. They are the conveyors of ideas and intention. They can sting, they can soothe. They are mighty.

And yet they are just – words.

‘My words fly up, my thoughts remain below.
Words without thoughts never to heaven go.’

(Hamlet, Act III, scene II – William Shakespeare)

Words sometimes fail. Words can be bricks in a wall, obscuring what lies behind. They can disconnect from meaning – and truth.

For some people, words are not biddable at all. They live without them, their senses aligned to other frequencies; tuning in to listen, but answering – and maybe hearing – in different ways.

My son doesn’t have words. He cannot speak. I’ve often heard it said that language is what makes our species somehow “special” – that the ability to speak defines what makes us human. But is my son not human? And are our words the only language at work in the world?

Language is all around us – in the birdsong; in the chemical signals passed between the trees; in the wind as it describes the mood of the day; in the pungency of fox scent reaching my nostrils as I listen to the robin claim his territory. The whole day is full of wordless voice.

‘Perhaps there is a language that is not made of words and everything in the world understands it. Perhaps there is a soul hidden in everything and it can always speak, without even making a sound, to another soul.’

(From A Little Princess – Frances Hodgson Burnett)

‘And this our life, exempt from public haunt,
Finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks,
Sermons in stones…’

(As You Like It, Act II, scene I – William Shakespeare)

During our long weeks in hospital with our son, we often felt keenly the lack of words. Doctors and nurses would look to my husband and I to interpret our son’s feelings, his reactions, his thoughts. We were often lost in a blank of not knowing – in a pit of bewilderment and distress; his and ours. We could guess, but could not be sure we were being accurate. We were in a new situation for all of us. Our usual parameters were gone. And even with words, we could not know our son’s mind. He could not know ours. Can any human being know another human being’s mind, intentions, feelings fully?

But without words, we can sometimes listen more closely – and keenly – to that other language which is heard more loudly by intuition – and which is so often dismissed or obscured behind a tangle of surface communication. Language is in my son’s eyes, his expression, his demeanour, his wordless singing. It is in a connection built in ways I can’t describe or explain with words. When asked how my son communicates with me, I can’t tell someone else how it happens. It just does. We feel and respond. And when, during his long ordeal in hospital, I found words that might work, I fed them to him like manna of reassurance. I laid each coin of words on the palm of his hand, so that he could feel the weight of the thought behind them. I saw his eyes listening to the intentions and the whys the words carried, if not to the precision of their particular meaning. I saw him understand.

‘Where words are scarce they are seldom spent in vain.’

(Richard II, Act II, scene I – William Shakespeare)

During 23rd April – the day that was both Shakespeare’s birth-and-death-day, my thoughts were already beginning to turn towards this week and to May Day; Beltane; time of renewal, new beginnings; the death of winter from which the summer is born; festival of fire; the phoenix from the ashes; Persephone travelling from the underworld to rise again.

And now it is the second of May – and in the passing of the days between Shakespeare’s birthday and today, the green firing of spring has ignited from tree to tree, bush to bush – the leaves opening more and more in front of our very eyes.

And we feel and respond to the wordless language of the season…

But words fail me again. This post hasn’t said what I wanted it to say; hasn’t conveyed exactly the thoughts I wanted to convey. But then words never do. When describing the true nature of the tree, words never (unless you’re Shakespeare!) reach to contain every far flung leaf adrift on the wind.

I’m very aware too that quotes from Shakespeare, placed out of context as I’ve placed them here, never really represent their true reach. Sometimes they transmute, taking on a significance that tips the scales a particular way. But, put them back into context and that apparent significance becomes problematic. We then have to follow a different trail of light-clues; ask ourselves what Shakespeare built around those words in terms of form and structure. How it all interacts. And whether the character who voiced the words is perhaps fooling himself, or lacking belief in what he professes, or maybe deliberately deceiving others…

When words dis-locate from their original surroundings, they become chameleons – both liberated and limited by the colours of their new environment – though, in Shakespeare’s case, ever retaining their magical, delicious ambiguity. But, behind the words is their intuitive touch on our mind – which, through and around those clusters of letters and shifting locations, reaches us direct. And if, in our response, we have heard the poetry behind the poem, felt that connection, we experience a deeper, wordless something begin to piece together – another fragment of light illuminating a little more of the whole.

Time is impatient with my own inadequate attempts to capture thoughts, so I shall have to be content with the fraying threads of this blog post and let my words fall where they will. So this is me, scooping up the fragments of light, trying to piece them together – and moving on into new Bookish Nature beginnings…

Thank you again to everyone who left such wonderful messages of support and encouragement during the darker times. They meant a lot to me.

So far, here in the South West of England, ‘the darling buds of May’ have not opened to ‘Rough winds’ but to balmy and glorious sunshine. These early May days have been filled with a wordless voice of awakening and shimmering exuberance.

My words fail again in attempting to transmit the true spirit of that voice – but, thanks to Sonya Chasey (who pointed me towards the Loreena McKennitt page on Grooveshark – many thanks, Sonya!) I discovered a while back the beautiful Huron ‘Beltane’ Fire Dance (from Loreena’s album Parallel Dreams) – which brims with that spirit of this time of year – and which pieces together for us those sparkling facets of intuitive, illuminating light via music; another wordless language that speaks so profoundly.

Whether you were out and about enjoying May Day revels yesterday, or are planning some for the Holiday Weekend – or are simply revelling in the spring – (or, indeed, are enjoying whatever seasonal fragments of light illuminate your own particular part of the world right now) – a very Merry May-time to you all!

Huron ‘Beltane’ Fire Dance, Loreena Mckennitt, performed live in Spain (part of a concert recorded on the DVD/CD set Nights from the Alhambra):

The Tree House

Signs of spring are already burgeoning…

Lords and Ladies (Cuckoo Pint) – January 2013

…and it’s quite a while now since this “dragon-tree” filtered the fire of the sun through branch and shadow, to melt the snowman….

…which had become its companion, very briefly, during this most recent and unfolding phase of its long life:

Nearby, new buds are reaching out to the light…

And over the past few weeks, I’ve been so inspired by a fantastic new venture which, very appropriately for this time of year, has also been coming into bud…

The Tree House is a proposed new community bookshop which, as I write this, is unfurling ever more towards bursting into leaf. Victoria (aka Evie) – the inspiring force behind the project – is an online friend (and fellow bookish tree hugger) from the earliest days of my first venturing onto the internet.

To explain the project a bit before you head over there to take a look for yourself, I can do no better than quote Victoria’s own impassioned words:

‘Books are not just a means of passing the time, they are lifechanging experiences – the good ones, anyway! They tell us more about what it is to be human, they feed our inner lives and our imaginations (another aspect of humanity that often seems a little underrated!), and make us more creative in our engagement with the world.

The tree is therefore a wonderful image for me of the heart of a reading community – deeply rooted, creating a sheltering and nurturing space, pushing us out into a richer existence as individuals and as a community. Reading can do this! And coming together around books and literary adventures is like planting a forest.

The government wants to sell off our forests. Our libraries are under threat. I see these two things as related – the very things that give life to our planet and our community are seen as superfluous when what is needed, supposedly, is to generate more wealth and get rid of spaces that do not do this. We need trees; we need a sense of community. We can all sit in our homes ordering books over the internet, or downloading them to our Kindles and Kobos and iPads, or we can protect our libraries and bookshops and share this fabulous experience of enjoying books and learning from each other.’

– From The Tree House blog

Please do take a visit over to The Tree House site; there are inspiring posts about the project and about books and reading; fabulous links to some amazing bibliophile-heaven bookshops – all of which sprang from the same soil of passionate motivation that Victoria is now cultivating – and there are also trees!

The Domesday Oak (thought to be 700 years old) Ashton Court Estate, Bristol

It’s a fabulous project, growing in all the right directions – and with a vision that is exactly the sort of seed our society needs to plant and nurture. It’s like the old saying goes… ‘mighty oaks from tiny acorns grow…’ – a cliche phrase maybe… but, like most cliches, loaded with truth!

Between a Rock and a Red Squirrel

Something made me stop, look and take a picture of this rock:

Undoubtedly the oldest thing within sight; the most ancient and venerable presence gracing this particular patch of Thrunton Wood in Northumberland, it emanated a strong sense of look-at-me… be aware. Its solidity was a grounding of Time. An anchor, of sorts, for the ephemeral.

That was back in the summer of 2006. Now – gradually, gradually through more recent days – I’ve been treading my way through David Abrams’ visceral and deeply grounding book Becoming Animal – An Earthly Cosmology.

Becoming Animal – An Earthly Cosmology by David Abram (hardback edition – published by Pantheon Books)

Reading it is like placing your feet on the earth, following the tracery of the words through the landscape, tracking the signs and signals of the senses.

In Wood and Stone, the third chapter of Becoming Animal, David Abram describes the feeling ancient rock evokes. Of how cleaved folds of stone speak to something primal in ourselves:

‘A solitary rock or a clear-cut stump is utterly inanimate only as long as “being” itself is taken to be static and inert. Our animal senses, however, know no such passive reality………. To my animal body, the rock is first and foremost another body engaged in the world: as I turn my gaze toward it, I encounter not a defined and inanimate chunk of matter but an upturned surface basking in the sun’s warmth, or a pink and sharp-edged structure protruding from the ground like the shattered bone of the hillside, or an old and watchful guardian of this land – a resolute and sheltering presence inviting me now to crouch and lean my spine against it.

Each thing organizes the space around it, rebuffing or sidling up against other things; each thing calls, gestures, beckons to other beings or battles them for our attentions; things expose themselves to the sun or retreat among the shadows, shouting with their loud colors or whispering with their seeds; rocks snag lichen spores from the air and shelter spiders under their flanks; clouds converse with the fathomless blue and metamorphose into one another; they spill rain upon the land, which gathers in rivulets and carves out canyons………. Things “catch our eye” and sometimes refuse to let go; they “grab our focus” and “capture our attention,” and finally release us from their grasp only to dissolve back into the overabundant world. Whether ecstatic or morose, exuberant or exhausted, everything swerves and trembles; anguish, equanimity, and pleasure are not first internal moods but passions granted to us by the capricious terrain.’

…And look who “grabbed our focus,” emerging from the knotty, silent moment when the rock made us stand still:

Roe doe – out from the undergrowth… Thrunton Wood, Northumberland, 2006

A glimpse of red – and of wary tolerance. A recognition and appreciation of stillness. Rock-steady watching; a pact of grace:

Roe doe – “capturing attention”

And, beyond that; another still, cautious moment of red – a blur of red squirrel. The first any of us had ever seen in the wild:

Red squirrel, Thrunton Wood, Northumberland, 2006

My daughter was nine years old at the time. Standing beneath that tree – delight and concentration rooted in her small, slight frame – she thought of all the times she’d seen red squirrels in books or on TV. All the wishes she had made. All those “what-ifs” that had seeded in her mind.

“Oooh!” she exclaimed moments later, as the woods released us from our still, silent encounters. “Dreams do sometimes come true!”

And quietly, quietly, her pleased astonishment at this small, red, earthy revelation – a gift from the ‘capricious terrain’ – sealed the moment rock solid in her memory.

‘A bird out of Merlin’s ear’

Since my children went back to school last week, there’s been a lot of catching up to do. Lots of gathering together of the self, much realigning – some careful stepping onto newly laid paths, pausing to wander and to really look. Lots of strengthening, preparing; allowing things to resurface and settle.

Some days, I’ve spent long slices of time sitting at the dinner table in our back room, working and thinking and shaping some kind of order and readiness into the previously swirling confusion of ideas and writing projects – and into the general ‘stuff that has to be done’ which often threatens to topple it all.

I’ve been working my way back to the heart of things. That quiet kernel of space so easily lost in the rush of demands and ‘things to be done.’ Over past months, I’ve been tripped up by too many instances of my mind jumping ahead of itself; not allowing itself to settle between leaps. Old, familiar footholds became all too easily muddied by that swirling mix, confusing my way across last year’s stepping stones.

But reading Witch Light through into the New Year definitely helped to recover my balance.

Witch Light by Susan Fletcher, published by Fourth Estate

It is a book filled to the brim with the heart of things; with ‘the heart’s voice.’ Choose almost any page at random, and the prose overflows with it. During the hours in which I allowed myself to sink into Susan Fletcher’s beautiful, lyrical novel, I lived in its world completely – in Corrag’s world. Her first person narrative enchanted me with its beauty; kept me in clear water; slowed me down to watch the light play; helped me to regain calmer focus:

‘Still. There was magick in that place – I promise it.

I felt it everywhere. I felt it in each tiny thing I saw – each stone which shifted under my heels, or each raindrop. I had time, now. Time, until now, had been as thin and as scarce as a wind-blown web – fluttering by, very brief. My second life had been go! Go! And when had I had the time to lie on my belly and watch a snail make its way across a leaf, leaving its moonshine mark? Never. I was running too much. I was galloping over mud and wild land, with the mare snorting hard, and any slow times were spent with her – picking the nettles out of her tail. No snails. No hour upon hour in the rain, watching a leaf’s middle become a rain-bright pool.

I had never liked witch, and still don’t. But if ever I deserved the name at all, it was then, I reckon. It was having my hair fly in the wind as I stood on the tops, and how I crawled through the woods where the mushrooms grew. It was cloud-watching and stag-seeing, and spending long hours – full afternoons – by the waterfall that I’d bathed in, watching the autumn leaves fall down and make their way seaward. They bobbed and swirled. I said magick, one day. In the gully that led to my valley, I stopped. The wind was in the birches, and it felt they were speaking. If they were speaking, it was magick they said. Magick. Here.’

From Witch Light (previously published as Corrag) by Susan Fletcher – published by Fourth Estate.

I felt sad to break away from Corrag’s company when the last page was turned – but, she has lived on in my mind long since – and echoes of her voice curl around the days and the small and the luminous; in moments of starlight and moon shadows…

Christmas moon – dusk, 25th December 2012

…in the times when our damson trees have been greenly on fire in the mid-day rise of winter sun…

…And in the birds who visit the garden continuously, and punctuate my hours as I sit here at the table. Goldfinches, blue and great tits, a song thrush; small fluid ripples of long-tailed tits taking the fat-balls hostage in a clasp of criss-crossed tails, before rushing off into insistent dusks; chaffinches, starlings, a handful of sparrows; our resident robin and dunnock; the chirring magpies; the blackbirds posing and hopping, staring down worms. They fill the edges of awareness with light and colour and movement, until there is nothing for it but to sit and gaze and absorb their rhythms to a slower heartbeat and a resettled frame of mind.

When I turn my eyes back to my task, the birds still fill spaces between thoughts like cushioned areas of dreaming, unconsciously wandering and enlivening the workings of the mind. Their calls and year-turning notes wake me up a little more – and a little more – to the new-beginning months and the strengthening light.

When 2013 was still in its very first days, my husband – putting out the milk bottles in the late afternoon – called me to the hallway. He flung open the front door; let the dusk declare itself a visitor. Invited in, it hovered tentatively on the threshold, clasping its traveller’s cloak of soft grey light – half in concealment, half ready to reveal; a gentle crumpling of birdsong shaken out through its folds.

“Listen…” my husband said, standing under the sky in last year’s broken down slippers, delight awake in his voice. “It’s five o’clock – and the birds are all singing. It’s five o’clock and it’s still light.”

I stepped outside and stood with him in the brim-full glimmer – a scooped cup of light not yet spilt from the evening.

And the birds floated its surface with their light-drunken notes, like Keatsian ‘beaded bubbles winking at the brim’ – a slow drift of mostly blackbird and robin song; birds who often tease out their territorial notes through the night – and through winter. But the tone was different to that robin song you hear in pre-solstice winter nights. It felt richer, more languid, more primed with a weight of promise – an outward-going rather than an enclosing intention; filled with the possibilities of light.

Last week, as I walked around our little bit of the city’s edge – once a village, still edged with woods and fields – this change in the birdsong was palpable, growing day by day. The trees seemed to flex with it. The woods, glimpsed between the houses, loomed closer, declaring themselves stirring from sleep, cradling the streets once more in a busy sense of living. The weather was mild, soft; spring with grey edges. But then it turned cold again. Fog shrouded the woods in a whispered plan of concealed waiting, and frost crunched under my feet as I re-filled the bird feeders. But, all around me, the birdsong persisted – and the next day, it seemed to raise the tree tops higher to the sky – the hidden buds tipped with fiery winter sun, simmering the cold, clear blue slowly towards spring. Gradually since, the air has drained of warmth, growing colder and deep chill (and, by the time I publish this post, deep snows will have blanketed most of Britain) – but the cup of light has kept filling and re-filling to a rising brim, steeping a new flavour into the days. And at night, Jupiter has sparked bright above our damson trees. Showing the way. To somewhere.

As I sit here at the table, a wren has crept and flitted across the patio immediately outside the glass doors. It has dashed and tail-tipped its way amongst the moss beneath the buddleia bush – like Time passed on in small, overlapping relays; a ticking pendulum of thought receiving a change of rhythm – a signal for the seeding of a new idea; creeping, as the wren in Ted Hughes’s poem, ‘out of Merlin’s ear.’

When the thicket’s drifted, a shrouded corpse,
He’s in under there, ticking,
Not as a last pulse, but a new life waiting.

Lonely keeper of the gold
In the tumbled cleave.
A bird out of Merlin’s ear.

(From Wren by Ted Hughes)

Detail from RSPB Christmas card – Design by Kate Green.

Fresh green shoots are adjusting their positions in our flowerbeds, following the light, feeling for familiar strung-out patterns of change, squeezing through corridors of the spectrum, skyward. My husband planted a whole host of bulbs in the autumn – scattering them in random fashion. “It’ll be a complete surprise where and what comes up,” he said.

Unknown, unguessed, waiting.

Like new days, new months, a new year.

We all know that along with the hope of a new year – like the hope flung ‘Upon the growing gloom,’ and amongst ‘Winter’s dregs made desolate,’ by the ‘ecstatic sound’ of Hardy’s ‘aged’ and ‘frail’ Darkling Thrush (and like the hope of bulbs flung on autumn soil) – shadows and darker realities still remain. But the darkling thrush also reminds us of something fundamental – deeper in our consciousness – as we too respond to the signals of a year’s propulsion towards the light, however slight, however overlaid with the sheen of cold – or a chilling surface of difficult odds:

So little cause for carolings
   Of such ecstatic sound
Was written on terrestrial things
   Afar or nigh around,
That I could think there trembled through
   His happy good-night air
Some blessed Hope, whereof he knew
   And I was unaware.

(From The Darkling Thrush by Thomas Hardy).

As my long-time hero Richard Mabey wrote in his monthly column A Brush with Nature back in the March 2010 issue of BBC Wildlife magazine, penning his words out of ‘the depths of the hardest winter for 30 years’ and in the wake of climate change talks in Copenhagen which ‘ended in abject, shameful failure’ – and in the face of all sorts of official apathy and disregard for natural habitat and wildlife protection:

‘I can’t do despair. I know intellectually the depths of the crisis we are in, but I’ve only to poke my head out of the door and emotionally I’m healed. Today, I can see the first hazel catkins, ready to hatch from their hoar-frost shells…’

He goes on to talk about George Orwell’s essay, Some Thoughts On The Common Toad, written in 1946 ‘in a Britain exhausted by war and racked by six hard winters in a row.’ He quotes this small section:

‘Persephone, like the toads, always rises from the dead at about the same moment. Suddenly, towards the end of March, the miracle happens, and the decaying slum in which I live is transfigured.’

Richard Mabey adds that, if Orwell were alive today, ‘I suspect he would insist that it’s down to us’ – that Orwell ‘…saw the enjoyment of nature as a kind of revolutionary act, a challenge to the political machine.’

He quotes Orwell’s essay again:

‘I think that by retaining one’s childhood love of such things as trees, fishes, butterflies and – to return to my first instance – toads, makes a peaceful and decent future a little more probable.’

Mabey goes on to write: ‘Now may be the moment to take the dictum ‘Think globally but act locally’ very literally………. Conservation works. Down in the parish, we can make a difference.’

‘Nearly 70 years ago,’ Mabey continues, ‘Orwell closed his piece with a tremendous call to arms that still resonates in every detail’:

‘So long as you are not actually ill, hungry, frightened or immured in a prison or a holiday camp, spring is still spring. The atom bombs are piling up in the factories, the police are prowling through the cities, the lies are streaming from the loudspeakers, but the Earth is still going round the Sun, and neither the dictators nor the bureaucrats, deeply though they disapprove of the process, are able to prevent it.’

Today, I was reading the farewell article from the National Trust’s former Director-General, Dame Fiona Reynolds, in the charity’s magazine – and the words she cites from Octavia Hill, one of the Trust’s most inspiring founders, sprang out at me as another appropriate link in this New Year chain of thought:

‘What we care most to leave is not any tangible thing, however great; not any memory, however good; but the quick eye to see, the true soul to measure, the large hope to grasp the mighty issues of the new and better days to come – greater ideals, greater hope, and the patience to realise both.’

And my mind returns to more bright beads to add to this chain of hope – to more quotes from Susan Fletcher’s Witch Light; to Corrag’s voice again:

‘What was dark will always be dark, I know that……

……But also, there is light. It is everywhere. It floods this world – the world brims with it. Once I sat by the Coe and watched a shaft of light come down through the trees, through leaves, and I wondered if there was a greater beauty, or a simpler one. There are many great beauties. But all of them – from the snow, to his fern-red hair, to my mare’s eye reflecting the sky as she smelt the air of Rannoch Moor – have light in them, and are worth it. They are worth the darker parts.’

And to Corrag’s faith that:

‘It is the small moments, sir, which change a world.’

A belated Happy New Year everyone! Here’s to a 2013 in which all our hope and creativity – all our contributions to the heart of things (however small or overwhelmed they might sometimes seem) – can add up to something bigger – reaching for, and growing stronger in, the brim-filled light.

Sunset, New Year’s Day 2013, Bristol Harbour

Wishing you all much fulfilment and flourishing in the year ahead!

(With thanks to the excellent Cornflower Books blog, for the inspiring introductions to Witch Light / Corrag and to Susan Fletcher’s writing which prompted me to seek it out – and also to Karen at her magical Moonlight and Hares blog for a special moment of Witch Light serendipity!)

Winter Green

Cold. Tipping-edge cold. Balanced on a pre-solstice day in early December, two winters ago; before the snows…

Tunnels of light hollow between the trees; deep wells of echo-light, fastening the horizon around us.

Everything hushes near, closing moments in startled sound… A blackbird alarms; a crow, urgent, makes for sky-laden trees – a warning of the vagrancy of night.

And we look for the green – the winter bloom of life that even now, just before the ice, takes an in breath and keeps on breathing. The Holly and the Ivy. Wearing the crown of winter…

And more green reaches our eyes; luminous tree-cloaks of moss…

Lichens – like undersea creatures surprised by halted water…

And all the time, we are drawn closer – through woodland windows; the leaves a spent thought, already murmuring into the earth.

A tree stump, its own world…

– connected to the hilt of a living branch, and sheathed in a ferment of flourishing and decay – invites us ever closer…

…to more green, more breathing; the earth casting shapes like small totems of existence. A fairy world, a microcosm world…

– where an oak leaf, dreaming its beauty like a work of art, cradles its future in droplets of decay, ready to give life…

The lowering light cools to a seeping sheen, defying the clasp of ice.

Fungi, ferns, moss, lichen, evergreens…

…these are the keepers of winter, taking their turn to fold the year‘s attention their way. All is quiet, all vibrantly alive – humming in connection to something turning even in the stillness; the spin of the planet constantly revealed…

Homeward, caught in ice light before the snow, we travel a margin of shadow…

…the sun melting towards the year’s waking-dreaming; tipping us nearer the solstice – and towards new memories of green…

(Photos taken at Westonbirt Arboretum, Gloucestershire Cotswolds, December 2010)

Selkies and ‘the eternal present of song-time’

Chasing a thought as it darts amongst the ripples left by Berlie Doherty’s Daughter of the Sea, here’s another telling of a selkie tale; this time in song form – not told through the ‘lilts and hissings’ of Eilean o da Freya’s strange ‘language of…singing’ – but via, once more, the beautiful voice of Heather Dale…

This is her version of The Maiden and the Selkie, written by Emily Holbert-Kellam (from Heather Dale’s album The Green Knight):

I must, must get myself a copy of David Thomson’s The People of the Sea. It’s been on my wish list for too long now; ever since I first heard a piece on the radio about Thomson’s vital work, undertaken during the middle of the last century, to collect and record the old selkie stories before the tellers and traditions passed from memory.

I can’t remember when or what radio programme it was… just that what I heard was magical and earthy and connected to deep pasts. David Thomson was a writer and producer of radio documentaries for the BBC from 1943 to 1969 – and the warp and weft of the voices with which he made such empathic connection during his folklore-gathering travels, reached out beyond his radio work to become bound into the pages of his book. The poet, Seamus Heaney, was a friend of Thomson and has written the introduction to Canongate’s reissue of the The People of the Sea. (You can read The heart of a vanished world, taken from Heaney’s introduction, on the Guardian website).

In it he writes that:

‘David Thomson’s book is luminously its own thing; it had its origins in one man’s rambles round the highlands and islands of Scotland and the west coast of Ireland, in search of stories and folklore surrounding the “selchie” or grey Atlantic seal. It was written at a great moment in the history of radio, during the 1940s and 1950s, when the BBC employed poets and writers to record and collect oral material and – most important – gave them permission to re-create it in a new artistic form.’

Heaney relates how, as he re-read the book, Wordsworth’s poem The Solitary Reaper kept coming to mind. Also written after a tour of Scotland, the poem was inspired by an incident recorded in the notes of Wordsworth’s friend Thomas Wilkinson – and is, writes Heaney, ‘…about the experience of listening to one of the local people express herself unforgettably in her native Gaelic’ :

‘Whate’er the theme, the Maiden sang
As if her song could have no ending;
I saw her singing at her work,
And o’er the sickle bending;
I listened, motionless and still;
And, as I mounted up the hill,
The music in my heart I bore,
Long after it was heard no more.’

This final stanza of The Solitary Reaper, Heaney goes on to say, ‘…manages to shift into the eternal present of song-time an incident that might otherwise have remained part of the accidental record.’ Heaney likens the ‘poetic achievement’ that is The People of the Sea to this Wordsworthian fixing in ‘song-time.’ What he describes as Thomson’s ‘Total respect, intuitive understanding, perfect grace and perfect pitch’ create a similar surety that ‘what was heard in the “chaunt” of the storyteller gets fixed on the page, only to rise in all its formality and down-to-earthness at each re-reading.’

As I read Seamus Heaney’s evocation of the character and effect of the man and his work; how Thomson’s The People of the Sea ‘…makes the reader a kind of dual citizen, at once the inhabitant of a poetically beguiling world of pure story and of a realistically documented world of fishermen and crofters’; of how Thomson’s ‘…writing combines a feel for the “this-worldness” of his characters’ lives with an understanding of the “otherworldness” they keep a place for in their consciousness,’ I felt again those ripples of deep story-time I experienced in Berlie Doherty’s Daughter of the Sea – and in the musical cadences of The Maiden and the Selkie.

The song-time of the selkie tales, echoing from somewhere between (to re-apply Heaney’s words) the ‘here-and-nowness’ and the ‘there-and-thennness’ seems, to me, to abide most powerfully in a concept Seamus Heaney beautifully apprehends when he writes that The People of the Sea ‘…at the mythic level presents us with an image of ourselves in those amphibians we have evolved from, all of us (to quote Wordsworth again) “inmates of this active universe”…’

‘Inmates of this active universe’. It says so much. It is the kind of phrase in which Wordsworth’s worth to the world most shines – a stepping stone phrase, helping to pave the pathways of poetry with gold.

And Heaney’s poet’s heart cannot resist scattering extra shimmer by layering alongside it the words of another poet, emphasising how the ‘fundamental understanding’ of the characters within The People of the Sea ‘…is shaped by what the poet Edwin Muir once termed “that long lost, archaic companionship” between human beings and the creatures.’

And, building on his own golden stepping stones of insight and expression within the book’s introduction, Heaney adds: ‘Plainly, memorably, repeatedly, instances of this old eye-to-eye and breath-to-breath closeness between living things appear in the narrative.’ He describes the selkie stories as possessing an ‘irresistible holistic beauty.’ They are not, he says: ‘…escapist fantasies but a form of poetry, especially if we think of poetry in terms of its definition as a dream dreamt in the presence of reason.’

In song, in story, the figure of the selkie reminds us of relationship: vital, life-and-death interrelationship between human and all other animal life – and between land and sea.

They sing of interdependence, these selkie tales; of the give and take, the not knowingness of beginnings and endings, the impossibility of defining where land and sea retreat or extend. They sing of the blending of past, future, present in cycles of belonging and leaving; and of how each of us exists in our own moment of shifting nows, thens and tomorrows; living as part of nature’s fathomless shaping of her own mysterious tale.

And – to bring us, appropriately, darting back along those cyclical ripples – just such an instance and endlessness of relationship shifts into ‘the eternal present of song-time’ in Seamus Heaney’s own poem Lovers on Aran (another shimmering offering to grace the golden pathway…):

Lovers on Aran

The timeless waves, bright, sifting, broken glass,
Came dazzling around, into the rocks,
Came glinting, sifting from the Americas

To possess Aran. Or did Aran rush
to throw wide arms of rock around a tide
That yielded with an ebb, with a soft crash?

Did sea define the land or land the sea?
Each drew new meaning from the waves’ collision.
Sea broke on land to full identity.

– Seamus Heaney

Daughter of the Sea by Berlie Doherty

‘My tale is of the sea. It takes place in the far north, where ice has broken land into jagged rocks, and where black and fierce tides wash the shores. Hail is flung far on lashing winds, and winters are long and dark. Men haunt the sea, and the sea gives up a glittering harvest. And it is said that the people of the sea haunt the land.’

As we said a sad-sweet goodbye to the Angel of the North…

The Angel of the North – sculpture by Antony Gormley, near the A1 at Gateshead.

… (our annual ritual of leaving and returning…)

…something made me turn to those opening words of the prologue to Berlie Doherty’s Daughter of the Sea.

This 1998 Puffin paperback edition…

1998 Puffin Books paperback edition of Daughter of the Sea by Berlie Doherty, illustrated by Sian Bailey

…was nestled in a bag by my feet in the car – along with all my other Barter Books summer finds. We were driving away from the far north of England and towards the autumn; the winter already a furthest-north-thought creeping steadily southward from invisible horizons behind us.

I discovered a few years ago, on another long road journey, that I’m able to read in the car as long as we’re still on the motorways; twisting lanes play havoc with my head if I try to focus on the page. But with three hundred miles of motorway from the North-East back to the South-West ahead of us, it felt like a good journey of the mind, and an honour paid to an always complex sense of parting, to allow this tale of the sea, and of rugged northern lands, to carry me home.

And so it was that, as we passed through a bright land of harvest and surreal summer-green (the trees and hedgerows kept strangely lush and leaf-abundant by exceptional amounts of rain) my thoughts were called towards ice, and crofters living close to the rock-rimed bones of remote islands; edgelands where the breath of survival moves with the sea.

In her Author’s Note at the back of the novel, Berlie Doherty tells us that: ‘Some of the stories woven into Daughter of the Sea are based on ancient tales from Iceland, Scotland and Ireland.’ And in the narrative, she achieves that feeling of a generic North – an evocation of shared cultural strands that knit place, experience and a Far North landscape of mind.

Philip Pullman, quoted in the blurb on the back cover, describes the ingredients of the book’s atmosphere perfectly:

‘Tension, emotional honesty and more than a touch of cold northern poetry as well.’

– Philip Pullman, Guardian.

A slender book, ostensibly for children, but with tendrils of deep archetypal concern that hold fast for readers of all ages, Daughter of the Sea casts its net far around a teeming weight of significance – just as the tight-woven, sparse words of folktale reach to catch big ideas, glinting with truth and meaning.

Berlie Doherty tells a tale of humans and selkies locked in an interrelationship which both washes towards the land, and pulls away into unknown deeps. People of the land are drawn to the sea, and the people of the sea are drawn to the land. The netted strands that join them are irresistible – and yet fraught with difficulty and danger. It is a relationship of both gifts and destruction; of both lifeblood and the ever-present threat of death.

It is an interdependence that reveals the very edges of life; the deepest concerns of spirit and survival, where the natural order is broken at your peril. The people in this novel’s pages live with a heavy sense of submission to what the sea must take in return for what the sea relinquishes. They live with a pact that, if broken, exacts terrible price – great sorrow and loss. But, it is also a pact that can bring vital restoration and healing. In these natural cycles of giving and taking, there is a balance of joy and sadness; of wishes and what must be; of possession and letting go.

Daughter of the Sea is written with a lilting call of voice. Its prose is an invitation to the fireside, whilst the snow and ice grips the darkness in the howl of the wind outside. The sea not only haunts the book’s characters and story, but its whole tone too. We feel the touch of ancient depths of human experience in its telling; the accumulated voices of many folk long gone, as the waves of the narrative take up each character and deliver the timeless and interwoven longings and acceptances of their lives…

…The life of Gioga, the daughter of the sea – delivered up by the waves to the yearnings of a childless couple; of Eilean o da Freya, the ‘crab-woman,’ who guards a secret, and lives alone in a den beneath an upturned boat, her story told in the ‘language of her singing’ which ‘has lilts and hisses in it, as if she has listened too long to the sea.’ And Hill Marliner, the mysterious white haired stranger who wears ‘a full grey cloak’ and whose appearance answers to the descriptions in Eilean’s tales of ‘the lord of the oceans’ who ‘rides the waves from morning to night, from ice to ice, from the world’s end to the world’s end.’ And of the islanders, who weave their tales through the cycles of nature; cycles that permeate every moment of their existence:

‘My tale is of the daughter of the sea. The best way to hear the tale is to creep into the lee of the rocks when the herring boats have just landed. The gulls will be keening around you. The women hone knives on the stones, and their hands will be brown from the wind and the fish-gut slime. And as they work they talk to each other of the things they’ve always known.

That’s when the story’s told.’

– (Berlie Doherty, opening to ‘Daughter of the Sea.’)

Story, Legend and Mordred’s Lullaby

The power of story – and its importance in our lives and endeavours – is an abiding theme here on Bookish Nature. Myth and legend are at the beating heart of a deep human need; the storyteller by the fire an essential part of any culture.

The Arthurian legends linger in Britain’s mists like memories rising from the land. They are an essence of something felt, but not articulated directly – something that is released in language only in the form of poem, symbol and tale; darting through an alchemy of words, lithe as a fox.

Susan Cooper says of the fourth in her The Dark is Rising sequence of children’s novels, so steeped in ‘the mythic history of the land’ and the legends of King Arthur:

‘….Above all, I owe ‘The Grey King’ to the power that’s been singing for centuries out of the land itself; the ancient, haunted mountains and valleys of Cymru, Wales.’

Both timeless and mutable, myths are passed on and inherited; blended, shaped and reshaped by many tellings, many hands. Time past, present and future, they address our deepest concerns about human nature and contain the elemental moods of the land, the spirit of place; who we feel we are in relationship to it, and how it shapes us…

My daughter and I stumbled upon Heather Dale’s music on the internet, and instantly felt we had found something wonderful. Many of Heather’s songs are inspired by myth and folklore, and are infused with storytelling and explorations of Arthurian legend.

In her album The Trial of Lancelot, Heather Dale crafts her telling of the tale through various voices. This song, Mordred’s Lullaby, is from the first person perspective of Morgan le Fay. Haunting and dark, it tangles its fingers in the themes of betrayal, hatred and corruption, the toxic nature of vengeance, the turning from the light – and keeps sight of the complexities inherent to the ways in which light and darkness glimmer…

Wells and Ways

Sorry, everyone, to be trailing my feet so very slowly into September. There were some challenging, and very tiring, obstacles to overcome before I got to this point – and concentration has been scattered to the winds for a while. But I have with me a huge sack-full of stories to unpack and to tell. Memories to fashion into words. Places and books jumbled and jostling. So much gleaned and gathered along the way…

So… which shall I pull out first?

A Memory of May elbows its way to the surface, insisting on chronological order (more recent tales pile up behind, babbling randomly – they’ll spill out of the bag as and when…)

In focus for now is that freedom-moment in May, when my daughter and I followed the low sweep of a buzzard’s wing through a Mendip forest, and discovered a secret path – fox-narrow, moss deep and scattered with late, shy violets.

With an almost ridiculous sense of release, we let its meander draw us in – not caring if it went anywhere, knowing that here, amongst star-green moss, and the hush of badger old-ways, we’d reached the pulse of the place. Along that springy soil, we could follow our thoughts, free from the well-trodden trails where the woodland withdrew, as if wincing.

Root-edged, now spongy, now muddy – my feet found the earth’s ups and downs and squelched through soggy stream-crossings with dizzy delight. But a shadow of guilt fell across my way too. We’d left behind two members of our family. My husband and son were waiting for us at a woodland bench – bound to the hard-surfaced path by a wheelchair.

We’re so used to that feeling of limits, of difficulty of movement around the landscape, of stuck wheels, muscles straining – determined to open up the great outdoors to our son – that when my husband or I get the chance to free-wander, we tend to let rip – deliberately choosing routes up steps, down high kerbs, along uneven cobbles, deep ruts – just for the feeling of light-bodied freedom. Because we can.

But guilt soon follows, because we can only have those moments when our boy is not with us – and without him, it seems a hollow joy. This Forestry Commission Mendip wood is a favourite picnic destination due to its access-for-all wheelchair route; a valued and reliable opportunity for our whole family to share a way into the wild…

Stockhill Wood is mostly conifer plantation, but its edges and corners wear a patina of ancient land-magic – polished by the wing-glance of buzzards, the darting gleams of dragonflies, and by the time-shivered remnants of pioneer plant life. Old lead workings heave the land into strange contortions, and there is something in the wood’s shadows that is like a ghost of past identities; the remains of an old, well-worn garment crumpled at the bottom of the wardrobe. Now, the land wears a cloak which, though lacking the rich weave of ancient broadleaf woodland, provides habitat for nightjars, long-eared owls – and a host of goldcrests, whose pin thin calls are a constant charm above us…

And this was a wood categorised as ‘commercial value only’ during the government’s infamous public forest sell-off proposals last year! Says it all really!

As I told our MP in my letter of protest at the time, such places are becoming ever more important to us now that our son is getting bigger. He’s almost outgrown his all-terrain buggy. Battered and just a little bit mangled, it’s been along cliff paths (some of which, it’s heartening to learn, are becoming more accessible now due to replacement of stiles with gates), across Northumbrian moors, along otherwise inaccessible beaches, in the sea, through woodlands, bouncing over the deep, chalky ruts of Wiltshire’s ancient track-ways, pushed to the top of hills by concerted, family effort, lugged up steps and over stiles (with son carried separately, I hasten to add!) But there’s a limit to our strength – and little ‘un is not so comfy in the buggy’s seat, now that he’s heading towards twelve and his legs are sprouting further than the foot rests. So, until (if) we can manage to find a suitable all-terrain alternative it’s back to the wheelchair for most of the time – and back to the main paths.

Feeling truant, I return from my indulgent wander, and follow the sound of our boy singing (he cannot speak, but his happy spirit bubbles intermittently through song, wordless but note perfect). He’s alongside his dad, surrounded by the flicker of goldcrests, and when his gaze turns towards our approach, we’re greeted by a dazzle of smiles, a song of delight at our return, and hugs all round.

And, falling into step beside his wheelchair, we’re more than happy to hold his hand and walk the wide paths with him… but sometimes those narrow, winding, freedom-ways seem like they’re a million miles away. Sometimes it’s hard to acknowledge that they are there. Not for us. Taunting us with the wishes we have for our boy. It can only take a stile or a too-narrow gateway to lock us out, leaving us looking at the horizon with hungry eyes.

But… small gifts can go towards healing thwarted wishes. Stealing close, they can tap us on the shoulder and remind us that we don’t have to follow far horizons to find magic. It can be right by our feet, right here…

…In an enchanted May corner of this forest where wood-sorrel grows each year, snuggled up against tree roots, pink blushed, heads inclined in elegant humility…

Wood-sorrel, Oxalis acetosella

Or in ancient elders draped in cloaks of moss, creating mystery and story…

And then it’s on into Wells – and tea and cake on the sunny street, the bells of the cathedral stirring the air into glorious, cacophonous collide. We discover that the Mendip vintage car rally is on today and my husband’s eyes light up at the sight of car upon classic car (don’t ask me which types!) lined up in front of the cathedral.

Whilst our daughter wilts in mystification at this spectacle of four-wheel devotion, a member of the clergy has taken an “if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em” attitude, giving up on manning a tourist-abandoned cathedral to chat happily with the throngs of car-gazers (and sun-seekers) on the green.

This rare day of May sunshine has cast smiles on everyone’s lips. People wander and linger, stretch their wings in the inviting open air. There is something adrift in the atmosphere which seems to have settled the cathedral into a different role today; people seek it out – not so much as an enfolding sanctuary, but as a glorying backdrop – an embrace – to the ebullience of the day.

I’m all eyes and ears for that wondrous building, which sits rooted like an organic thing, grown and worn in to its space, corners slumped like scraped butter, crumbling into the earthy vibrations which heave and release magnificently through its walls. Nesting birds come and go in the gaps between the medieval statue figures, intent wings brushing stony faces. A flurry of feathers prompts imaginings of dignified mirth – or irritation – concealed beneath serene, unruffled beards.

But all those rather weary and philosophical eyes remain unblinking as they watch us walk through time…

…clockwise around the cathedral…

…where we pause to admire melting statues…

and griffins poised for flight…

…before we wander on, past the cosy-gothic of Vicars’ Close…

…to the Bishop’s Palace.

“Why would a bishop need a palace?” our daughter puzzles.

You might well ask…

We sit on a bench overlooking the moat and discuss a little history – the interplay of power, the contradictions…

And are ignored by pigeons, sleepy above our heads.

Then it’s out across the Palace Fields, along the surfaced path which is such a godsend. All the way – (a good long stretch without any barring obstacle – hooray!) through accessible gates to the village of Dulcote,* spreading our wings in unison with the buzzard high above us

as we revel in the enchanting views of Park Wood, the cathedral and mystical Glastonbury Tor…

Which is so beautiful, so affecting, it’s worth digging out an old photo of an April moment from 2007 to show you another view – across the watery world of the Somerset Levels, from the RSPB Ham Wall reserve…

A wonderful place with wheelchair access to this magical land of Avalon, where our son can watch Great Crested Grebes dance…

…and where (if he can pause in his singing for long enough!) he may just spot an otter one day…

* Note – at the end of the surfaced footpath across Palace Fields (after the final gate) there is a short but steep slope down to the lane leading to Dulcote village. Strong muscles are required for wheelchair access at this point if intending to go beyond the fields (we retraced our steps here, so I’m not sure how easy wheelchair access would be along the road to the village. There was a pavement opposite, though we didn’t see how far along the road it continued. We did, however, manage to push our (slightly-built) 11 year old son down, and back up, the slope after the last gate – but it took a burst of effort!)

Useful Links:

Stockhill Wood, Mendip Hills

RSPB Ham Wall Reserve (with details of RADAR key disabled access)

Shapwick Heath National Nature Reserve (close to Ham Wall reserve, also with some disabled access)

Accessible Countryside for Everyone (ACE) website – South West England page (lots of information regarding disabled access to various countryside sites and details of easy access trails)

Wells Cathedral

Tourist Information for Wells and North Somerset

August Interlude…

‘I love borders. August is the border between summer and autumn; it is the most beautiful month I know. Twilight is the border between day and night, and the shore is the border between sea and land. The border is longing: when both have fallen in love but still haven’t said anything. The border is to be on the way. It is the way that is the most important thing.’

– Tove Jansson

Personally for me, it’s an impossible choice between April, May, September or October for that title of ‘most beautiful month I know’ – but there is a special approaching-the-border feel to August; a character to the month that’s slightly louche and intent on shaking loose.

It’s a wayfarer month, dusty and dishevelled, having tramped along the road of the year to a point where the clothes in the rucksack need a wash, the straw coloured hair a cut, where August’s beard is sprouting grey, unruly tufts – and the birds are quiet and moulting in the hedgerow; the swifts and swallows are turning their minds with the planet’s tilt back to warmer climes… and all is waiting for the fresh cusp of September to shake crisp and golden from the trees – and jewel-berries to fatten into glossy temptation amongst sun-curled leaves.

August is also the month of school holidays, and usual routines fading into forgetting. It’s time for far-flung family and friends – a month of get-togethers and migrations; time to explore overgrown ragged paths, and to follow late-flying butterflies as they glance the low sun on their wings. It’s time to search for lost books in dusty bookshops; to turn dry, stiff pages whispered shut long ago, and to crackle them into life again – to discover voices from times that once were ‘now,’ and which will never know that they have slipped into ‘then’ – voices telling stories that echo memories, or intrigue with new strangeness.

It’s a month when time to write slips away – but is also a brewing month, when ideas simmer, and gain flavour from sights, smells, sounds which infuse the mix of holiday experiences and places visited.

Lots of new posts for this blog are brewing – but August still keeps them bubbling over the camp stove – suspended in its sprawled-by-the-roadside, tea-break of time…

Soon, August will shake the dregs from his cup, pull his boots back onto weary feet, and take a path half hidden between the hedgerow brambles. He will follow it to where its grass wears away, sandy and parched. He will tread the slip and slide of the dunes, avoiding the sharp whip of marram grass, and stoop to marvel at the startling pink of bloody cranesbill and the humbug yellow-and-black of cinnabar moth caterpillars, chomping their way through unruly ragwort. And then, he will hear the whisper of wind and water and the harsh cries of gulls; he will look up to see the sun arrow from the sky on the white wings of terns – and follow its dazzle as spray rises from the waves – and he will amble down to the sea…

Beach Scene (watercolour) – painted by my daughter, 2012

Later, September – carrying the fruits August piled by the roadside for her to bring home (along with the billycan of brew he’d carefully kept simmering) – will arrive back at this blog, and post wayfaring August’s tales of the road…

Until then, August is a month of very few words – he reveals his thoughts through the storyteller month of September, who shows all her fruits proudly in the hedgerows and gleams words gold, red, yellow and bold from the trees…

Woodland Waterfall (acrylics) – painted by my daughter, 2011 (using pointillist technique)

Time, energy, words return with September; with a step taken across another border…

‘The border is to be on the way. It is the way that is the most important thing.’

Glimmers of taciturn August’s mind may break into words, if his tongue loosens in the meantime – and if the hours give him opportunity to trudge an extra mile or two. But September is hot on his heels, looking forward to gaining her time to speak. She has a lot to tell…

See you back here then, when – all blackberries, apples and ripened words – September will take her place beside the hedgerow, and pour the summer’s brew into the Bookish Nature picnic cups for all to share…

‘One summer morning at sunrise a long time ago
I met a little girl with a book under her arm.
I asked her why she was out so early and
she answered that there were too many books and
far too little time. And there she was absolutely right.’

– Tove Jansson

Sailing Boat at Sea – painted in oils by my daughter, 2011 (using rag technique)