This is the first post i have put on this blog for many months! I do not know what it will be about, but i sense a feeling to redefine and clarify what am I doing with this blog. Firstly blog isn't a very nice word, it sounds too close to being a bog where everything stagnates in a rancid pool of rotting stuff. I would prefer to call this
'blog' a narrative, because when i post things here i am in a way narrating my own personal journey and everything that means to me. As a narrator i am entering into the ancient role and humanity's original gift of storytelling, which is naturally what is happening here; why are people on the internet creating these online ongoing narratives of what they are doing, where they are going, who they are? It is storytelling again, the original gift adapted to the age of the microchip and digital technology. Humans must tell their story, or at least try and find one, because its the quest we all enter coming out of our mothers womb: the quest for seeking our unique creative core, the spark nestled tight within our skins, and how to bring this into the world most fully. The second birth after our physical birth: the spirit child.
Welcome then those who come this way to the narrative of my own spirit child, the creative spark which I find when in contact with the Earth; and the contact is manifold in walking, gardening, climbing trees: travelling the landscape as well as being in it as a dweller. I find the story finds me, as it were, when I'm out there being in the land and through working on the land, in whatever form that happens to be, I find myself working through something in myself, in my inner-land of the soul and mind. I have found there is a quality in the land that if you are sensitive to it, encourages you through further thresholds of your inner-life. I do not seek this quality as if chasing after a bus I have to catch, but it happens just in the lands raw meditated innocence of simply being there: and like a spread out sheet I start to leave my residue or a pattern on it of the thoughts and feelings I have processed while inhabiting that landscape. It is like the sentience of the land how it feels to be in, live in, experienced through its dimensions of Earth, Water, Stone and Plant becomes aware of you being receptive to it, and starts to guide you towards awareness of yourself. This doesn't necessarily mean you have to adopt a hedgerow lifestyle, dwelling beneath a tarpaulin and consuming berries. You could just live in a house with mains water and electricity and walk everyday in your local area; the local area may even be in the middle of London but you can still connect with the land by making the effort to be aware of its Earth dimensions.
I write poetry as a conduit to water my garden of imagination with inspiration and insight found in the land, and being in contact with the Earth. Sometimes i don't write poetry specifically about the land or anything seemingly connected to it, but the land doesn't work for me as a linear conveyor belt: the land sometimes is a place that gives you space just for me to write about something I have to write.
Today the land outside my room a few miles out of Cirencester near Calmsdene, is in a very easy-going summery bursting-out of energy. The sun is out, there are a few puffy clouds, and the birds chortle while some planes drone about in the sky. Cow parsley throngs, among dock, nettle, hogweed, plantain and buttercups. There is abundance and yet also a little sadness because this will not last. The green cloaks the Earth as though she has been forgotten in the rush of the plants to reach to the sun, but Earth is still there anchoring their roots and feeding them: waiting for their return.