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.

Wwoofing for two months in Spain and what happened to me

About five months ago now, on the 2nd of April I set off alone to go WWoofing for two months in Spain.
For those unfamiliar with 'WWOOF' it means willing workers on organic farms, and is now a global-wide organisation that sprang in the seventies from working weekends (on organic farms). I had got in contact with smallholdings around Spain on the Wwoof host listing for Spain that I was interested in, told them the dates I intended to visit, and while there was still time did a short course in learning Spanish.
I have been abroad several times, but never alone. This was also the first time I would go Wwoof.


A dog who befriended me at the first farm, called Lily

In this blog I will retell my journey!

My new child: Geomythical, a collection of poems concerning the legends of Earths own history, as told by her plants, animals and landscapes

Geomythical? Yes this is the name of my first collection of poetry, inspired by my greatest muse, Mother Earth.
I created the word 'Geomythical' from two words 'Geo' or 'Ge' and 'Myth'. The first refers to the Earth and the second refers to a collection or body of legends, stories, forming the mythology of a people. In the process of putting together the poems for this collection I sought to find a name that would grasp the spark in what I was beginning to realise these poems were conveying. The poems in the collection are about my connection with nature, and therefore the Earth, as explored in my own personal experiences and encounters with animals, plants and landscapes. Much of the poems draw on Earth-experiences here where I live in Stroud, and draw even deeper on my own journey from childhood being exposed to the wonder, joy and transformation of nature. She does that, the Earth, she constantly seeks to utterly change the way you look at her world, and I feel my poems are expressive of this impulse of hers, where I find myself entering into a way of seeing that is mythological as counter to mundane. For example the first poem in the collection, 'Cowsaga' was very much brought on by plenty of walks on the high, flat grassy wolds above Stroud where Cows are still brought out by local farmers every spring to freely roam and graze. Meeting the cows in this setting where natures abundance is seen in the wildflowers, in the wildlife such as the sky larks and glow worms; where natures raw vitality is felt in the wide open sky above, and the winds that stampede through the grasses, it feels to me like I am meeting these cows as real cows: with no fences and no corrugated-iron roof barns looming nearby.
I believe for most of us these days our experience of the Earth has become reduced to boxed-in, and pruned-down settings. The less we are experiencing the Earth as something real, alive and unconfined to a category, the more we struggle to make that link with her realm of unfettered being and the more we experience ourselves as a race that is cut-off, isolated, trapped, and doomed. Earth gives us mythology which allows us to come into our spiritual inheritence, where we have a greater-than-physical meaning in this universe and where we are in connection with the potency of all of life's unfolding: where our hearts and the teachings of animals, plants and the land matter.
This collection of poetry can be said to be a work of my own heart, working with the voices of the Earth.
Let the Geomythology flow...

Here are some of the poems in the collection,


Old Apple Tree's Message
I came to the apple tree,
branching bountifully,
lichen on old, rough bark;
she leaned slightly,
towards me,
to ask:

What does the apple wait for?

I wondered,
I looked up.

There among leaves,
I saw a sweet sphere waiting.

Saintly is the apple,
ignoring gravity,
though ripening in the fall of the year,
when the Earth yawns,
calling life,
to her deep belly.

The apple tree waits,
like Eve,
to be tempted by the earthworm,
every autumn,
to drop her leaves,
and stand naked,
in the frost.

Apple tree waits to surrender innocence;
apples harvested,
brought inside,
by the winter fireside.

Apple tree,
stands with her blossom,
when April,
is seized by joy,
birds sing about a returning sun;
she stands with her budding fruit,
when summer,
is putting hands together,
of newly wedded ones.

The old apple,
now i realise,
she waits for love to be celebrated.



CowSaga

There was Cow.

Whose hooves,
trod the ways,
on grass-sea plain.

Whose horns,
proud grooves,
in the sky.
Upturning,
to cradle sun,
sitting on the flat,
of her skull.

Whose furnace belly,
was fuelled on,
wind-going grass,
ringing wild flower.

She who lowed and loved to sit,
chewing,
steaming,
content.

Whose udders,
ripe with the milk,
that baptised our labours,
and fed the first gods.

Who wandered mighty wanderings,
nourishing herself,
on Earths full girth,
nourishing Her,
on great brown pat.

This was cow:
Earth Wanderer,
Sun Cradler,
Milk bearer,

A saga on four legs