Theme - Awakenings

Find me wings
and I'll fly for you.

Find me a voice
and I'll whisper all those happy words.

Find me a shadow
and I'll show you the sun.

Awakening to the newness,
to the brightness.
Like a child I watch the world anew
I see its glorious halo
its every little spot is
as if washed with water and soap,
a glorified rainbow.

Find a whisper
and I'll show you how to shout
how to sing
and how to dance with the stars
(the ones above, not the media whores).

Show me life
and I'll show you hope.

Making Memories: Anatidae

He sifts and shunts at the reeds then turns his back on the shallows and heads outwards. His feathers rustle. Alone. He sees land to the left, more reeds, and on the embankment trees and leaves; the island and this is his home, mostly. To the right is the deeper water and he corrects his course. A surface of black and gold that ripples away behind him and he paddles and tilts his head. Blue above, but early. Early. He dives. The mud gives way to his bill as he roots for lavae and worms. The silence is less down here, a faint hiss like background radiation, reaching through the body of water. Whispers from the bog. The sediment he disturbs is dark brown: peat tannins, humic acid, little or no oxygen. He surfaces then dives again. Deeper here, waterweed and he burrows into the soil, shakes at it, the water darkens further but his eyes are huge and sharp: insects scatter but are caught smartly. An off-white glint at the bottom, smallish bones, maybe the remains of a young coot or the finger from a long-forgotten human sacrifice, bludgeoned to death and dumped in the water centuries ago. The drake glides past this history and rises again, breaks the water-mirror and light cascades off his feathers. He has drifted and is back closer to the island and over by the tree roots she sits - unattended! - and he hurries and they regard each other. They met yesterday? The day before? But then with others and he was chased away. But she knows him and he lifts his body high and shakes himself and she inclines her head. Later they dive and feed and the feeding is good and this he will remember. And this he will remember: alone, the bones, the hiss through liquid and now she is with him and the water wakes in two. The matter underneath their feet rises then settles, gently moved by their questing slipstreams.

New Theme: Making Memories: She Wakes Me In The Morning

She wakes me in the morning,
the flicker of a little girl.

Waiting for her to emerge
out of her little cocoon.
Waiting for her first smile
 and now it's here

melting my heart
strengthening it
till it can never break again
never a crack in the crystalnever no more
 or 
until she starts to cry
scream until she is red in the face
and I know not what to do
I know not what she wants. And I sooth and I am,we arethe three of usin our own little cocoontill the world comes knocking.
She wakes me in the morning
so gently
my little girl.

Holy Place

On the day before Christmas Eve when the snow, ice and clear blue skies cast away the feeling of cold and festivities are almost here, a stroll away from the madness can bring us to a moment frozen in time.



Newtown Churchyard

This is believed to be one of Ireland's Holy places. A Church or Monastic settlement has existed above the banks of the Borora River for many centuries. Usher's Visitation of 1622 describes the ancient church and chancel "as in ruins". The roofless building seen here in the churchyard was erected in the late 18th century.

Theme: Time Gone By

Dark.
It was always dark.
The snow covering the earth.
       I remember it always covering the earth during the dark winters.
       I remember the snow.
    Lights filled the windows of the houses around ours. Red, green, blue, yellow and white, of course white, like the stars in the sky.
    I often lay on the ground, wearing snowsuit to keep the cold away, my nose red like Rudolf's.
    I often lay there staring up at the stars wondering what I'd be doing ten years from then.
    20 years from then.
    30 ...
And I tried counting the stars while making snow angels.
    Then I just lay there still until the cold crept up on me through the thick clothing, watching the northern lights play with themselves.
    Eventually I had to jump up and leave the stars and the lights, always attempting to jump so that the angel wouldn't be ruined.
    There could be no footprints where the snow angel was supposed to be.
    If there were steps it was a failed angel.
    A fallen angel.
Afterwards I guess I went inside and continued to wait anxiously for Christmas to arrive. I would stand in the window and look down on my snow angel, the beautiful white snow angel that was sometimes even prettier when it had fallen...
    ...sometimes steps in the snow still remind me of those days.

Day 2.5

“The earth brought forth vegetation: plants yielding seed of every kind, and trees of every kind bearing fruit with the seed in it. And God saw that it was good. And there was evening and there was morning, the third day.”

Hang about. Forgot something.

And the gods (for He can split into many when duty calls) stepped forward and touched the trees and the branches and the twigs. And leaves sprung forth: broad, narrow, prickly, elliptic. Different and interesting. Yet all were green – green to contrast the two previous days of blue water and white light only. And the branches shook with pleasure and pride, they whispered amongst themselves, ‘look at us, look at us, we shine with the virtuous natures of this world; green is the colour of goodness, surely.’

The gods stood back and thought. Hmm.

YOU HAVE NOT BEEN GIVEN THE WORD, they said (in one voice for they agree as One, of course), THAT IS FOR LATER CHAPTERS ONLY.

The trees shook again, this time from the winds of godly bellow, and from plain fear: ‘the cruelty! Do not take our murmurs away from us – we could not bear silence now we know the pleasures of free discourse!’

Hmm. In fairness, it seemed churlish to withdraw a godly gift, once granted.

YOU MUST LEARN TO MODERATE YOUR BEHAVIOUR – THE WORD IS SAVED FOR SOMETHING SPECIAL, AS YOU SHALL SEE IN A FEW DAYS.

The trees trembled at this and therefore had to whisper with it. ‘Sorry!’ they called but that only made it worse and their apologetic rustlings echoed through the world. Clearly they can’t regulate themselves, He thought. Bother. And with many arms he once again reached out to touch the offending items: one by one, the leaves began to fall to the ground.

‘The green, the green, it’s going, it’s gone!’ the trees cried but you could hardly hear them at all by now.

RELAX. I’LL LET YOU HAVE YOUR SAY HALF THE TIME. THE OTHER HALF, YOU SHALL JUST HAVE TO STAY QUIET.

‘But our colour!'

If it’s not one thing, it’s another.

THERE, He sighed – and the leaves on the ground and the leaves in the air and the leaves yet to fall from the branches turned brown or russet or auburn or yellow or red or all those colours at once; like tiny sunsets floating downwards.

THERE; NO GREEN TO REGRET. AND IT’LL COME BACK NEXT TIME ROUND, I PROMISE.

At any rate, it was too late to hear any further complaints. Silence everywhere. And some good ideas had presented themselves to the divine mind: seasons and suns and moons – something to break up monotonies and add colour too. As luck would have it, the falling leaves had also been rather beautiful.

Sketchjournal 19/11/09

A cross-post from my personal blog, Omphaloskepsis.

"Autumn wins you best by this, its mute appeal to sympathy for its decay." ~ Robert Browning

Last night I finally sat down to sketch a leaf I picked up about a week ago. Pressed between the pages of my sketchjournal, it was temporarily spared the fate of crumbling into dust (the fate of so many other leaves my little girl and I have brought home over these autumn months) and I was able to paint it in light washes of gouache and, for the patches of green, Victorian Gold acrylic.

This shimmery gold-green paint was purchased on a recent trip to an art materials shop in Cambridge, where I also bought some coppery gold-leaf flakes. I plan to experiment with both of these in my oil pastel paintings.

We are on the cusp of that dark, dread season where the reds and russets and yellows of autumn are lost, crumbled, trampled, rotted and gone for another year. During the bleaker months, we are left to create our own colours, and must conjure shimmer and sparkle and light however we can.