A Strong Day

Today is the Spring Equinox and there was (as I'm sure you're well aware) a solar eclipse.  It's also the new moon in Aries and a 'supermoon' (meaning a full or new moon that's particularly close to the earth on it's orbit).

This is the sun through clouds as it rose this morning.  It was a warmish just-about-to-be-really-truly-spring day. For the first half of the eclipse the clouds here were too thick and there was nothing to see, but as the moon withdrew from between us and the sun you could see this.

Slowly, slowly the sun had mostly disappeared behind the moon until our life-giving orb of golden light became a silvery sliver.  The temperature plummeted (how I love you mighty Sun, how grateful I am for your warmth) and although the birds did not all stop singing as they did in 1999 they did start finding their way to their beds.  It became eerily, magically quiet.

Two stags stood still as trees, watched me watching.

Now, my astrologically minded friends tell me, the sun and the moon are both in Aries - and that is the time for letting go. As the moon cleared the sun it felt as if the slate was being wiped clean, the face of brother sun transformed by sister moon.  As if there has been a letting go on a planetary level - of what I'm not entirely sure but it feels as though on this day; when the day and night are of equal length, and just for a moment the moon out-faced the sun - that the energies of masculine and feminine might be coming into alignment.

From a lunar point of view this year is an extraordinary one.  There is usually only one supermoon approximately every fourteen moons, so not even one each year - this year however we are going to have four! There was one on February 18th, there was one today (the new supermoon), there will be a full supermoon on August the 29th and on September the 28th there will be the closest supermoon of the year and a lunar eclipse and a blood moon! There is also another full lunar eclipse on the 4th of April.

Hold on to your hats!  The times - they are a-changing.  I don't know much about astrology, I don't know what all these queer lunar extravagances mean.  I do know some people born under the sign of Aries - and they are without exception grounded and earth-loving people.  I feel a strange new hope, wriggling it's way up through the soil with spring.

The Naming of Things

Recently the latest edition of The Oxford Junior Dictionary was published.  These words (words that are to my way of thinking completely essential to a child's enjoyment of childhood and to an adult's relationship with the world) have been omitted:  Acorn, adder, ash, beech, bluebell, buttercup, catkin, conker, cowslip, cygnet, dandelion, fern, hazel, heather, heron, ivy, kingfisher, lark, mistletoe, nectar, newt, otter, pasture and willow.

In their place we have 'attachment, block-graph, blog, broadband, bullet-point, celebrity, chatroom, committee, cut-and-paste, MP3 player and voice-mail.'  A deeply sarcastic Whoopee.  I'm sure the lives of every child in a primary school classroom (for that is the 'target audience' for this dictionary) are deeply enriched by understanding these words in preference to the omitted words. Not.

Language helps us shape our sense of place, it mediates our experience of where we are.  It creates a familiarity that instead of breeding contempt (as the old adage goes) gives us an intimate relationship with the land.  With our land.  How can we deepen into that relationship if we don't even know which words to use, how to name what we see?

According to Wendell Berry "people exploit what they have concluded to be of value, but they defend what they love, and to defend what we love we need a particularising language, for we love what we particularly know."  I certainly love, unendingly and without reserve, the land I know. The place I live, my place.  I have gone on at some length in the past about the value of practices such as 'The Seven Directions of The Warrior' - we need to find our place in our land, whatever and wherever that land may be.  Even if you are surrounded by skyscrapers (and I must admit that I hope for your sake that you are not, or perhaps I mean that I would hope for my sake not to be - if I was) there is still rock, the living bones of the land, underneath the concrete.  There is still sky above you, birds to your left (quite possibly)and maybe even trees behind you.

It is said that the Ancient Ones - the Sacred Ones - live inside trees.  As you may know, not all trees like to be engaged in conversation by humans, but some love it. All knowledge is contained inside the trunks, branches and leaves of trees generally but the really important stuff, the stuff you can only look at while you're in the library - that's in the Oaks.  It is no chance that we call the pages of a book it's leaves.

What are you doing this week?  Have you got time to go and talk to a tree?  I think you should.  I really do.  Go and find a tree in whose presence you feel comfortable.  A tree you can lean your back up against maybe.  Or just one you really like the look of.  There is much this tree can tell you and there is much peacefulness to be found here, listening.

Or maybe you need the tree to listen to you.  Listen they will.  Perhaps with a more compassionate ear than you can find in the busy helter-skelter franticness of many of our daily lives. A tree will listen with the deep listening of one who knows the interconnectedness of all things.  An Oak will listen from the heart of all things, with no judgement.  Try it.

I dare you.

The Raree Man

Back when God was a boy I went to University and 'did' a degree in Theatre Arts and English.  You can tell, can't you, by the exquisite eloquence with which I write ;-).  Within the hallowed halls of the Theatre Arts building I first encountered the word Shamanism (it wasn't where I first encountered Spirits - they had been there all along) and I learned to look at the magical liminal space betwixt and between.

I was fortunate that Baz Kershaw was my tutor, fresh into teaching having been working with 'Welfare State International' - a nomadic collective of artists, musicians, performers, poets and engineers who set up site-specific multi-media performances and ritual performances that sought to be celebratory in nature. They were called "dream weavers, purveyors of images, sculptors of visual poetry, civic magicians and engineers of the imagination" by Baz in his fantastic book 'Engineers of The Imagination - The Welfare State Handbook'; a total must read for anyone wanting to create that kind of performance.  One of their stated aims was to "advocate a role for art that weaves it more fully into the fabric of our lives; that allows us to be collaborators rather than spectators".

Yesterday I was fortunate enough to meet another past member of Welfare State International and to be invited into the wonderland that is his home.  Tony Lidington, otherwise known as 'Uncle Tacko' is a man who calls himself a Showman because it's the nearest term he can find to Shaman - which in his words is "a spiritual guide , who's performative persona provides access to other worlds."

He's also the man who made this wonderful little film.



Visiting his home was like stepping into a land where all wonders at the back of my imagination had come into being, it reminded me of all the things I thought I was going to do with my life and inspired me to realise that I am doing them, in a different costume, on a different stage....

I have always been interested in that liminal space - where transformation takes place, where healing can occur, where truth can be found - and in who resides either side of it and who looks into it.  How can we collaborate to make it better, more inclusive?

Theatre is the way we present ourselves to ourselves.  It can obviously also be many other things and different things to different people - that is part of it's power.  What I love are the ways in which we explore 'otherness' and the opportunity to provide a forum for new ways of presenting old but seemingly unheard ideas, a way of attempting to provoke cultural change; both personal and communal.

Our world view is here - all our worlds contained in the space between the audience and the performer.

All the questions we ask about how we perceive ourselves and how we are perceived are here - between the worlds of the real and the not-real.

The questions we ask when we engage with performance are the very one's that we need to be asking when we engage with anything - imagine if we lived in a world where we thought for a moment about who might be watching what we do?

Where we might be accountable?  Because we realised that we are not in fact the only ones here.

Who inhabits the space with us?  Have we noticed who's footsteps mark the ground beside our own?

Imagine a world where we sought to collaborate; create a consensual reality for the benefit of ALL. Accepting of the magic - the life that lives in all things.  Knowing that everything is connected. That would be a fine world indeed.

Imbolc

Bright blessings on this most beautiful of days.

Yesterday was Imbolc, or alternatively today is Imbolc - it depends who's calendar you are looking in.  Either way it's a day to celebrate the turning of the year - Spring is starting to un-wind from the frozen winter earth.  The snowdrops are out, the catkins are hanging in the Hazel trees.  Traditionally this is a day to 'break the ground' ready for the earliest seeds to be planted - the one's that relish a bit of ice and frost.  It began with the kind of blazing sunrise that seems to set the trees on fire and bring every spirit of every living thing loud and lively to the fore, dancing in the winter sun.

 It is said that the Cailleach  gathers her winter wood on Imbolc.  If the day is bright and sunny then winter is far from over, she has made the day fine so that she can go out and gather wood for the fires that she's going to need to keep herself warm for in the continuing cold.  If the day is misty or dull then she's sleeping - winter is over and spring will be here in earnest soon.  Yesterday was exquisite.

We celebrated Imbolc with a little family ritual. It goes like this - Brid (her feminine energy symbolised by a doll made of sticks for the purposes of this endeavour) is the guardian of the land hereabouts and of our house in particular.  She is dressed in a beautiful robe and ribbons and she is put to bed (a willow basked made years ago by me with the first willow I had ever grown for myself) with a carved phallus - this is Bres, he is the masculine half of that energy.  In the bed with them go offerings from each member of the household.  These are usually a 'thing of beauty' that has either been made or found and also a small rolled up piece of paper.  On our pieces of paper each of us writes what they would like to bring to birth in the coming spring; our dreams, our ambitions. These things all spend the night in the bed together in front of the heart fire which is kindled afresh for the occasion.  In the morning the offerings and the wishings - or more accurately willings - are burned in the fire.

It was incredibly beautiful for me to watch my tall loose-limbed sons bend knee and head to this little ceremony, something we've been doing since they were children but something that has never lost it's magic or it's power to transform. There is no Father Christmas here to give up believing in, only the heart-full acknowledgement of the Spirit That Lives In All Things.

Today the Cailleach's wood gathering was over and the day was full of sprinkley showers of snow which brought the endless preparing of drum skins to a frozen halt while I laughed by the fire inside making drums with a lovely woman from 'not far away'.

When she had gone, drum happily in hand, I took to the fields with my camera.....

May what you wish to bring to birth this spring be yours, and may it be for the good of all of us.

Into The Woods

"I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately" - Henry David Thoreau

Or did I live deliberately because I went to the woods?  This feels more like the truth for me but, like many things that are true, it's true whichever way round you say it.

If we are looking for the wild instinctual self, the self who knows her seasons and her cycles then we need to go to the woods.  Within stories from all over the world it is within the woods  that the heroine or hero  'grows up'.  They go there to find their power and their knowing and enough wisdom and just plain guts to get on with the rest of the story.  They go, as the children did in Kipling's 'Puck of Pook's Hill', by Oak, Ash and Thorn.

So where are they, these woods?  It is frequently said that  - in order to find our connection to the outer world - we need to look inwards;  but it seems to me that the path to the inner woods is most easily found outwards, here among the trees - beautiful, bountiful, blessed trees.

Up here woodland is mostly sparse, we live over 1,000 feet above sea level.  The soil is poor and shallow and the winds howl so fiercely in the winter that the average Dartmoor Oak tree (predominantly Quercus Robur - English Oak) only grows to between 7 and 12 meters tall and some are not much taller than a man.

Trees are everywhere, even in cities, and the magic that is held in a full grown tree is little diminished by it's surroundings, whatever they are.  Find a tree, find many - sit with them, exchange breath with them. After all, you can only breathe at all because of them.

Once we have found the outer woods; spoken a while with a tree or two, noticed perhaps that their timeless beauty and strength are neither new nor perfect, revivified our connection to the all that is; those other woods become easier to locate.  Perhaps these are the woods within which Silver Hands re-members herself, finds her adult powers, her strength and her community and transforms herself from serving girl to queen. Perhaps they are the woods where Red Riding Hood takes the path of wisdom and initiation and not that of compliance, or where Gretel finds her clarity and resolve. The richness to be found within these inner wood trials is worth the journey.  Today's magical task can be finished and the ongoing business of transformation can take another leap forwards.  It's time to rejoin the human world, but to bring with you the wisdom and power collected, like a basket full of juicy ripe berries from under the canopy of the trees.

"To know the woods and to love the woods is to embrace it all, the light and the dark - the sun dappled glands and the rank, damp hollows; beech trees and bluebells and also the deadly fungi and poison oak.  The dark of the woods represents the moon side of life: traumas and trials, failures and secrets, illness and other calamities.  The things that change us, temper us, shape us; that if we're not careful defeat or destroy us... but if we pass through that dark place bravely, stubbornly, wisely, turn us all into heroes."  Terri Windling

"Forests will always hold your secrets, for that's what forests are for.  To separate and hide things. To protect, to comfort, to hold, to envelop, to demonstrate, to slow down, to teach.  Go to the trees to explore your questions and dreams.  Go to the trees to desire and seek.  The world will listen as youw walk, watch, soften and breathe." - Victoria Erickson 

"Sometimes a man must go alone into the forest 
and die into its heart 
so that he can bring 
back the forgotten pieces of the world 
a world kept alive only by this:
our constant remembering 
our constant telling our constant calling out 
far into the bright burning" 

Daverick Leggett