Quiet Illuminations

Words for the embers of the year

Friends and deep woodlanders,

This is a little essay to bring you a dose of calm at the still point of the year. It’s scheduled to be delivered to you at 9.21 GMT which is the exact time when the northern hemisphere leans farthest from the sun. By the time you read it we will already be drifting back to the light. It’s a public post for all readers, so feel free to share with friends if you feel it resonates. It’s my last post of the year. Time for some quiet . . .

At the foot of the page is a link to Rima 1, an e-book selection of short essays. Some have been published here over the year, some are from the archives. This is the first of a series I’ll be publishing for (paid) Rima subscribers. If you’re a recent subscriber and you’re not familiar with the themes behind Rima you can read an introduction here.

LANDSCAPE IMAGES BY LEWIS SAMUEL ROBERTS

I’m writing this story next to a burning candle which is beckoning the light. Though the flame is protected on all sides by the rim of a cup it stumbles like a nervous child. At times it seems to be going out, which, for someone like me, who often reads omens into the most ordinary things, feels, well, ominous. It’s one of those heavy and still winter days, the sky featureless, a single wash of monotone without variation. People are walking bent through the town, though there is no wind to fight and it’s not especially cold. The lightlessness creates a listlessness perhaps. I’m feeling it myself. There’s a mist gathering around me, or perhaps a dusk, my focus seems to broaden then fade. Though I’m staring at a large monitor watching the words appear, the screen seems hardly there. At the same time my mind is free of noise, not a sign of the chatter which sometimes makes writing seem like I’m trying to hold a conversation in a noisy bar.

There’s a big painting on the easel which I need to finish. I have a proposal for a new exhibition submitted and I need to prove that I can do the work to a high standard. The painting’s subject, a heron, is flying low over an estuary. The image comes from the first stanza of a long poem I’m also working on, which is also unfinished. Every time I pick up a brush and start work the picture becomes more fuzzy, almost abstract. It dissolves back into itself. I like what’s happening though. I’m using museum board for the first time, a thick substrate which absorbs all the salt, percolates it and then releases it over days to take on the texture of worn stone. This is serendipitous because the exhibition will be housed in a hall built of centuries old stone. But the heron refuses to appear out of the inky textures. It’s as if it wants to hide in the dusk of the year, its treacly, chocolatey richness. I’ll go with whatever it wants for now as I’m sure the heron will fly into view soon enough. It’s one of the things I’ve learned over the past months: to wait for the thing sung to begin the song.

The other day I visited Hereford Cathedral as dusk began to gather. The stained glass windows were subdued by the low light outside. At the back of the building was a tiered table filled with tea lights, little memorials to the lost, or wishes for the failing. All of them were lit, and they leaned in unison, a pool of shivering yellow light staining the stone wall behind. The pool was so small and fragile, the grey of the stone threatening to wash through it. Still it held me mesmerized for a time, and, as usual, I teared up. High above, the beautiful painted ceiling was lit by floodlights. The polished floors shone and reflected. The windows glowed. It was a grand sight. But the illumination was only there on that little table covered with tiny, guttering flames, little flames of hope and grief. Hope is something I give little attention to. But grief I know deeply, you could say I’m tuned to sadness. A person of the dusk, not the dawn.

It was strange in the woods this morning. After their partial demolition by the latest storm I’m wondering if the birds are reacquainting themselves with the place. So many of their favourite perches and nesting places have gone. There were many crows in the pines, and six ravens circling over them. They seemed to be in negotiation about something, or perhaps they were just discussing how times have changed. As I’m writing this sentence a crow has just landed in our yard. It picks between the stones as two blackbirds chase each other across the garage roofs. Their monotone feathers fit the day. Two days ago, walking beside the reservoirs near Rhayader a pair of bullfinches flushed from a tree in front of me. The male seemed like an afront to the dimming year, a daub of the wrong hue that could ruin the painting. As they flew over the lake a faint shaft of sunlight followed them, and there was that little glowing pool again.

People often tell me that we live in ominous times. I have no idea if this is true. For all of my life so far there seemed to be a precipice just out of view, some part of the world in conflagration, a new existential threat to combat. The year has been dramatic. I don’t have to mention the events, we all know them, have all talked or read about them over and over. This isn’t a place for that. Instead, it’s a place to mention the ravens which reared three young in the high pines; and the jackdaws still streaming out over the town at dusk, more and more; the swifts that finally arrived in late May; roe and muntjac deer that have become an almost daily presence in our lives; late summer light turning the high hills orange; new babies born to the children we knew as babies - their grandparents’ beaming faces; young lovers singing and laughing, their feet dangling over the sea’s edge; old lovers holding hands while they sat on a bench near the summit of the ridge; the troubled man I used to pass twice a day on the street who took his own life, flowers rain soaked outside his front door alongside a DVD of his favourite film wrapped in a plastic bag. My wife’s fifth clear mammogram post cancer treatment. My mum’s eighty-ninth birthday. Yes, a dramatic year.

Strange how lost things sometimes re-emerge. I was shuffling through some old notes when a wolf appeared. It’s a little sketch I made when I first started experimenting with ink and salt. I’d been reading a book about a wolf pack in Denali National Park, Alaska. One of the photographs was an aerial shot of the pack travelling through deep snow and one wolf in particular seemed to be toiling. I drew it with its head bowed as if it was carrying a great weight and I came to interpret this as the weight of grief. Wolves grieve like us. I once read about one who returned day after day to the place where her mate had been trapped and killed. She lay on the ground scenting his dimming presence. Wolves live the most precarious lives, there’s always a precipice approaching for them. But the book also showed pictures of them playing, or lying around fast asleep in puppy heaps, or attending to young not their own, helping them to keep up with the travelling pack, to cross fast moving rivers or climb steep cliffs. They live in a fusion of pure attention. They glow like candles and then blow out.

Now comes the sleep of the year, the last flickering days of the cycle. My son just came home from a long walk on the Black Mountain in the far west of the Brecon Beacons National Park. He was supposed to be taking photographs of the wrecks of airplanes but the light became his subject. High on the plateau little gaps in the clouds began to open and great beams poured down, luminous pools shining beneath them. Even teenagers, so wired for adventure, stop and gaze when this quiet phenomenon appears. Their frantic lives slow and slow. They sit quietly, ignore their nagging phones, and just take in the glow.

I’m back in the woods at dusk again. I have to scramble in places where the oaks came down in the storm, sidestepping between holly bushes and tree saplings. A squall passed through a little earlier and soaked the beech trees, turning them dark with rain. As the water drains from the pencil thin branches of the young trees tiny droplets catch and hang below next year’s spear tip buds. In the dim of the wood each catches a pearl of light. I reach out and touch them one by one, lightly, the skin of my fingertip merging with the skin of the droplet. As we touch the water flows onto my skin and begins to evaporate. Tiny candles glowing, going out.

Thank you for your support this year. Wishing you a peaceful solstice. Light those candles!

(I’ll be back on Jan 4th)

J

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