Ripples on a Lake

Being within mystery

Red Kite over Claerwen

Friends,

This is an anniversary post, it being one year since I first began Into the Deep Woods. So much has happened in that year. We’ve all travelled 93 million miles around the sun. Phew! Yesterday a young couple walked into my studio carrying a two month old baby, his wide eyes the bluest blue. A year ago he may not even have been an idea, along with many of the other 12 million or so two-month-olds currently on planet earth. Miraculous, mysterious life.

I’ve thought a lot about mystery in recent months. Perhaps it’s better to use the term the mystery. Given the richness of the subject I could probably write a lot more about it, book length, perhaps, but I like to keep my writing short, and to leave as much space around words as possible. Ultimately these little essays want to condense, to become poems appearing in beautifully produced pamphlets. It’s happened already, if you’ve seen my pamphlet Winged, which was written at the same time as I was working on essays like the ones I publish here.

At the end of the story I’ve added a video reading of a new poem which condenses some of what I’ve written about woodlands recently into a few lines. It’s the first of a series of videos recorded in the places the poem is about. I’ll be doing more of these in the near future.

Hope you enjoy this week’s offering. To me it’s one of the more important pieces I’ve written, suitable for a one year anniversary.

J

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Last Sunday the weather forecast promised all day sun, utterly clear skies, light winds, a last burst of high summer before the dewfall of autumn. So we closed the gallery, drove to Claerwen, found our own private beach next to the deep-dark water . . . and soaked up the rain. Nevertheless there were gaps in the cloud, a wind trilling the surface of the lake and the tiny slate pebbles which formed the beach were like a waterbed made of stones, moulding to your shape. We cloud bathed and snoozed. It’s a moody place, Claerwen, a touch of winter always in its colours, twilight always present even in the middle of the day. Mysterious, you could say.

The next day I was stewarding at a gallery in Bristol where some of my work is currently on display. Galleries are quiet places, you don’t get many visitors. People wander in, wander around, wander out, quietly. Galleries are a little like churches, we feel obliged to be serious, contemplative. To pass the time I listened to a couple of podcasts, one an interview with a writer I admire; the other a group interview with a musician, a filmmaker and a scientist. The main question of the two episodes was how to approach our lives in a time of ecological crisis. All of the interviewees seemed to have problems expressing an answer to this, circling the subject, going off on tangents, even occasionally descending into mumbo-jumbo. The agreed answer, though, seemed to be something along the lines of “don’t do, be.” The word being was used many times and all the respondents said they were working on their own practices to be more themselves, more present, more alive etc. I’ll be honest I had to press the pause button several times, and I didn’t make it to the end of one of the episodes.

Language often confuses me. Perhaps its because I spend too much time staring at words on pages, and in the way that a random pattern of dots or lines can start to constellate into strange shapes, sentences and phrases sometimes take on unintended meanings, or lose their meanings completely. Being not doing is a phrase I read a lot and I simply don’t understand it. I think it’s a way of responding acceptably when something else, deeper and more mysterious, is felt. Be, don’t do sounds spiritual, but it sits on the fence of spirituality.