25>The Queen's Wad

The queen's wad gazes wanly from my wallet, giving a faint smile of encouragement for my enterprise.
It is hard to make a gentle living.
And seemingly getting harder.

We are all tied by fiscal strings to the outer world. However sufficient we become, there are obligations and services that require money.
Sawblades, seeds, shoes; making do can become wearisome.
Man cannot live on cabbage alone: let there be chocolate.

Children find it particularly hard to live within the cage of their parents righteous penury.

Words to do with caution and restraint seem archaic after fifty years of consumerism, but part of the pull we have felt back to the land has come from knowing this Great World Party of excess can't last.



But even if you step out of it, the traffic roars by.
I have never felt any lasting joy in disconnecting entirely from your mother culture.
It smacks of grim faced zealots, cursing outsiders for not undergoing equal hardship.

That dialogue called trade is where common values meet. Where we appreciate each others skills and sensibilities.
It is where we offer the fruits and rewards of an alternative lifestyle.

Wow, I feel almost saintly, put like that!

There is a continual need to keep a check on where your enterprise is being led, by the logic of scale, and the slaver of success. To keep that resonance between it and your life and the resources. In a Culture founded upon the principles of growth and increasing wealth.
I have seen simple woodcarvers ready to turn into ruthless tycoons when a big order beckons.

We try to make a living from simple acts of creativity.
But the irony is that most of what we offer as trade goods are hardly the staples of life. It may feed the soul or the imagination, but not the body.

As people become more cautious about spending money,  as they too become wary of excess, so we will feel it in fewer sales.




That is just how it is.
We are not an isolated elite.

This is part of a shared journey.

24>Great Unblinking Eye

Am trying to write. Its a lot easier than it was. I got jammed up with words at university. Stuffed full. But had no narrative for them to serve. It was painful I remember. Constipated and disconnected.
I got instead into the pure physical around me. The rocky shore, the hedgerows, the wind-blasted tops of hills. And sang to them. Simple, structured songs, enjoying the discipline of rhyme and breath.
I made up songs for my children, about potties and sweeties, and came to relish reading storybooks to them at bedtime.
 Words were winning a way back into my life.

When I was a full-time child, I had had an ambition to be either a poet or an ad-man: a coiner of slogans. I didn't mind which.
So my next creative word format made sense, as I devised names and descriptions for the things that I made: Safe but exciting handles for customers to grasp.
Then came the internet, and websites, that ever shifting quicksand of possibilities. Many creative lives were squandered there.
An appendage to my website of my wares was called missives, and was where I started to formulate and express my ideas. I remember them as being rather dense, angry works, as I struggled  to work out how to get out of the cage.
Then there were the online forums: Sanctuaries for bores and obsessives and fanatics, sporting silly code-names and a tenuous grasp on sense. I soon fled from attempting expression there.

Emails themselves were a great way to dare new ways of writing.
A wet evening would all too soon be gone composing one.

Now there are the social network formats, the tribal email.
And this wonderful, pure form of vanity publishing, the Blog.

Maybe nobody will read this one.
Potentially, everyone in the world, with online access, COULD.
And I don't have to care.
There is no box of poesy going dusty under my bed.

Because that idea- that larval flow of thought has been expressed. It is hardening now.I am done with it;
Can move on.
For that cage I was trying to escape from, was myself.

I remember my father's terse, wise observations on things.
They were a scaffolding that kept him sane and good in an unjust  and devious world. But they became an impregnable castle, a citadel in which he eventually imprisoned himself.

We are elaborate creative plumbing.
There are many modes of expression: sex, paint, gossip, clothes, gardening, violence, politics, an endless list.
But we NEED to express.
If we don't, our bodies will. An implosion of tumours and cancers and ulcers.
If your guides are on your case, they will offer you a chance to break your patterns with a few timely disasters.

As you convalesce or lick your wounds after a break-up or break-down, you have been given a chance to ask Why? And to explore and try to express both the pain and the answer.
You are on a unique, and special journey.





So, praise be this screen. This unblinking eye.

   

23>Gardentalk

 It's strange to be sowing again.


Patches of bare earth are appearing in among the great garden greenness.
If I had seedlings ready, they could go happily straight into that warm, cultivated ground, but I think I was too transfixed by the burgeoning growth of my crops last month to think ahead.
I am proving to be an extreme gardener though: planting as early as I dared in the Spring in my enthusiasm, and now in late July.
We had a couple of damp, dark days last week that felt like the Autumn. Literally, I felt it in my bones, as an ominous ache in my thighs.

 

The dread of Winter must be an inherited squirrel instinct > Look to your woodpile and where to store the potatoes, it says.
We invest such a deep store of expectation in The Summer that disappointment is inevitable. Our childhood is stored there, gilded in sunshine, along with the flowers of early romance.
Idylliotic creatures that we are.
As I remember, the summer was often wellies and waddingtons games, rather than basking on the beach.
A good, moist tilth though, and one the slugs and weeds have been waiting for.
One reason not to plant late crops is that they won't be ready before the weather gets too cold. What is ready, huh?




There is an underlying assumption that plants have to be large to be worthwhile. This is true in forests too.
I see it as The Big Willy syndrome; a relic male oversight of the living world that favours largeness as a symbol of prowess.
To this end, trees are spaced to optimise growth, towards a day of reckoning when they are 'mature'.
I have come to appreciate coppice and smallwood use as a more harmonious treatment of many woodlands.




Now I see similar male dogma rooted in the garden. The allotmenteer competing to produce prize leeks.
I like to eat delicate leeks, the size of a pencil. I grew some onions from seed this year, and got lovely dense billiard balls of onion which I prefer to big ones.



As I pored over gardening books, I saw a picture of some onions grown clustered together. They looked so snug.
Then I read that turnips can be planted this way, sowing about four seed together. (The turnip is a vegetable that has escaped from the tyranny of size, having had a renaissance as a tender salad crop).



I tried this and it works well. They do seem to grow better this way.
So I am looking at what other roots would benefit.

Planting in clumps rather than lines makes so much sense. Just like us, plants, for the most part, like to live in community.
I have been planting my ash seedlings close together. Part of that is because it's a windy site. I don't expect or want to get high single-stem trees there, but anticipate healthy coppice.



Ash seedlings in the wild grow as thick
as grass, yet somehow glean themselves, without any sign of pain, of surplus trees, as the group grows in stature. They grow as a cooperative organism. Ashitude. They are the ultimate republican tree.



So to plant trees to their ultimate young adult spacing is to rob them of their childhood.
To conscript them into an army.
Social control patterns reminiscent of an earlier time.



Let your trees live in tribes again.



Set your vegetables free!

22>There was one.

There was one.

     A blog.

I'd thought about what he'd said and what I'd said, and so on and then there was a lesson .... There endeth the blog. Amen.



It was going to be about the difference between living in a world order based on human certainties, with everything contained by cerebral understanding, and this faerieland that I choose to live in, full of intuition, seemingly fed by intelligent, often mischievous, nonhuman interventions.
I find containment enough in belief in a wise and benign universe.

My world is littered with exotic graffiti.
Everything has meaning.
Bus tickets picked out of puddles in the street, Shop signs, snatches of speech, car numberplates, chance meetings, irksome feelings. Thoughts that won't go away:
It's all pure and meaningful information.

 
Its all useful. Meant to happen. To you.

Dolphins cavort and crop-circles sprout shouting "Lighten up! Enjoy it! Life is Good...
We are given opportunities to learn as we live with every breath, every second.
THAT is how good life is.

Maybe I am living in a bubble of idiocy.
A delusion. I need to worry more.
Terrorism, Ill Health, Accident, Penury>
Our Culture is a Class A Fear user.
So no wonder we feel life is empty without it.



Should I feel that I am delusional unless there is something dark ever clawing at the door, and that various human initiatives such as Parliament and the Law, are guarding me? Unless I feel lethargic and in need of instruction or entertainment.

I could go and buy grey slacks and hunch my shoulders and assume that other people were in control and get irritated when a bus was late and write a letter and wait for a reply that never came and get cancer or an ulcer and decide to die in a hunched and irritated way, though hanging on stubbornly because part of me knew that I'd missed the main event.

As if we think that we are tied to bit-parts in some soap-opera, but are actually freelance angels.



 Scrumple that script...

Write your own

New AngleLand

We live in a Rightest Society.

I speak as one of the Sinister, the Un-dextrous, the left aside, Left handed.

A rightness that even extends into the shape of things: the Right Angle.
The Square that dominates our living spaces.

The Rect-Angle, the Reich,
Full Square it sits in front of me as I type.



The machine age has been it's glory days though. Its clean-cut, mass-produced standard lengths and panels do not fit anything but clean-cut, mass-produced items.



I heard, in one of those magpie radio moments once, of a company who, knowing that they would be making different things as time went on, simply called themselves Straight Lines.
Straight implied honesty and openness. Lines are the fruits of a conveyor belt production system...
In a patriarchal era, a straight back expressed dignity and self worth.
 In these New Age times, it is seen as the essential posture to connect Earth to the Cosmos through our bodies.  They share the same root, in understanding that we thrive by valuing our own paths.










The major disillusion with the cold logic and aggressiveness of the machine age that flowered in the 1960's expressed itself in adoration of tribal, and circular structures. The tipi, the Round Table, the dome.



They symbolised flow and completion, a consciousness that embraced all, after a century of driven tunnel-vision.
(I sometimes wonder if this was partly due to marijuana replacing alcohol as the drug of choice.



Ethnic shelters and clothes captured imagination, as their use of local, natural materials implied an intimacy with the Earth that urban life had chosen to shun.
This was more than a moment of dilettante world weariness.
Practically, it has effected the basic values of global trade.

Personal identity now factors in a sense of tribe: Often threatened or lost.
This is expressed in rites, diet, clothes, domestic space, and aspiration.



This challenges the Box. That suburban packet we come from.

The right-angle has lost its certainty, its righteousness.


                  right?