31>AWST

This piece has been sitting in my iWriter like cheese in a fridge. Not a good idea.
So I am posting it to be done with it.
Might wash my hands now...


'I have been ranting about August today in a blasphemous way.

What are the months? I felt them like there is a potentate who presides over each. A goddess of August. We are subject to her whims of weather, her emotional outbursts. In human form, she would be a large, blowsy woman, a bit lazy and prone to leaving things where they fall. I daren't look too hard in case she notices my attention and demands my head.

It has always been a difficult month for me: Well, perhaps it was endless heaven when I was young, so that 'always' means since I had a working domain.

August is the Month of Interference.
I used to fish an open boat off a shingle beach. When it was beached, safe above the tidal reach and anticipated seas, it attracted a keen, intrusive interest in August.
I would often leave the boat smeared with the detritus of lobstering, partly from tiredness, but also hoping that its rank, fishy smell might deter tourist curiosity. An August morning would often find its deck littered with lager cans and pebbles.
At sea, lobster pot ropes hung slack on the surface, prone to being cut by speedboat propellers, where curious visitors had lifted them.

It is an aimless month. In some European countries they wisely take the entire month off: declaring a Great Emptiness.
Of course that means ice-cream vendors and deckchair attendants are in full cry.
The painful truth is that this coastal economy generally is dependent on visitors. Well, it is heaven, so who are we to clutch it to our chests?

The winter is a peaceful desert though. The `Ber dynasty hold court there at first before the two `Ys supplant them. Both decree a more essential pace to things. A war economy. I like this.

August is an emotional month too. Laden with fruit and fat rainclouds, ready to burst. Drunken wasps, drowned butterflies.

 We would all be poorer without the arrival of any season.

 August though is the final,decadent crescendo of the Empire of Summer, the month of Visitor onslaught.
The Finale is August Bank Holiday: like the end of the crescendo in "Day in the Life" on Sargeant Pepper.
Psychic and physical Relief.

 Before the empty spaces blossom in the car park.

And the tumbleweeds of Autumn roll down down Market Street.'

30> Q

I showed a neighbour around my land  today, at least a bit of it. -That itself said to get on with the task of scything on further, to make a network of paths.

The garden's sequence of care distracted me before now, and beyond a certain date, the imperial power of the bracken was too much to take on. I felt overwhelmed.
It's dying back now, and there is a danger that it will take weak saplings down with it, burning them up in the heat of it's decay.

 I have just ordered some more trees    so have their homes to look for too: some silver birch, sycamore and elder. Have also been offered some other hardwood saplings free, which I want to plant in a way that acknowledges the giver. Coed Rachel.

The hardest thing with these new paths is working out how they will approach, and weave through the large rocks that stick out as natural, igneous megaliths on the steeper slope.  Its a hard physical and geomantic task. Needs a lot of clear space. Inside me.
My visitor also shone a light on what I have done,   acknowledging the dream in progress.

What webs we weave and walk gently through, feeling our connections and the alchemy of them.

The wind would be roaring outside if it wasn't smothered by mist. It is cosy in this hut. Like a large coat, that I never button up. There is no door, but the rug is hung up there tonight.


Have started storing my roots. Well my book says that I should, otherwise they get frosted or go woody.
I made a clamp for my beetroot last month and it was suspiciously easy.
I laid out a nest pile of dryish bracken, put the beetroot on top, big ones first, then covered them with a thick bracken layer.
I pried into it today and all is well.They were sprouting feebly: Vegetative life seems to be half habit...A cut log often sprouts leaves.
So will do one for the swedes now, well half the swedes. - it is just an experiment after all.


Fachongle is bursting with produce. We are in danger at the moment of living entirely on perishable rejects and gradeouts, while their chosen cousins sit smugly in sacks or hang like polished breasts from all possible beams.
We will need to get cannier about how we discern Surplus I think.



 We have SO much to learn, or to relearn,
as we work towards a Degree in the Bleeding Obvious .

29>Awsted Out

Got a lot of words, but no intent.

Too many. As if my metaphysical period is over and am in the wallow of decadent style; Donne to Dryden in a week or two.







Started writing about why I disliked August, and maybe have become infected by its shapeless confusion. A month of moulds and yeasts.


But I have no excuse now.
Its late September, and we are steaming full-speed into the dark and windy sea of tomorrow.
Bustles of picking vegetables and cutting firewood help define time.
People are juicing apples and stringing onions wherever I look.



 I have been back more to the forest, and restored my workspace there, with a new clear tarpaulin rigged like a berber tent over the sawbench and a fresh battery on its tractor. The garden is getting less attention. I spent the equinox there, so feel the autumn tidying has at least started. Some turned soil.

The bracken is backing off boiling all over my saplings. I have rescued some drowning, chafed and shrouded trees, but have come to love it despite this. It nurtures with its compost, as long as I too tend to the task.



I'm trying to be wisely spontaneous about where to be and when, partly by listening to the gentle call of a task before it becomes a scream, or thinking about it makes my heart sag with guilt. Its not just work places that nag for a visit. There are  about half a dozen sites that occur in my mind with firm regularity. They need attention, and I always come away feeling replenished, so its mutual.
Its shamanism. You have it too. There is a mix of letting go of intellectual commentary and predeliction, and embracing intuition and imagination, that is magic. Our lives are not ready-meals. The only reliable recipe is you.



And then there is myself. My body is feeling stiff and sore, so I have to listen to it when it gets stretched and painful, and try to give it a loving rest.
As long as I am doing the right thing, at the right time, there IS energy and time for everything.

But that's so rare, its more theory than practice.

I feel ready now. For whatever comes next. The mess of Summer is being flattened or stripped by this wind.

It's real again.