To whom are we beautiful when we go?

"I wish I knew the beauty of leaves falling. To whom are we beautiful when we go?" David Ingnato

Someone very close to me is on their way. It has been a slow process. I am at the point where it is really very challenging to try to see any beauty in it. I suppose that increasing vulnerability is hard to accept from one so big and so strong. And yet, the unexpected softness, the holding onto the small pleasures, the very rare moments of laughter, these are precious still, although rare enough these days.

Wanting to run away from this parting I find that the deepening autumn is my soulmate on the road . Glimpses of the world around me going to sleep, absolutely lacking in any sense of panic, can be re-assuring. Ever so slowly today I am letting winter happen! The almost bare branches are going to be strewn with bird feeders by the end of this day, and I look forward to filling the larder of the robin family over the next few weeks.......

Perhaps the truth depends on a walk around a lake

 

Some mysterious things go on in the world. Many that most of us don't expect, support or buy into. While we all have to mull over and face up to our fair share, it is often hard to find solutions to the myriad of problems that absorb us. Foxglove Lane is an oasis from that place ; no politics, no economics no pessimism, no solutions are on offer.

Wallace Stevens said "Perhaps the truth depends on a walk around a lake." Some days that's about the size of it and meeting a small frog along the way can really help.......

Even Jung recommended talking to trees

Sometimes a place has a soulful feeling about it. Off behind our house are three deserted farms which overlap in a series of fallow fields and gorse covered hillocks. Each of them has a farmyard haggard overgrowing with an ever increasing wildness. There are corners which have been long forgotten and hold memories and echoes of the past. 

In the corner of a small grove this Ash tree commands a striking pose, back to a low wall and branches outstretched. Even in the sparsest winter this grove is a haven of lush wooded green. Mosses and ivy cover every inch of it.

If a tree could tell you something of it's individuality, this one speaks of confidence and ease. So perfect is it's setting that entering in here you immediately feel the carefulness that is required to delicately negotiate around the space, in case you might disturb things. Tiny pink wood anemones cover the earth and twisted matted ivy stems braid around the trees and their branches. It is almost like entering a green room more like a library or a small chapel than a forest.

The tree presides over the little grove like a sentry on duty or a mother embracing all protectively. Where most trees reach upwards, here is one that reaches outwards.

I go here each season and remember as Jung once said, “You will find yourself again only in the simple and forgotten things, why not go into the forest.....sometimes a tree tells you more than you read in books” There is no real separation between us and this tree. At least that's what my own instinct tells me when I am in it's shadow. Do you know what I mean?

The tall silent wooden ones.......

There's not much big wood around here at all. My favourite trees the little Hawthorns are everywhere mainly on the hedgerows. These large pine trees are at the edge of the forest where they catch the light and luckily they have survived beyond the harvesting stage. I can never get an angle on the tree tops so have to be content to photograph a lot of bark and scrappy branches. But from the distance I can sometimes see the sun setting through the thinner trees......all the way through the seasons......