Pixelated friendship

Sometimes, here in the middle of nowhere,  I get the most precious correspondence. Mostly from people I don't know and have never met in the real world.

There's a tribe of ripening women who consistently show up and dazzle me with their shining wisdom. They are photographers, practitioners and bloggers of all kinds; sky watchers and lovers of sunsets everywhere, in Australia, Brazil, Alaska and on Horsecroft Farm in merry old England; sensitive types who love birds, and lanes and dogs; writers, creatives and friends of Ireland; sassy beach walkers and mid-winter sea dippers..... 

And lonely people, bedridden, who remind me of my Dad's last years and send me warm email messages. And men too, with foreign sounding names and fabulous websites of their own. People with all sorts of deep knowledge and technical skills in their own fields, or who live in big cities and pine for hedgerows. 

Even real old friends, who played in the back gardens of Ireland and beyond, send hand written notes with warm memories or mail me snippets from their lives. 

So thank you ALL. (Even if you never did send any love letters and just visit here occasionally, consider yourself included) We may never have met in person but through some twinternet alchemy we are developing a new kind of pixelated friendship. 

Soon Foxglove Lane will be moving lock stock and barrel to a new website. I have yet to learn how to fully make the transition, but things are falling into place and while parts of my brain are now fried, a few of those pesky old brain cells are leaping for joy.

Here's to you, me and continuing pixelated friendship!



By the way there's an interview with me here by nature lover and blogging legend Donna Abel Donnabella. Hands across the Atlantic! 

Long before it happens

"The future enters into us....in order to transform itself in us.... long before it happens."

William Beveridge

Time is beginning to play tricks. It gallops along at a right old lick and then slows into stillness. I love the idea that the future enters into us, to transform us, long before it happens? It is a kind of explanation as to what I am feeling about the future and why.....

I have no New Year resolution or intention..... I only know that I want to go deeper into what matters with every day.  Like going into the forest again, that spooky old place, rustling and creaking. But then the light catches some small details and I get swept away, into the flow again.....

Afterwards the thinking part of my brain decides to build an entirely new website. I'm about to shift from Blogger to WordPress, start again from scratch, learn a lot more about how to do all this. I'm trying to visualise the world 5 years from now. I find it is almost impossible as everything changes so fast.....

Then I woke up and found that artist, genius and legend Bowie was gone. I find Lazarus (his current gift to us) very hard to watch. But I always loved this one from 2013, maybe before he knew how it would end? Full of emotion, sadness, nostalgia for Berlin, and of course the dead.....

An encounter with a dragon

I crashed into the week with news of an unexpected piece of work which was urgently required but at the very same time an old slain dragon (one I thought had long been put to bed) suddenly erupted into fiery form and whacked me over the head with it's tail!!!

In no time there I was in the eye of yet another storm, face to face with the protagonist. I talked to myself.......... stay calm, listen, hold the line, you know what's right here..........I then wedged myself between the dragon and the mouth of the cave...........he breathed heavily..........

I noticed there wasn't too much flame..........I saw a way through.

"I'm on my own here now but there are dozens more like me coming" I roared "they are on their way now, you'd better believe me!" This was the closest I have ever come to making any kind of threat.

I saw a moment where he looked tired, his life flashed before him, he was listening........he stumbled.......he began to consider an easier option.......I have seen this look before. It happens just before an agreement is clinched, before a compromise is reached, before a dragon backs down.........

But there is always one more sting in the tail and I waited and waited, while the dragon thrashed around in the cave.......then it came at last, a final snarl. I turned my head towards the light. In the distance I saw the sun coming up at the edge of the forest.........it's sunbeams highlighted my way through.............the bellowing would stop very soon if I could hold out......

Then it happened, he faltered, slouched and there was a huge rumble as he collapsed on the cave floor spent and old. Dust rose, cleared and then silence.

For now it was time to return home, job done.

This was no triumph. There would be no celebration. As I set out on the journey back my feet would barely lift from the ground. I could only smell the heat of the battle. My head hurt.

In the forest, the light grew and the green wood filled me with damp mossy thoughts. The beauty of the world. The goodness of people, the sweet smiles of my loved ones. And that soft light and squishy path lifted my spirits just enough to remember that I would never fully harden to the world in spite of it's darkness. And anyway, here I was on my way home.

An unlikely pair of romantics

The evening light is warm as toast casting long terracotta shadows on the woodland grasses.

The Robin is back! The bare branches allow me to follow him along the track.  But mostly he is following me, popping up ahead, appearing when least expected, and looking at me....I'm sure of it....

She is up ahead walking with her 5 dogs. Now in her late 70's she only goes to the top of the first hill and back, very slowly. She likes to stretch her legs in the evenings glow.

We talk about sheep, dogs, cats, rats. Rats are the big topic today, we both detest them. All my fear and darkness bubbles to the surface when I see one. It can ruin my day. I tell her how I was walking through the forest and one was sunning himself BRAZENLY outside his home. Although charming in a "country rat" kind of way, I couldn't pretend, he just made me shudder.....

You should have a dog she says, they can be great ratters......

She has no romance for this place. She saw too much misery in it. Until she married well enough to a small farmer she didn't have the luxury of a bathroom or a stove. This whole place was full of cottages and houses once, before the Famine times, the few local children now play in the ruins.

We layer year upon year. The past doesn't go away. We resurface it and call it a fresh start.

I'm a romantic I say to her. Look at me taking pictures of sun beams and raindrops.

She laughs. Well you might be, but I'm a doting old thing when it comes to dogs. I haven't an ounce of sense....I have them all spoiled.....

Today I have discovered that we are a pair of romantics and we have more in common than I once thought............isn't that always the way.......

Windswept, freckly and fairly wrinkly

While I am standing beneath this Sycamore, besotted with its golden glow, leaves are passing away in front of my eyes. A little death is taking place as each one turns, decays and falls. Autumn and it's peaceful slowing brings the inevitable truth to mind. 

The wrinkling up of my smily eyes like a crisping leaf, curling and fraying at the edge. The retreat to creative solitude as each hour of daylight becomes more precious. The overwhelming urge to dawdle and dander on my walks. While the Sycamore is going through a gradual decline with each season, I suppose in some ways so am I.

Without any sense of panic or great turbulence the natural world is going to sleep, is letting autumn happen. All the so called imperfections of these ageing leaves, dark spots, crow's feet, crumples, puckers, creases and fraying at the corners, once caught in the eye of my lens, are surprisingly beautiful!

I'm not there yet, still only dabbling, but when the time comes the best possible decline would have to be a similar windswept, freckly and fairly wrinkly one.  I doubt that this will never be written on the back of a jar of moisturiser............ 




This time last year I wrote a similar post called "To whom are we beautiful" inspired by the lines of David Ignatow

In the green backwoods

We listen for the sound of the soft turf giving way with each footstep. We watch every little rustle in the leafy undergrowth. The darkened tunnel becomes our adventure today and we are high on the danger of it.

The boys have to hide first and then we girls count to 100. That gives the boys time to conceal themselves throughout the forest. We girls then set out to find them knowing that at some point either we will sneak up on them or they will ambush us cleverly before we can......

The giddy excitement of the increasingly spooky and darkening thicket. The ripe blackberries that lurk in the briars to distract us from our task. The shadowy woven branches of Willows, Ash and Beech. The unbridled screams of the found girls and the inevitable row over who saw who first.....

These greenest of green backwoods have been home to my dreams as along as I can remember. Dreams of bigger experiences and journeys. Dreams of a better me in a better world. Dreams of freedom and safety. Scary dreams too of what might be hidden in the dark there.

Everytime I re-emerge into the light after walking in the backwoods, I feel I have lived that young girl's fears and longings all over again......

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......

When you can't see the wood for the trees, just listen to them instead

I wouldn't normally go into the woods to clear my head, I'd be more inclined to go to the coast or up to the hills, would you? But every time I pass this little wood it calls to me, and so today I finally went in there. Something about forests makes them a bit spooky and I found myself breathing hard and checking behind me every now and then! The forest is a place where you go deep. It's impossible to avoid fears and uncertainties, at least for me.

I was soon distracted by the presence of the larger and the more slender trees which seemed very sure footed somehow; still and sure. I tried to listen to them and they were a calming influence.

It's easy to go through life in the pursuit of colour and drama in the garden, the whirring and the whizzing of insects, the beauty and the grace of butterflies. But the still, green, silent ones are always standing strong and tall in the background, filtering the light yet allowing in just enough to nurture the forest floor. And sometimes it's ok to feel a bit lost, and to try to re-find the right path.......there's beauty there too....

"In the middle of the road of my life I awoke in a dark wood where the true way was wholly lost" -
Dante, Commedia