Paying attention

One of the blogs I follow is called ‘a small stone’ (http://www.asmallstone.com/ ). In it the writer records one tiny observation for each day ‘like a stone picked up on a long walk and carried home in your pocket’. What a lovely idea.

    She says that she uses the blog to help her pay attention and she hopes it will do the same for us, the readers of her blog.

    Indeed it does.

    I made two observations this morning.

Ellie and I were walking through a wood when a herd of Guernsey cows and calves thundered past at speed on a narrow track, led by one quad bike and followed by another. We were both fascinated.

As we drove home, a lorry came in the opposite direction. On the passenger seat, next to the male driver, was a life-size cut-out of a blonde bimbo dressed in shocking pink.

    Roselle, in her blog ‘Qualia and other wildlife’ (www.roselle-angwin.blogspot.com ), points out that ‘things are things-in-themselves and can also be signposts to other more subtle realities’. In other words, we see what we need to see. Like dreams, the things we notice are actually glimpses into what is happening in our subconscious, glimpses of what is in the process of emerging from the compost heap of the subconscious and becoming conscious. They are omens.

    Recording observations, like recording dreams, like any writing in fact, makes the subtle concrete. It clears blockages in the subconscious/conscious interface and moves along the psychic processes. That’s why we do it, I suppose.

   Goodness knows though, on the evidence of the above, where my processes are heading.

Wildflowers

I’ve at last discovered how to take close-up pictures with my camera, or rather I’ve discovered that there is a special setting for close-ups, so can share another of my passions with you. My camera was thrown out by my brother because it had stopped working but retrieved and made to work again by Frog. Unfortunately, we didn’t have an instruction book and, because I’d never had a digital camera before, I had no idea what the camera could do. Frog has now printed out some instructions for me from the internet.

    I hated biology at my secondary school. The teacher was cruel to us, there were cages of locusts in the lab – climbing all over the glass making scratchy noises - and we had to do horrible things like cutting up dead frogs. One project however, keeping a wildflower diary, enthused me. What’s more, the mother of a friend in the village who was in my class at school, was a wildflower expert.

    Miranda’s mother took us all over the North Downs, where we lived, helping us identify plants and taking us to the secret places where the rare plants like orchids grew. The North Downs are particularly rich in wildflowers because the thin chalky soil is not much good for farming so the hills are left – as beechwood and as closely cropped sheep pasture. Sometimes I headed out alone, coming back with armfuls of wildflowers to press or draw. (I would NEVER pick a wildflower today.*)

    Then, in the summer, I went with my family on holiday to the Norfolk Broads and was able to take a canoe on my own up hidden creeks and discover a whole new world of wildflowers. I felt like an Amazon explorer, imagining that I was seeing things that no other human had seen, going to places untouched by human hand and identifying plants for the very first time.

    The next year they awarded two special prizes at the school – for wildflower diaries. Miranda got first prize and I got second. Exactly as it should have been (although I was pretty peeved at the time).

    The M25 goes through the North Downs now and wildflowers are endangered all over, with some already extinct (I think).** I find this frightening.

    In Devon however we are lucky enough still to have some room for wildflowers, and here are some of them, photographed over the last few days around where I live and by the sea twenty or so miles away. (As you will see, I still have a lot to learn about the best way to capture them on camera.)



Lady's bedstraw. This sweet-smelling plant was used to stuff mattresses.




St John's wort, still used to treat depression.
Any plant with 'wort' in its name - and there are many - was once used medicinally.

We used to call this 'eggs and bacon' in Kent because of the brown markings (bacon) on the yellow petals (eggs). In Kent, with the dry climate and nibbling sheep, it grows about a tenth of the size it does here in lush Devon. Its official name is 'birdsfoot trefoil'. 'Birdsfoot' because its pods splay out like birds' feet and 'trefoil' because it has three-lobed leaves like clover, to which it is related.

This spooky plant was growing in deep shade. I think it's a broomrape, rare parasitic plants, possibly 'red broomrape' which, according to my beloved Oxford Book of Wildflowers (given to me by my parents on my eleventh birthday), grows by the sea in the south, (parasitic) on wild thyme - which is an example of how specific are the needs of some plants.

This tall, triffid-like plant has the splendid name 'hemp agrimony'. My book says it likes damp woods, marshes and riversides but I've only ever seen it by the sea, in Devon and Brittany. Another of my books says that recent research has shown that it might be useful in the treatment of cancer and AIDS.

The lovely star-like lesser stitchwort.
Apparently it used to be chewed to relieve muscular pain and 'stitches'.
Alternatively you could stew it in wine and powdered acorns (yummy).
In Devon they used to say that if you pick stitchwort you risk being led astray by pixies.


Must stop now and go and plant out my leeks and parsnips. And no I don't weed unless I really have to (and then usually only bindweed and couch grass, and I do apologise to the plant and explain what I'm doing before I start).

*Since writing this, I’ve done some research. It is actually illegal to uproot any wild plant without the landowner’s permission, or to pick, uproot or destroy any of the plants on the endangered list.

** One in five native plants (about 345 out of 1,756 in 2008) is either ‘critically endangered’, ‘endangered’ or ‘vulnerable to extinction’ according to internationally recognised criteria.

Picture-fest

A Frog masterpiece.
Yes, I know, it's got meat and cheese on it and I'm supposed to be a vegan
- but I'm a very bad vegan, I hate labels, and if food is cooked for me I make an exception.



A particularly beautiful musk mallow - dark pink rather than light pink.



Meadowsweet and weeping willow.
Meadowsweet can smell rather sickly but at the moment it smells of vanilla-honey.
(How do you describe smells?)




This old bath was full of tadpoles a few weeks ago.
Unfortunately I couldn't check what happened to them because cows, calves and a bull took up residence in the field.
I hope they didn't drink them. (I mean, I hope the cattle didn't drink the tadpoles, not the other way round.)



Still crazy after all these years*

I follow four blogs at the moment (details in my profile) and each of them teaches me something different – about how to be and about how to write. ‘Reading the Signs’ (http://www.readingthesigns.blogspot.com/ ) is my most recent discovery. The writer suffers from ME and the blog is an extraordinarily honest account of her pain.

    I wasn’t brought up to feel pain. I was brought up to ‘get on with things’, to ‘stop making a fuss’ and to smile. The trouble is though, if you stop feeling pain, you stop feeling anything. And, for someone who wants to write - or live, that is poison.

    My pain is my numbness. Every three weeks I have a migraine and that, I believe, is my accumulated psychic pain looking for a way out.

    There, I’ve said it. I’ve admitted to feeling pain. And you’re the first to hear it.

    Aaagghh.

*This is a Paul Simon song title. I hope he doesn't mind me using it.

Leys

I love wacky ideas: the gods were visitors from another planet; the Earth is controlled by reptiles who feed on our fear; the pyramids, Avebury and Stonehenge were built by Atlantean refugees. I hate to think that we have the world sewn up. Does it matter if ideas are true or not? Actually, I don’t know what true means. To my mind, if something works or makes me feel better then it’s true. Truth isn’t fixed. All you can say is – this is true, for me, at this moment. To say more is to head towards the realms of arrogance and bigotry.

    All of which is a preamble for talking about leys.

    It was Alfred Watkins, in his classic 1921 book The Old Straight Track, who first pointed out that prehistoric and natural features seem to be arranged in straight lines. He thought that these lines might be ancient paths or direction-finding devices and called them leys (pronounced ‘lays’) after the place-name element (also spelt lay, lee, lea or leigh) which has never been properly explained. Conventional archaeology scoffs at his ideas but computer analysis has discovered that ancient sites in the UK are in fact aligned much more often than chance alone would allow.   

    A more recent idea about leys, first suggested by John Michell in his 1969 book The View over Atlantis, is that they are ‘energy’ lines, part of a worldwide system perhaps inherited from Atlantis. In acupuncture, energy is believed to circulate around the human body along ‘meridians’. Leys are the meridians of our planet. Prehistoric people put their stones and so on along these lines to enhance both the energy of the Earth and their own when worshipping at their sites (or whatever they did at them).

    If you want to check leys out on maps for yourself you can include long-standing crossroads and churches or other historic buildings (often built on older sites), ancient tracks and ponds (possibly dug by prehistoric people to enhance leys) as well as obvious prehistoric features such as standing stones and barrows. When out walking in the countryside look also for sudden vistas, markstones hidden in undergrowth, or hills with notches in them. 

    The beautiful Scots pine is native to Scotland but you can see clumps on the tops of hills all over the UK. Watkins suggested that these trees (or rather their ancestors) were deliberately planted by prehistoric people to mark leys.

    On one of my walks I pass a Scots pine and on a hill in the distance is another. It wasn’t until this winter, however, with the ground icy-hard, that I ventured into the middle of the neighbouring field and was able to align the two trees and stand in the line myself. I looked behind me and there was the ancient farmhouse of some neighbours, directly in line with the two trees. A thrill went through me. And it still does, every time I stand in that line.

    Earth energy, imagination or just a lovely view?

    Who cares.

I took the above photograph when I was up there this morning. The second pine is on top of the conical hill in the distance just to the right of the first. (You can't see it in the picture, but you can when you're there.)