The Earth Laughs in Flowers

The Earth laughs in flowers. ~Ralph Waldo Emerson~

Margaret Fuller: The Prose of Life

I fear I have not one good word to say this fair morning, though the sun shines so encouragingly on the distant hills and gentle river and the trees are in their festive hues. I am not festive, though contented. When obliged to give myself to the prose of life, as I am on this occasion of being established in a new home I like to do the thing, wholly and quite, - to weave my web for the day solely from the grey yarn. ~Margaret Fuller~

Meditations of John Muir

“This grand show is eternal. It is always sunrise somewhere; the dew is never dried all at once; a shower is forever falling; vapor is ever rising. Eternal sunrise, eternal dawn and gloaming, on sea and continents and islands, each in its turn, as the round earth rolls.”  ~John Muir~

Osho on Nature

Look at the trees, look at the birds, look at the clouds, look at the stars... and if you have eyes you will be able to see that the whole existence is joyful. Everything is simply happy. Trees are happy for no reason; they are not going to become prime ministers or presidents and they are not going to become rich and they will never have any bank balance. Look at the flowers — for no reason. It is simply unbelievable how happy flowers are.  ~Osho~

Rachel Carson: The Sense of Wonder

“Why should we tolerate a diet of weak poisons, a home in insipid surroundings, a circle of acquaintances who are not quite our enemies, the noise of motors with just enough relief to prevent insanity? Who would want to live in a world which is just not quite fatal?” 

~ Silent Spring

“A child’s world is fresh and new and beautiful, full or wonder and excitement. It is our misfortune that for most of us that clear-eyed vision, that true instinct for what is beautiful and awe-inspiring, is dimmed and even lost before we reach adulthood. If I had influence with the good fairy who is supposed to preside over the christening of all children, I should ask that her gift to each child in the world be a sense of wonder so indestructible that it would last throughout life, as an unfailing antidote against the boredom and disenchantment of later year…the alienation from the sources of our strength.” 

~ The Sense of Wonder

“To stand at the edge of the sea, to sense the ebb and flow of the tides, to feel the breath of a mist moving over a great salt marsh, to watch the flight of shore birds that have swept up and down the surf lines of the continents for untold thousands of years, to see the running of the old eels and the young shad to the sea, is to have knowledge of things that are as nearly eternal as any earthly life can be.” 

~ The Sea Around Us

Thoreau, from Walden: Or, Life in the Woods

“We need the tonic of wildness...At the same time that we are earnest to explore and learn all things, we require that all things be mysterious and unexplorable, that land and sea be indefinitely wild, unsurveyed and unfathomed by us because unfathomable. We can never have enough of nature.”

 

~ Henry David Thoreau, from Walden: Or, Life in the Woods~

Donovan: The Song of Wandering Aengus (1971)

Haunting music to the poetry of W. B. Yeats

I wish out to the hazel wood
Because a fire was in my head
And I cut and peeled a hazel wand
And hooked a berry with a thread

And when white moths were on the wing
And moth-like stars were flickering out
I dropped a berry in a stream
And caught a little silver trout.

When I had laid it on the floor
I went to blow the fire aflame
But something rustled on the door
And someone called me by my name.

It had become a glimmering girl
With apple blossoms in her hair
Who called me by my name and ran
And faded through the brightening air.

Though I am old with wandering
Through hollow lands and hilly lands
I will find out where she has gone
And kiss her lips and take her hands

And walk among long dappled grass
And pluck till time and times are done
The silver apples of the moon,
The golden apples of the sun.

I have only started reading Rob Young’s Electric Eden: A History of Britain’s Visionary Music (for my purposes read: acid folk), but Donovan gets an early mention which alludes to the milieu in which he wrote this otherworldly and inspired music, quoted below.

Donovan’s success after the Dylan- influenced singles such as ‘Catch The Wind’, ‘Colours’, and ‘Universal Soldier’ was in part due to some steerage by his new producer/ svengali Mickie Most, who had urged the young artist to trick out his acoustic folkiness with generous helpings from the new palette of psychedelic colours creeping into pop production in the wake of such records as The Beatles’ Revolver and The Kinks Face To Face. In 1965 he was still immersed in the Woody Guthrie/ Dylan knock- off protest folk of his first LP What’s Bin Did and What’s Bin Did, while on his second, Fairytale, he began to inch towards a more bucolic mode.

… From a landowner named Donald MacDonald, he had just purchased three remote Scottish islands; Islay, Mingay, and Clett, near Skye’s north- west Vaternish peninsula, where he and his friend/ ‘manager’ Gypsy Dave intended to set up a ‘Renaissance community’ of artists, musicians, and poets in a row of tumbledown shepherds’ cottages.

[and of his consequent dreamy musical projects]… These benignly stoned odes fondly and naively imagined a long- lost, bucolic Avalon where like minds of a forever young Flower Generation might gather in peace, singing, dancing, smoking, making love and contemplating the universe in a guilt- free environment.

[after collaboration with the Beatles and Maharishi Yogi in India]… He flew back high as a magic carpet with a pipe- load of Eastern mysticism, and a newly piqued interest in Celtic medievalism and Victoriana, manifested in songs such as ‘Guinevere’, ‘Legend of a Child Girl Linda’, and ‘Season of the Witch’… now with his purchase of a far away island kingdom, Donovan was planning to use his status as a counter- cultural guru to convert the pipedream into a living experiment.

This then was the artist who brought his own stab at Wonderland, the pied piper whose master plan was to sail off to his private fiefdom singing Lewis Carroll’s line ‘Won’t You Join The Dancer?’ and who put up the money for potential acolytes like Vashti Bunyan and Robert Lewis to make the pilgrimage.

The Song of Wandering Aengus appeared on the album H.M.S Donovan, the second album of Donovan's children's music, and was recorded between 1968- 1971.

From Prince Caspian

Lucy’s eyes began to grow accustomed to the light, and she saw the trees that were nearest her more distinctly. A great longing for the days when the trees could talk in Narnia came over her. She knew exactly how each of these trees would talk if only she could wake them, and what sort of human form it would put on. She looked at a silver birch: it would have a soft, showery voice and would look like a slender girl, with hair blown all about her face, and fond of dancing. She looked at the oak: he would be a wizened, but hearty old man with a frizzled beard and warts on his face and hands, and hair growing out of the warts. She looked at the beech under which she was standing. Ah!- she would be the best of all. She would be a gracious goddess, smooth and stately, the lady of the wood.

C.S. Lewis, Prince Caspian.

Tree Lore

"You should see them at the full moon", says the deer park keeper, "The trees look at you in an odd way".

--- Thomas Packenham, Meetings with Remarkable Trees.

There was nothing to alarm him at first entry. Twigs crackled under his feet, logs tripped him, funguses on trunks resembles caricatures, and startled him for the moment by their likeness to something familiar and far away; but it was all fun, and exciting. It led him on, and he penetrated to where the light was less, and trees crouched nearer and nearer, and holes made ugly mouths at him on either side. Everything was very still now. The dusk advanced on him steadily, rapidly, gathering in behind and before; and the light seemed to be drawing away like floodwater.

--- Kenneth Grahame, The Wind In The Willows.

 

Holloway

Although I had heard of this creative effort by Robert Macfarlane, Stanley Donwood & Dan Richards before, it took a chance encounter with it at the Quaker Meeting House in London to compel me to buy it. Sitting down to a coffee (which is quite reasonable, and in spacious and agreeable surroundings, surrounded by quiet souls and the wisdom of the shelves of contemplative books), the slender volume had an instant tactile and visual appeal, especially on account of the dark artwork of Stanley Donwood. Contrary to what you might think (it being London), the book is not about the district of Holloway, but instead the ancient hedgerowed tracks- a hollow way, a sunken path. A route that centuries of foot- fall, hoof hit, wheel- roll & rain run have harrowed deep into bedrock. Of course such tracks are not much use to the tarmac generation, but that adds to their overgrown appeal. Out of character, and charmed by the endeavour, I paid full price for the book with some satisfaction, rather than trying to hawk it second hand.

Late that night, we cycled back up to the holloway in fierce silver rain, skidding on wet mud, raindrops showing in our headlamp beams & the eye- glow of unknown animals glinting in the hedgerows.

The eyes of creatures shine in low light because of the presence of the tapetum lucidium, the bright carpet, a mirror- like membrane of iridescent cells that sits behind the retina. Light passes first through the rod and cone cells then strikes the membrane & rebounds back through the retina towards the light source. Any available light is used twice to see with; perception is thereby doubled.

So heavy was the rain and so thick the blackness of the night, that we soon became separated, each invisible to the other & yet when we later spoke, each of us had the experience of being pursued by another who was not of our group- someone holding a bright light and following in our tracks.

We slept that night down in the depths of the Holloway. In the darkest hours of the night a rain storm came, the water falling so hard it left drill- holes in the leaf litter. Walking at dawn I found that I had left my copy of Edward Thomas’s poems unsheltered. The rain had plumped it and driven gobbets of earth & shards of leaf in between the pages.

The path, winding like silver, trickles on,
Bordered and even invaded by thinnest moss
… and the eye
Has but the road, the wood that overhangs
And underyawns it, and the path that looks
As if it led on to some legendary
Or fancied place where men have wished to go
And stay; till, sudden, it ends where the wood ends.

Ralph Maddern: Ogwen Falls

A few steps from the stile opposite Ogwen Falls is a world remote from the vehicle- bound one. Savour the design! A prehistoric convulsion [that] built cliff faces and ramparts from where, on a windless day, the lake may be observed playing with an image of Tryfan. Catching Ogwen’s mood is like grasping a fleeting dream. She will allow a devotee but a brief indulgence. One of her favourite caprices is concealment beneath a cloak of mist through which she might reveal a mere glimpse of her western lips and white pearls cascading down her slender neck. Beyond the lower cliffs one must reconcile to loss of intimacy: up ahead is a steep south- facing bank.

Ralph Maddern, from Walk Snowdonia Peaks.