Silver & Gold

ONE ICY MORNING as the light crept over the edge of my day, I stepped out into the frosted world and found there on the cold ground a lost wing of summer, its flutter of gold now flightless and fallen, as the crisp stilling of silver winter rose up. 

Everywhere a quiet alchemy was taking place. The cold gate latch ice-clanged. Frost and rust: strange playmates.

Here I stood, on this late November day, as the Earth's Wild Jeweller threaded her silver through the rich golds of autumn.

Birch trees edged with peeling paperbark were amber-lit by the first light against blue moonstone-cold fields; autumn's late-clinging leaves shone golden in the silver morning.

Old bracken and new ivy, brown and green, were adorned by the twin lustre of those two precious metals of fable and proverb, found in Long John, in apple, in moonlight, in heart, in pirate's swag and tax collector's booty. The Earth's Wild Jeweller had cast a metallurgist's spell to enchant any lost or jaded treasure-hunter.

I stalked the paths of this 24 carat world, the treasure chest of my heart full up with iridescent awe, and ringing in a momentary gladness.

As the light found its way over ice-stilled leaves and grass blades caught in the electrolysis of winter...

Fallen acorns and upturned mushrooms and leaf skeletons grew tiny, quiet crystals of the rarest value...

And all the while, in this shining hush, not one of the world's appraising marketeers could fathom or match the value of this, my silver and gold.

The Battle Between Frost and Light

IN THE MORNING of winter shadow, 

a night time of ice quills quiver in shrouded anticipation 

of the bright armies of day to come rushing round the edges of things with their spears of sunlight into the battle. 

The gathered halberdiers of winter cast long needle-shadows across the green ice with their weapons,

and the lichen-frosts whisper the crystalline secrets of this very new day. 

Each crack and trill of the waking world asks:

Who will win the battle?

At this cold cusp of a certain point of early,

the blades of frost and light clash and shatter my vision into a million pieces of beautiful.

October's Microcosmic Circus

THESE EARLY OCTOBER MORNINGS astound me. Some kind of immense absent-minded god walks the common before anyone is awake and forgets a crystalline miasma all over the undergrowth, as if divine crumbs have slipped through loose stitches in his angelic satchel, and the god walks on unaware.
When the sun comes, these unearthly spilt treasures are ignited into brilliance.


A low mist hangs above our morning, wet and sunlit, the day is possible and just born.
I stand at some centrepoint where my spokes are made of dew & sunlight & cobweb & mist & grass & morning, but where the wheel I feel turning is an incomprehensible and devastating beauty refracted by these things straight into my heart.



A subatomic trapeze act is taking place. Gorse is wonder-stitched with high-wires on which to balance our wishes for the day. Teetering in the dazzling light, our hopes balance on spider-strings, and the white light of love is split seven-ways: a spectrum opened out onto the morning sky, to see what there is to see, and to meet the spectre of this apparent god face to face, to shake his hand, and to thank him for the hole in his satchel, through which spilled humble bedazzlement, and a promise of is-ness.



Everywhere is netted in cobweb.



Is this the Wyrd made visible? It is so beautiful. Autumn thorns are cocooned and sewn. This is a love-letter to us all written in the pearlescent ink of Monday-morning spidersilk. Every flourish of the evanescent handwriting is dew-dotted; the world is scattered, like by tears-after-crying waiting on eyelashes.



I kneel down and peer at these tiny orbs of water. Wet-kneed, I see this world again, but tiny, upside-down, and clear, washed new for this day. Who scattered these microcosmic scrying balls amongst the grass for me today?



And they ring, oh they ring! Bells they are: the bells of my wild church.

Here, the most beautiful sight in all the world, this moment ... divinity, this: Dew caught by a dandelion. Time suspended sacred in jewels of water.



And then I come across the artist of the morning. Giving birth before my eyes to lute strings for October's psalm. Little weaver, stringing her fine story into this day...




... This bright, clear, dew-ringing, spider-stringing, heart-singing day.