Earth Pathways Showcase

By sunset the snowfall had smoothed out the meadow and in the strange lucid twilight I quickly found the fire basket. Once it was free of snow, and the fire laid, the paper and kindling caught quickly and brightly, flickering sudden orange shadows leaping across the snowy drifts piled up around the hedges. I watch as slowly the logs catch, smouldering then glowing through. The small vigorous fire flickering burnished light across the frozen swathes of firm ice-crusted snow. The hard granular surface of the snow, the result of a single sudden February snowstorm followed by daytime thawing and clear night-time freezing, looks like sand; light, crisp, cold, fragile sand. As the evening progresses we feed the fire with dry logs, which begins to melt the snow beneath the fire basket in a blackened oval-shape. The full moon rises above the rooftops and the snowdrifts beyond the fire’s orange-light circle are cast in aquamarine moonlight reflections, catching crystalline ice-sparkles in sharp blueness. The full moon night is twinkling clear cold, colder than it’s been all winter and brighter than it’s been all month, glowing in harmony with our Imbolc fire.

Snow Moon Fire © Jean Dark 2015

Tranquility at Dusk
Late low sun breaking cover
Sets serenity
On a rain-ridden day

Haiku © Jean Dark 2014

The sun has slipped below the horizon, the end of a gardening day. I straighten my back and brush soil from my hands. Distant mature ashes and limes are printed inky black against a last glow of daylight as it dips into ochre dusk. A damp coolness rises up from the earth. A blackbird calls out his nightly watch and I stack my gardening tools away for the night.

Shadows thicken as I put the kettle on to boil and I gaze deep into the growing twilight of the garden, until the gloom seems to ebb and flow with crepusculous speckles that I can barely sense, between the bat that flickers around my periphery vision, and the still silhouette of my cat on a garden wall.

In the settled pause of twilit teatime, I make my brew and wait, watching the garden unfurl in the gloaming, exhaling, filling it's own space, and spreading out in the dusk.

Nightfall © Jean Dark 2014

My face is tingling in the dark, burning in the glow of the campfire. Everybody is gathering beside the fire, with chairs or on blankets. We draw in close, into a warm unbroken circle. Faces catch shadows in the firelight; some gaze into the fire; joyful voices ring close in the air.

Updraughts whip the fire's flames into glittering orange cinders that spiral out into the deep night air; our wishes and dreams and petitions waft up in sparkling clouds, fading off in the height of the near-dark sky.

The night stays in my memory; I remember the misty rain that sprinkled around us. My head and back, places untouched by the drying fire's heat, are drenched in the light summer-rain. Around me sit friends, with drums and guitars, flutes and voice. People dance a circle dance, close to the fire, edging and following the glowing circle of firelight. Somebody close by is playing a Hurdy Gurdy; Its steady rhythmic drones build a deep, earthy resonance around which percussion, pipes and chants weave, flow, wax and wane. We are a circle within a circle with no beginning and never-ending; the chant hangs, spinning gently in my memory.

The memory now is so faded that I don't recall who I was with, who sat beside me, who opposite. Mainly I remember the roaring fire, music, dancing, chanting, the heat and the rain. That we were there together, celebrating harvest in the ancient act of community. We are the old people, we are the new people, we are the same people, stronger than before.

Rainy Hearthfire © Jean Dark 2013

In early autumn my brother visited from New Zealand, and we spent much of our time together in long walks. Through the childhood haunts of our home-town we tramped, we rambled through woods, by streams, in alleyways and snickleways, we roamed along stretches of Estuary salt-marshes. But in particular we visited Wandlebury Iron Age hill fort on the Gog Magog down – a range of low hills just outside Cambridge.

And in the way we always had when out walking together, my brother and I picked up and admired souvenirs, woodland spoils, trinkets from along the path. As a parting gift, just before he boarded the plane, my brother handed me his nature hoard – a handful of brown dried fruits and a fine collection of deadwood sticks.

In my old gnarled bur-cherrywood bowl I see a conker, a hazelnut, some beechnut shells and half-a-dozen acorns. Their shells all shapes and sizes, colours from yellow and green through deep rusted-iron to dark burnished brown. Some of the acorns are fixed in their cups, some cut adrift and rolling. I think I might plant these acorns gathered from Gog Magog Down and see if they grow into oaks.

Acorns Gathered from Gog Magog Down © Jean Dark 2013