devil's club

This is the little patch of earth under two big maple trees that I am calling my garden. It doesn't look much like a garden now and I don't really mean for it ever to look like a garden. It's just an area that was overgrown and weedy, and now is open and clear.

This is a 'before' shot, when my garden was full of hollies and hawthornes and salmonberries and other aggressive and fiercely armed plants. To be fair, I like wild and weedy underbrush. I just thought it would be nice, under these particular trees, to create some space for new things to grow. And there really is something so lovely about a bare woodland carpet of composting leaves and needles. One just wants to lie down then and there, amongst the scuttling beetles and the smell of woolly earth and sleep deep and long.


I was able to escape the city today, and I feel so much better, infinitely better than I did yesterday. My mind has replaced the images of packed streets and garbage and cars and glassy buildings with whole, frank beauty.

I'm sitting outside right now in a silence speckled with bird calls. The blue of the evening sky looks much the same as this morning's blue, but the air smells of cooling grass and dews falling - so different from the rising scent of a new day.

I'm getting back the sense of direction and purpose that I've felt estranged from these last few weeks. Found some clarity today. Who knows why. After so many days of low-pressure, drooping grey skies, it was just a relief to get a day of sunshine. Ah, my fickle fair-weather heart.

I do my best under a ceiling of clouds, but I can't help but pine for the brilliance of the sun's unshrouded light. There is nothing, nothing like standing under a deciduous canopy and looking up into the diaphanous skin, veins and glowing chlorophyll of the new leaves, watching the shadows dance and change, all from a breeze so slight as to be undetected by the senses. Nothing illuminates the essence of things like the sun. Nothing lays everything so transparent and naked.

I needed that today - I've been feeling like a dense mass of confusion and conflict, and I needed a glimpse into the simple perfection of life, needed to feel my own transparency. It's amazing how mental and emotional states obscure reality. I'm just water and colourful cells busily working, with a mind whirring away, creating problems and fantasies, and a life source that connects and feeds me but is too mysterious to comprehend. Not quite so impenetrable and hopeless after all, if I can just try to keep tabs on that ol' devil of delusion.

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