Bricolage Gardening

Fearn

Full Moon 23rd February

A Moon in new surroundings – small is beautiful – egret empire

At this stage in my journey through the Celtic tree calendar, I feel myself getting tangled in a confusion of moon cycles, a house being engulfed by ivy, making it harder and harder to see clearly out the windows. I began this venture back in September with an exploration of hazel, it was only a few days until the full moon, and my musing went well into the next lunar cycle. My initial plan was to create a piece of writing on my meditations with a specific native tree that the Celts had considered sacred, leading up to each of the full moons, of which there are thirteen (before beginning again). The order in which I planned to go through the trees promptly changed, as I learnt that the tree calendar was often interpreted to follow the Gregorian year (January 1st to December 31st) rather than the Celtic year (November 1st – October 31st). 

Full moon and Mendip mists. Dusk skies of birds migrating with a deep knowing.

Switching to the Celtic year meant changing which tree I would focus on for each of the lunar cycles, and so rather than going from Vine/Bramble (Muin) to Ivy (Gort) I went to Elder (Ruis). Are you still with me?  This was largely due to my purchase of a book by Sharlyn Hidalgo on the Celtic tree Calendar who had decided to use the Celtic calendar. I spoke in my piece on birch (beith) about Samhain marking the new year and thus birch representing the tree of a new lunar calendar, with the tree symbolising the period of rebirth and letting go of old. 

Clouds that cling close to mountains green

My writings have often dragged on into the following lunar cycle, and by now in February, I am a full full moon behind, so have jumped ahead to Alder in an attempt to realign myself. Following the calendar can cause the moon to shine a different light, looking up at the night sky, the shimmering shape can often appear as a countdown timer to when my next writing piece is due. This was never the intention, I chose the moon as some structured guidance to integrate myself with the trees and landscape that surrounded me, not to become another chore of shoulds and musts. On the whole I feel like I’m not giving myself too much of a hard time as to whether or not I’m ‘on track’ and it has certainly initiated a conversation between myself and some trees I was less familiar with at the beginning of this pondering. 

Eyes front and back, one foot out the door, the other bouncing with impatience, barely an essence of presence. Here then gone like spider webs shimmering in the wind.

Alder is a tree that I have only become acquainted with since following the calendar. My rambling gaze had begun to seek it back in January, with no identification book with me, it was a process of elimination and some whispers of information that helped me identify a flurry of them, shadowing a stream alongside a familiar loop I walk from my home.

One afternoons walk had a lure of magic to it; in the previous field, a  buzzard, who’s call and flight have become my mindfulness reminder on walks, had taken off from the pasture, flying to a perch in the nearest tree, waiting to see if it had given enough distance to feel safe. As I continued along the footpath it decided it hadn’t and so set off again in flight that looked arduous and heavy, like the air was made of treacle, a far cry from their often effortless glide when hunting.

Buzzard be my guardian, high-on-sight i wish to find.

 deep glides of guidance you offer, reassurance from the hedgelines, 

Out of  the dream-world you snatch me, a cold war of mind and body. 

A peace treaty you deliver, in the camouflage of your plume, in your paraglide prose,

 sweet calls of medicine that sinks deep with resonance.

After dropping into the next field which showcases a meadow grassland, I’m met by another nature being, this time it is beady black eyes that transfix, poised on  back legs with a magnificent snow-drop white underbelly,  a stoat pauses  in a burrow at the roots of an oak tree. We each remain where we are, feet glued to the ground, wondering what the other is up to, I find the stoat to be surprisingly calm and perhaps too them of me. Eventually they disappear, kindly leaving behind a smile for me, returning home beneath an oak who’s buds hold invitations of spring. I’m swept over with a sense of awe, looking around I see a flurry of song buds softly migrate through a hazel corridor; that which has been laid by kind hands. A woodpecker nearby is considering relocating and the entire space around me seems to hum a fine tune. The magic in this slither of land is a beacon of hope, Nature is still here singing where space is offered, no matter how small. 

A haze of greys that glaze across my cage of ribs. Interpreted as sadness and labelled as wrong. But this beach is grey on a spectrum of whale to ageing hair. This beach has nothing wrong with it and I have nothing wrong with me. 

Try to let go of self punishment and forever waiting, waiting, waiting. But then, but when, but if… Stop! Hop off the linear lines and into the quantum soup, where everything is already. Where the crickets and frogs are bounding, no thickets of fog surrounding.

A little further on where the trees following the stream expand out into a narrow woodland thirty metres a breadth, I find what I believe to be alder. Tall straight pillars for trunks seem to emulate what good posture is and the squelching leaf litter below harbours clusters of small egg shaped cones. I’ve heard them to be water dwellers, and this place is just that, a stream with shallow banks has created a marshy bog with a carpet of creeping plants and a stand of alder with some hazel and oak on the peripheries where the ground begins to rise up into the neighbouring fields.

I enter the marsh and instantly disturb a selection of birds from the canopy of trees, a pigeon flies off emulating the sounds of a frantic fire bellow. One of the alders has a peculiar curved trunk right at their base, offering a chair and positioned over a natural pond. I precariously hop onto the trunk and balance myself against it, knowing that a slip would plunge me into the icy cold waters of winter. Once I’ve settled, the woods do too and the birds carry on with their doings, a family of long tailed tits systematically working their way through the wintered twigs. From the base of the pond bubbles rise to the surface, a gateway to the Otherworld? For now they are just a gentle reassurance of this world’s beauty and how we’re never too far away from that. 

Subjectivity is the objective. From it’s to yous and i’s.

Once Alder is on my radar, I notice just how prevalent it is in this landscape. The river chew that winds itself through the farmland is peppered with alder on its banks, far fewer than it would desire I’m sure, but a companion nonetheless. Two days before full moon the rain barely stops and most of the roads in the area are badly flooded. It is the fullest I have ever seen the river chew and in several areas the banks were elapsed, submerging the surrounding fields in standing water. 

Trainside tundra with a force of thunder, a deconstruction of destruction, weeds that remain and remind. Dragon light with purple clouds as scales that form ridges in the skies horizon

The river suffers from the farmland and roads that criss-cross the hills. Farmers plough within feet of its banks, leaving no place for trees to give shade in summer and to slow water and protect its bank from erosion in winter. As a result the river maintains a murky brown for most of year, void of the life that Wind In The Willows alludes to. I’m hopeful that in my lifetime this will change, summer days to swim in water clean and snooze in shade of native trees as the chew chatters on her way by. 

A stop with bees drinking from glistening streams. Unmissable scenes, shaded from ultraviolet beams. Draped blades of grass in river beds quiet, invitational caves, thickets of words, pictures that returned us to unclothed memories, bathing dusty skin that carried the weeks labour.