Fenland Musings: When Great Trees Fall
Grief. Silence. Movement.
When Great Trees Fall - Maya Angelou When great trees fall, rocks on distant hills shudder, lions hunker down in tall grasses, and even elephants lumber after safety. When great trees fall in forests, small things recoil into silence, their senses eroded beyond fear. When great souls die, the air around us becomes light, rare, sterile. We breathe, briefly. Our eyes, briefly, see with a hurtful clarity. Our memory, suddenly sharpened, examines, gnaws on kind words unsaid, promised walks never taken. Great souls die and our reality, bound to them, takes leave of us. Our souls, dependent upon their nurture, now shrink, wizened. Our minds, formed and informed by their radiance, fall away. We are not so much maddened as reduced to the unutterable ignorance of dark, cold caves. And when great souls die, after a period peace blooms, slowly and always irregularly. Spaces fill with a kind of soothing electric vibration. Our senses, restored, never to be the same, whisper to us. They existed. They existed. We can be. Be and be better. For they existed.
Good day, good day, good day. It is a frosty one here on the edge of the Fens.
And I am feeling wayward.
Unfocused.
Discombobulated.
And a little lost, to be honest.
This time last month I shared a poem by Michael Kleber-Diggs, The Grove, and this month I share the news that the guardian tree in my life’s grove has fallen.
I am noticing that a large part of me is recoiling into silence.
The air in my little office as I type up these musings, is both sterile, and misty with incense, incense which is described on the box as “Powdery crisp patchouli with earthy vetiver and green and mossy oak”.
A cold breeze saunters in through the open window and nibbles at my neck.
And I wonder what I should share with you dear folks.
Around this time last week I was about to stand up in front of a room full of friends and family, some I’d not seen for nearly 30 years, to say some words of remembrance for my beloved father.
He was a gentle, kind and generous man. Someone who was utterly at one with nature.
A man who kept bees.
Fed the birds and the hedgehogs.
And who was astonished at a bright blue sky at dawn.
I loved him dearly and I miss him already.
Martín Prechtel, in his book The Smell of Dust on Rain, said:
Grief is what living beings experience when what or whom we love dies or disappears.
Now that is a simple truth, simply expressed.
And grief, I am learning, is a great force.
It is tidal in nature.
Unpredictable.
It will shift our inner cosmology, just like a big spring tide will move the shingle around at will.
Curiously though, like those pebbles rolled around on the shore, I feel like I will somehow be re-constellated from the parts I was before grief made it’s unexpected visit. I expect I’ll be, to mangle a line from Kleber-Diggs’ poem, the same, the same, yet different.
Grief moves us into a different time, and place.
A place where the past, and the future, fold in on themselves to create a more weighted, luminous, agitated present. A present that seems to move in the blink of eye, 40 years into the past, and not a moment later to a future where “promised walks never taken” remind us of the fragility of time.
As Prechtel says though:
Grief is movement not stagnation; real grieving never wallows.
So whilst I feel the weight of my dad’s passing, I am determined not to wallow, and to hold onto the ancient wisdom that this chapter of my life will be an important teacher, possibly in some unexpected ways. It certainly has some initiatory qualities about it.
Liminal. Marginal. Unknowing.
Whilst he wouldn’t be my ‘go-to’ psychologist of choice, Sigmund Freud said something like,
‘The death of a father is the most significant event in a man’s life’.
That’s quite a statement, but I do feel different.
I feel like my grove is missing an irreplaceable friend and guardian.
And as I look at my own kids, the saplings growing faster with each season, I realise that I am now the protective guardian tree of my own little grove.
And for that I am grateful.
I’m going to close by reading the poem I read at the end of my dad’s funeral.
Much love to you.
Will
Am I Not Among The Early Risers - Mary Oliver Am I not among the early risers and the long-distance walkers? Have I not stood, amazed, as I consider the perfection of the morning star above the peaks of the houses, and the crowns of the trees blue in the first light? Do I not see how the trees tremble, as though sheets of water flowed over them though it is only wind, that common thing, free to everyone, and everything? Have I not thought, for years, what it would be worthy to do, and then gone off, barefoot and with a silver pail, to gather blueberries, thus coming, as I think, upon a right answer? What will ambition do for me that the fox, appearing suddenly at the top of the field, her eyes sharp and confident as she stared into mine, has not already done? What countries, what visitations, what pomp would satisfy me as thoroughly as Blackwater Woods on a sun-filled morning, or, equally, in the rain? Here is an amazement–––once I was twenty years old and in every motion of my body there was a delicious ease, and in every motion of the green earth there was a hint of paradise, and now I am sixty years old, and it is the same. Above the modest house and the palace–––the same darkness. Above the evil man and the just, the same stars. Above the child who will recover and the child who will not recover, the same energies roll forward, from one tragedy to the next and from one foolishness to the next. I bow down. Have I not loved as though the beloved could vanish at any moment, or become preoccupied, or whisper a name other than mine in the stretched curvatures of lust, or over the dinner table? Have I ever taken good fortune for granted? Have I not, every spring, befriended the swarm that pours forth? Have I not summoned the honey-man to come, to hurry, to bring with him the white and comfortable hive? And, while I waited, have I not leaned close, to see everything? Have I not been stung as I watched their milling and gleaming, and stung hard? Have I not been ready always at the iron door, not knowing to what country it opens—to death or to more life? Have I ever said that the day was too hot or too cold or the night too long and as black as oil anyway, or the morning, washed blue and emptied entirely of the second-rate, less than happiness as I stepped down from the porch and set out along the green paths of the world?
1. Listening: to Sandy Denny - Who Knows Where The Time Goes?
Driving home last week from my dad’s funeral I created a playlist of songs to keep me and my daughter company, all based around one of my Dad’s favourite bands, Pentangle, and three tracks in Sandy Denny’s mystical vocals kicked in and with tears streaming down my face, I almost had to pull the car over!
2. Reading - Archipelago, Clutag Press
If you like small presses. If you like prose and poetry and memoire, largely focused on the theme of “the margins and the marginal, in nature and place, in the British and Irish Archipelago.” the next edition of the wonderful Archipelago is open for pre-orders now. Follow this link:
3. Firelore - Laura Cannell
Out today! Laura Cannell’s latest EP.
Listen HERE
Firelore draws on stories around fire, of blacksmiths, fire thieves and fiery spirits improvised on improvised Church Organ. "Music for our time" The Wire Magazine.
4. Poetry - Autumn Richardson
Do check out this stunning poem from Autumn Richardson, in the latest edition of Montreal based online poetry quarterly, Columba.
Find it HERE!
Grow Your Courage
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Will, I am so sorry to hear of your father's death. Sending much love. I hear you in your grief - thank you for bringing it to this space 🖤
This morning I finished reading "Die Wise" and was deeply struck by these words:
"Grief is a way of loving. Love is a way of grieving. They need each other, in order to be themselves."
I am feeling all of that here - you honour your dad so heart-fully.
Oh Will. Big hugs to you and yours. There are no words yet into poetry the green path of loss leads. The honey-man. Where has the time gone? It does stand still like that wind that we feel before we often see it. It gales on through. Like a poem, we are not of language. We enter into it. We are in this world. Yet we are not of it. In the failure of language lives the birth of poetry. In our grief lives love. Words can never ever heal. Yet despite their use, as Domanski writes, something is carried along with them that does. When we are lost stand still. The forest knows where you are. You must let it find you. Keep writing. We need you 🙏❤️