Letting In Spring
What You Say And How You Feel
Greetings my friends, from the deep hills of misty Canada. I’ve been up in the wilds in the kind of tent I lived in back in my youth. During the day I teach Parzival (over four days), at night I retreat up to my lair. Last night on the mulchy trail I saw something huge and un-named slip past me and into the trees. Turns out there’s bears in this forest.
To start us off – the best part of two hours of conversation with myself and the wonderful Paul Vander Klay. At a peak moment there was an abrupt power cut, so we continued several days later. Powercuts follow me around I’m afraid. But this was a great deal of fun and filled with sparks.
Letting in Spring
Another spring. Another influx of eruptive life that is so arresting in its beauty I have no choice but to shut a fair degree of it down. If I am thirsty don’t bring me the ocean, says Tomas Tranströmer, a drop will do. Driving home the other night I had no choice but to gape at the purpled sash of evening settling on the River Dart as every conceivable bud and blade seemed to reach towards the heavens, bashful secrets no more. Nothing bashful about spring. Outrageous, full scale, Cecil B. DeMille level opulence. Night and her animals.
When I wake and see that unrelenting bank of blue just an inch under my heavy curtains, it’s likely a day I will rarely leave the house. This may seem mystifying: most of my friends will already be splashing around in the brook or skimping about in swimming trunks and heading to the coast. And why shouldn’t they? It’s not as if sunshine is in relentless display here in England.
St Brigid
I think of St Brigid and her Marian Yes-ness to the world. Feeding the hungry bacon from the backstep as a kid, wishing Jesus could have a lake of ale when thirsty on the cross, breaking the news in church to the startled Irish that Christ was even-better-than-a-poem! Bridgid is a bright step into the spring, she’s winking at the blackbirds and beckoning me out.
C’mon wee man. Don’t be late for God’s parade!
I’m not rude: I’ll open the back door for a little while, salute the sun with my cup of coffee, but then turn and inevitably go to my perch at the dinner table where I tend to write. I like to hear life going on around me, but I don’t need to be part of it a great deal of the time. All this sacrificed sunshine is squeezed into my books and I don’t regret a moment of it. Sometimes you may touch a page and catch a little warmth.
There are places round here that are just like they were when I was a child. That’s lovely, and can also be a little confusing. I forget which century I’m living in, which is hard for a man whose foreground consciousness is myth, and creeping around in the background is what we normally call daily life. That made my lonely when I was younger but not now. There’s others with the same creative jurisdiction.
When I write, find me a room without much view. Turned to the wall is fine. I’m a rather low-stimulus character these days. A good cup of coffee, a storm, a visitor early evening, phew, that’s living.
I flourish in autumn. I make sense in autumn. The chill walloping in from the North Sea, talk of Christmas, the first snowflake on my Donegal tweed. The red beer, the deerhound by the fire, snoozing with a book. A cigar in the yard watching Orion hopefully lope the autumnal sky. I don’t seem nearly as situated in July.
But I’m paying more attention to the spring this year.
The hawthorn hedge of Rob & Sally Shaw, Stamford, Lincolnshire