Enjoy the Silence before the coming Squall

 

I wrote this a few weeks ago, when the weather was colder – now it looks like we’re far from having a white Christmas.

But we can still enjoy the simple things, even if it is only by ignoring the difficulties awaiting us in the new year and beyond.

The snow starting in the pines – if you zoom in you can see the haze is all flakes of snow. The camera never does justice to the scene, of course.

           Silence before the Squall

Snow falls past pine trunks 

Like solidified silence: almost

An extension of dawn’s tranquillity

Before squalls scream across canopy

Sending flakes flurrying down

To pale box and holly’s leaves.

As hours slowly pass, and white quietly

Deepens, the wind weakens and settles 

Like drifts. Then, as evening stretches,

A strip of cloud opens to allow sunlight

Illuminate the scene before twilight,

Suffusing with diffuse golden radiance

The shifting mists along the ridges, red

Shrouding windmills. Imbuing soft sunset

With orange fire across the ice instead

Of another storm sending us scarpering 

Inside to hide, it seems such gentle 

Splendour shows us the scenes 

Awaiting us after all our playing, and

For all our attempting to prepare 

For her vagaries, in the end, we will

Flit like flakes upon her wind, for

We are but Nature’s playthings.

The scene before sunset (lower down were less snow fell) – the sun was beginning to get down to that break in the clouds to light up that mist that hung all along the mountains to the left, while my kids were playing just out of shot and distracted me from taking a photo of the later colours.

Happy Christmas everyone!

For those looking for a quiet read, or a nice E-reader gift, check out my books….

Some of them are on sale with Smashwords from today!

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Shifting Baselines

            Shifting Baselines

I read a story, set in a strange place

But setting off from London in the

Last century, and the strangest fact 

Was the act of dating time: not using

Newspapers, which was his job, but

From the nightingale’s mating song.

Nightingale – a bird once heard in London

How stark the shift from this to

Today’s sad state of scenes: the lark

Sings aloft, a lone clarion upon the

Empty sheep-shorn heath, and yet 

Nobody knows him, nor hardly hears.

skylark. still common where there’s only grass…

Our knowledge of the shifting seasons,

The timeless turning of life around

Us, fell away in the meantime: lost

To ever-speedier spinning, electrons

Taking attention from the tunes and

Stories sewn in sinews, to those 

Traced ephemerally on screens, stacked

Up operas in boxes, serial sameness,

Lines listed, twisted until too seems

Our lives, left less sane, tracks too tame

To take notice of what, without, from us 

The gamers have already taken.

The Many Versions of the Werewolf Tale

I was in the Basque speaking area of Navarra last weekend, up in the hills.

Very green.

We went to visit a museum made by a very interesting guy called Iñaki Perurena, whose famous in the region for having Guinness World Records for lifting stones, among other things.

He has some amazing sculptures and lots of interesting paintings of characters from Basque Mythology on huge rocks dotted through the woods.

The Basques have a lot of strange characters that live in the woods. A much richer diversity than the simple fairy and leprechauns of Ireland, to be honest.

They have a type of Faun, mermaids, goblins, their own Santa Claus character, a cyclops, giants…

And…. another creature who you might bump into while walking the woods in such remote areas where houses are separated by large tracts of land, and visiting your neighbour involves a trek up a mountain.

Gizotso, is werewolf  in Basque, and is said to be an extremely strong savage beast that lives in the woods and is made by sexual intercourse between humans and wild animals.

I’ve a long-held interest in werewolves, of course, and my kids speak Basque in school, but I’d not heard of this particular thread of the great tapestry of werewolf tales.

It’s fascinating how many different versions there are of this story. One of the things that unite all human societies are the similarities in our fireside tales of others who live just outside the light spread by our hearths. And the werewolf is perhaps the most ubiquitous of all, more than even the dragon.

At the same time, it’s disturbing how easily every society can alienate others and reduce them to the status of “savage animals.”

Perhaps it not so difficult to see how such stories of werewolves can spring forth in our imagination from simple ingredients such as deep woods, woodland dwellers, people we don’t like, and people we desire.

Of course, nowadays, nobody believes in werewolves.