The Song of Wandering Aengus

 

One of my all-time favourite poems and so wonderfully set to music by both Donovan and The Waterboys below.  The last four lines conjure up an image that calls to something deep within, the search for the perfect place and time, and the pull of the sun and moon on the human heart.  Yeats certainly had a way of translating human longing into beautiful words.

I went out to the hazel wood,

Because a fire was in my head,

And cut and peeled a hazel wand,

And hooked a berry to a thread;

And when white moths were on the wing,

And moth-like stars were flickering out,

I dropped the berry in a stream

And caught a little silver trout.

When I had laid it on the floor

I went to blow the fire a-flame,

But something rustled on the floor,

And someone called me by my name:

It had become a glimmering girl

With apple blossom in her hair

Who called me by my name and ran

And faded through the brightening air.

Though I am old with wandering

Through hollow lands and hilly lands,

I will find out where she has gone,

And kiss her lips and take her hands;

And walk among long dappled grass,

And pluck till time and times are done,

The silver apples of the moon,

The golden apples of the sun.

(William Butler Yeats)

Donovan's Adaptation

 The Waterboys

Riding Out the Storm

 

Yet another storm.  They’re naming them now. We are only in January but already have reached the letter J.  Today Storm Jonas arrived in the area, and without seeming rude to Jonas, it really would be better if he had stayed away.  A storm by a different name but bringing the same as the others; gales and rain.  

It is becoming all too familiar now – the blanket of grey cloud that throws a half-light across the days, the sound of the wind roaring across the fields and hills, and the incessant rain beating on the windows and soaking everything, animate and inanimate, plant, animal and human.  So yet again, the wind gushes through the tree-tops flinging the branches from side to side, and rocking the trunks so violently that I am amazed that more of them are not felled by this invisible force.  The bodiless roar is almost deafening at times as it rushes along the lane, building momentum as it goes, before slamming  into the group of trees at the bottom.  It ploughs into them with a howl like a battle-cry, and the firs and birches whoosh, rumble, and clamour back in defiance. 

From its vantage point in a solitary rowan nearby, the raging battle is quietly watched by a ring-necked dove. 

I notice the dove as I finish securing the shed-door against the storm.  It sits with its underbelly covering its claws and its feathers fluffed out for warmth, hunkered down against the wind and rain.  Though the tree rocks fiercely, it simply rests there swaying in tandem with the branches, watching.  From time to time, it closes its eyes, a picture of serenity and repose amid the drama of raging forces.

Mini rivulets of water run down my coat onto my legs, soaking into my trousers, sneaking under my hood and the wetness cools my skin. My face tingles under the slaps dealt out by the wind and rain.  I head inside to the warmth and comfort there. Glancing back at the rowan tree, I am again struck by the stillness of the dove amid the turbulence of the scene.  I leave the bird sitting quietly in the tree while I go indoors to read and write and ride out the storm in my way, just as it is doing in its way.   

Around us both, the wind continues to roar and rage, and the rain fills the streams and rivers and soaks an already saturated landscape. Jonas will be with us for a while.

 

More to Winter than meets the Eye

"We are accustomed to consider Winter the grave of the year, but it is not so in reality. In the stripped trees, the mute birds, the disconsolate gardens, the frosty ground, there is only an apparent cessation of Nature's activities. Winter is pause in music, but during the pause the musicians are privately tuning their strings, to prepare for the coming outburst. When the curtain falls on one piece at the theatre, the people are busy behind the scenes making arrangements for that which is to follow. Winter is such pause, such fall of the curtain. Underground, beneath snow and frost, next spring and summer are secretly getting ready. The roses which young ladies will gather six months hence for hair or bosom, are already in hand. In Nature there is no such thing as paralysis. Each thing flows into the other, as movement into movement in graceful dances Nature's colours blend in imperceptible gradation all her notes are sequacious."

(Alexander Smith, 1829 -1867)

What Trees have to say...

 “For me, trees have always been the most penetrating preachers. I revere them when they live in tribes and families, in forests and groves. And even more I revere them when they stand alone. They are like lonely persons. Not like hermits who have stolen away out of some weakness, but like great, solitary men, like Beethoven and Nietzsche. In their highest boughs the world rustles, their roots rest in infinity; but they do not lose themselves there, they struggle with all the force of their lives for one thing only: to fulfil themselves according to their own laws, to build up their own form, to represent themselves. Nothing is holier, nothing is more exemplary than a beautiful, strong tree. When a tree is cut down and reveals its naked death-wound to the sun, one can read its whole history in the luminous, inscribed disk of its trunk: in the rings of its years, its scars, all the struggle, all the suffering, all the sickness, all the happiness and prosperity stand truly written, the narrow years and the luxurious years, the attacks withstood, the storms endured. And every young farmboy knows that the hardest and noblest wood has the narrowest rings, that high on the mountains and in continuing danger the most indestructible, the strongest, the ideal trees grow.

Trees are sanctuaries. Whoever knows how to speak to them, whoever knows how to listen to them, can learn the truth. They do not preach learning and precepts, they preach, undeterred by particulars, the ancient law of life.
 

A tree says: A kernel is hidden in me, a spark, a thought, I am life from eternal life. The attempt and the risk that the eternal mother took with me is unique, unique the form and veins of my skin, unique the smallest play of leaves in my branches and the smallest scar on my bark. I was made to form and reveal the eternal in my smallest special detail.

A tree says: My strength is trust. I know nothing about my fathers, I know nothing about the thousand children that every year spring out of me. I live out the secret of my seed to the very end, and I care for nothing else. I trust that God is in me. I trust that my labor is holy. Out of this trust I live.

When we are stricken and cannot bear our lives any longer, then a tree has something to say to us: Be still! Be still! Look at me! Life is not easy, life is not difficult. Those are childish thoughts. Let God speak within you, and your thoughts will grow silent. You are anxious because your path leads away from mother and home. But every step and every day lead you back again to the mother. Home is neither here nor there. Home is within you, or home is nowhere at all.

A longing to wander tears my heart when I hear trees rustling in the wind at evening. If one listens to them silently for a long time, this longing reveals its kernel, its meaning. It is not so much a matter of escaping from one's suffering, though it may seem to be so. It is a longing for home, for a memory of the mother, for new metaphors for life. It leads home. Every path leads homeward, every step is birth, every step is death, every grave is mother.
So the tree rustles in the evening, when we stand uneasy before our own childish thoughts: Trees have long thoughts, long-breathing and restful, just as they have longer lives than ours. They are wiser than we are, as long as we do not listen to them. But when we have learned how to listen to trees, then the brevity and the quickness and the childlike hastiness of our thoughts achieve an incomparable joy.  Whoever has learned how to listen to trees no longer wants to be a tree.  He wants to be nothing except what he is. That is home. That is happiness.”     

                                                           Hermann Hesse (1877 - 1962)