I'm here

So I cycled through town up to Euston, got the Tring train and wended my way to the lake via the gorgeous, cool, Grand Union Canal to be greeted by Cathie Hasler and a rucksack left by Alistair with such necessities as a thermarest and medicinal Laphroaig for my second night in the yurt. It's warm, quiet and very lovely here. All poppies and wood pigeons, low speed trains and lapwings.

We Aren't Here

Well, it's been so long since I was at the lake We Aren't Here seems more appropriate a name for the residency.

The Renga day didn't happen around midsummer - we are hoping to re-run it in the autumn, with more publicity. Fingers crossed.

And I'm pleased to say that I will be back for an overnighter later this month.

Some more photos from day four

Samuel Palmer

Being here nice and early is making me think of Samuel Palmer's 'Early Morning'

Palmer lived for a time very near to where I live in S.E. London.

I love his intense and warm engagement with nature in the image.

Believing the bird

As I write I'm sitting in the tump hide on the edge of the lake.

I stayed overnight in the yurt, and was early to bed and early to rise, with just the wind for company.

I worked with a small group of children from Ashmead school yesterday, taking photographs and writing.

We had a good day - it was a real pleasure to see them becoming more and more absorbed in nature; in the place.


It has been a real pleasure to be here in evening and morning light, and to
watch and hear the birds - lots of lapwings and housemartins, the odd hobby and kite -  and also to watch lolloping hares, and catch one of my favourite common-or-garden flowers, the campion, in its white and pink manifestations...

...as well as the much rarer white helleborine, which some field guides are surprised is doing so well here, I was told by Chris, the education managed, who was doing a survey of some of the flora here yesterday.

James Audubon once wrote: "If the bird and the book disagree, always believe the bird."

If the flower and the field guide disagree, we probably need to believe the flower.

The best field

Here's a bit of Rumi, the Persian poet.

"Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field. I will meet you there."

More Poems By Wallace Stevens - this time with birds in them!

Of Mere Being

The palm at the end of the mind,
Beyond the last thought, rises
In the bronze decor,

A gold-feathered bird
Sings in the palm, without human meaning,
Without human feeling, a foreign song.

You know then that it is not the reason
That makes us happy or unhappy.
The bird sings. Its feathers shine.

The palm stands on the edge of space.
The wind moves slowly in the branches.
The bird's fire-fangled feathers dangle down.



Not Ideas About The Thing But The Thing Itself

At the earliest ending of winter,
In March, a scrawny cry from outside
Seemed like a sound in his mind.

He knew that he heard it,
A bird's cry, at daylight or before,
In the early March wind.

The sun was rising at six,
No longer a battered panache above snow...
It would have been outside.

It was not from the vast ventriloquism
Of sleep's faded papier-mache...
The sun was coming from the outside.

That scrawny cry--It was
A chorister whose c preceded the choir.
It was part of the colossal sun,

Surrounded by its choral rings,
Still far away. It was like
A new knowledge of reality.





Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird

I
Among twenty snowy mountains,
The only moving thing
Was the eye of the blackbird.

II
I was of three minds,
Like a tree
In which there are three blackbirds.

III
The blackbird whirled in the autumn winds.
It was a small part of the pantomime.

IV
A man and a woman
Are one.
A man and a woman and a blackbird
Are one.

V
I do not know which to prefer,
The beauty of inflections
Or the beauty of innuendoes,
The blackbird whistling
Or just after.

VI
Icicles filled the long window
With barbaric glass.
The shadow of the blackbird
Crossed it, to and fro.
The mood
Traced in the shadow
An indecipherable cause.

VII
O thin men of Haddam,
Why do you imagine golden birds?
Do you not see how the blackbird
Walks around the feet
Of the women about you?

VIII
I know noble accents
And lucid, inescapable rhythms;
But I know, too,
That the blackbird is involved
In what I know.

IX
When the blackbird flew out of sight,
It marked the edge
Of one of many circles.

X
At the sight of blackbirds
Flying in a green light,
Even the bawds of euphony
Would cry out sharply.

XI
He rode over Connecticut
In a glass coach.
Once, a fear pierced him,
In that he mistook
The shadow of his equipage
For blackbirds.

XII
The river is moving.
The blackbird must be flying.

XIII
It was evening all afternoon.
It was snowing
And it was going to snow.
The blackbird sat
In the cedar-limbs.