It's autumn, loud speaking, silent season
I've been walking in the woods a lot with my small family. Catching the light in my eyes, or the drizzle in my hair, wondering, is this the moment, is this now? And how to hold onto something that seems entirely free of nostalgia, but so strenuous and clamouring.
“Time has taught the uses of silence” the logs tell me. They are silently being broken down by the actions of microscopic creatures, but me, I feel continuous. But like a shadow too, nothing to be parsed, a break for the leaves to drift through.
[Like all of us, my moods shift about, and seem monumental one moment, dissipate the next]
[The clouds banking over a stooky, yellow field]
Yesterday a lecturer contacted me about one of my stories, to ask permission for it to be used as a set text for schools in this country. I said yes, and felt my shadow fill a moment. Some children will read my work and likely be annoyed by it, and remember it perhaps, and bring their own tools to it. Wonder.
Sometimes I try to look at the world outside of the domestic and the woods and all I see is cruelty and I turn back to the din of caring, crafting, feeding, washing. What one word do we have for not yearning for a future untime when things will be better, kinder, more just, less barbaric (I speak not of my own life, of course), but a wish for a steady pulse of changes to accumulate. A thump into. A gap pouring with light. A little dung beetle moves about on an island on a loch, by a ruined farmhouse. I hate nature writing. I like the black of its body. The leaves come down.
