The Liminal

For several weeks, I have been mostly quiet. Alone with my thoughts, my preferred walking companion my old Canon camera. I love how heavy and unflappable it feels in my hand. I love the deep click of the shutter, as satisfying as the sound a big old stone makes when it hits the shingle beneath the ever-billowing hemline of the sea.

And then this strange thing happens. 
At Winter solstice, my cyclops and I stand watching the sunset over Herefordshire and the Iron Age fort of British Camp and, quite suddenly, quite simply, I know - I just know - that our three eyes are not alone in their seeing. 
For the bare trees, their branches pencil lines drawn on orange-stained paper - they are watching it, too.

Together, we watch. 

Foggy days between Christmas and the start of a new calendar year smudge and mute the landscape and the people traversing it – myself included.
Oh, the blade-sharp lines we tread in our lives, always lines, from here to there, and back again, arcing, rising, dropping, snaking along the way. 
But everything is muffled and blurred by the fog, until you draw close to the bony, sinewy trees, each one sumptuous against a backcloth of bokeh. Their bark glows and glints, now silver, now black, now ferric or greenish in the gloom. Lanterns at twilight.

Words will only emerge in the twilit realm of my journal. Moles, they are, taking fright at the glare of public attention, burrowing back underground, kicking up heaps of rich, mulchy thoughts.
As a child, I loved to jump on molehills, that satisfying squash beneath my soft, chubby feet.
Thoughts were much lighter things, then. A magical shadow-play, puppet theatre, no more nor less real than the fairies I would hope to spy beneath snow-capped stones in the woods. As unassailable as Jesus.
I often wish to jump on adulthood in much the same way, feel it yield and compact beneath my boots. 

Why this need to entrap and preserve my thoughts as words, like insects in amber? Unreachable, lonely things.

For several weeks, perhaps longer, I have known myself to be unalone in my solitary wanderings, each step answered by the footfall of something wild - or less tame.

It is not safe, to be tamed. I know this, and it makes me fretful, cowering in, and from, my own fickle skin. This hide that refuses me sanctuary.
Being tamed, being walled and blanketed and chained in safety, our ancient fear of predation has nowhere to go. It lunges inappropriately, missing its target, bemused by how the claws that dig into it draw no blood. Jaded by the softness of its own heartbeat.

Why does the blood flow so slow?

Only amongst the trees do my veins and arteries relax, so that the thoughts banging fists on bone can escape the confines of my skull and my eyes that stand guard over them can simply see.

See the silvered grass and the sticky earth and the skeleton trees and the nook in the bracken where a small thing might rest and the portal tree with its crazy punk branches and the revelation of last autumn’s leaves flaming from the ash-hued murk and the water drip-drip-dripping and the fog, vignetting everything - oh my god it is so BEAUTIFUL. So damn beautiful that the brain makes no logic of what the eyes relay to it, but I can feel it, here, around the sockets of those eyes, in the cave of my throat and the rubble of my belly and no matter how much I stretch and stretch and stretch my arms, my neck, my legs, I cannot separate myself from myself, be like the drops of water glittering my black wool coat… 

This yearning, this yearning, to become vapour, dead leaves, and mud.

Perhaps then the trees will speak to me in a language I can comprehend.
Oh, but – why the infernal need to understand? 
The speech of trees is that moment before the words are wrested from their energy in order to serve our ends.
What is at the seed of a word but the will, the will to make sense of a thing?

I mean, I probably write because I make more sense, am more defined, as ink on paper than flesh on bone. Paper-thin-skinned as I am. 

To leave the trees, to get in my car and drive back to the routine of life, is hard.
I wish to dwell only in the liminal.
This real world, I have not the palate for it right now, nor the teeth sharp enough to chew my way through it. 
Is that childish, or wildish? 
This craving for the simplicity of bones scoured to a dazzle by maggots. 

Am I depressed? Or simply being re-pressed?

It’s just - this hobbling anxiety, it lepers its way into my company wearing the cloak of depression. This subversive body of mine, no longer willing to be subservient to my mind.
I am bewildered by its capricious ways. A child left in the care of an unfamiliar neighbour, I dare not touch anything, will not make eye contact. Things might break. 

What’s the matter with my body? Why is there always something wrong with it?
I keep asking no-one in particular for answers, but all I get is a question:

“Why do you keep treating the symptom not the cause?”
Is that rhetorical, or not?

Well. Whatever. 
The answer is: because I don't KNOW! I don't know the damn cause, nor if I should excise or embrace it.

And then this strange thing happens. 
Duvet balled around me, my head an island in a sea of crumpled linen, resisting the day, scrolling on my phone. A crow caws, three times. It’s uncanny but, fleetingly, I know the sound is coming from inside me. I can locate its reverberations in my solar plexus.

Together, the crow and I caw.

A warm hello to all new readers, and a big thank you to you all for being here and for the gift of your time spent reading my words. I’d love to hear from you, so please do say hello in the comments!