Re;rooting

I have mentioned that I am working on a few new projects some destined to be joyfully simple and realised soon & some elaborate & left longer on the boil. As well as this I am beginning to make record of this experience, or returning home after so very long. It is an exquisitely nuanced journey that has taken effect both emotionally and physically and I offer here a small extract from the beginnings of this articulation.

At this time of the year all the glorious golden ears of wheat that have been reaching for the sun, fibrous feet luxuriating in the Essex soil, begin to be cut short. Abbreviated stubble, disembodied stalks stood still. Waiting in shock to be lifted, roots and all, from the earth.

But there is always the flip of the coin. Perhaps we indulge this landscape with too much prevalence. Ancestors believed that trees were sacred for having one foot in this world and the other in the earth, in the otherlands. Water, caves sacred openings too and the tops of mountains allowed real access to the stars, to the heavens.

Perhaps those stalks stand proud, liberated from a bind to this middle land that had grown weighty and hard to support. And until that moment of ploughing when they begin to become dead things they retreat back to the calm of the earth, breathing in time with the world beneath our feet, communing with the underworld.