Come walk with me...

So you can't be here, in Dulverton, on beautiful Exmoor...  Never mind.  Come with me on my morning walk.  We'll take it slow (I'm not feeling so great today)...
The SP is bouncing like Tigger but he always waits for me to open the first gate...

...and then the second gate...

We walk through town as it starts to wake up...past the familiar shops, and the familiar cars and familiar people.

And then we cross the bridge and turn up into the woods.  It's steep and somehow steep on tarmac is harder than steep on earth so we take it easy.

The wild foxgloves are bee buzzed bells...

Most people go straight on, following the wide track down to the river.  But we veer left, through this narrow opening, and up the steep track known locally as the Chimney.

Past ancient beech tree hedgerows, moss-crept, sinew-rooted...

The bluebells have sunk back into the earth now, and bracken reigns.  The woods open out as we dip down and up the old ramparts of the bronze age hill fort.

We pause at "my" tree, of course, wondering again how it survived when its brothers and sisters were felled. Happy chance.  Sometimes I meditate here, sometimes I just lean back and listen to the birdsong, the distant sounds of the town.  If we're very still, sometimes the deer come.

The path widens and we come across the den, a little camp constructed around a tree.  Weeks back I decorated it with a rib-cage, placing the skull to watch in a nearby tree but now they've gone.

We have a choice.  Sometimes the SP and I turn left and make a full circuit but today my energy is flagging so we veer to the right and pick our way downwards.

Past the hawthorn tree, past this little moss-sprung spring...and back to the wide path, down down down, over the bridge and...you get the picture.  It's only a small walk - an hour at most - but every day it is different, every day some new fresh detail.  It comforts me somehow.  Even if life is basically meaningless, it can still be beautiful.

The woods are talking...

The wind is wild today.  It slams cold into my face up at the hill fort and harries the trees, making the beech, with all their fresh, young, and oh so green leaves, tremble.  The oaks are slower, calmer, not so hasty. Their leaves are only just uncurling, amber drops unfurling, cautious. 

And I stand with my back to my tree and I think how young and fragile-strong it feels. How all alone. It? Not him? And I wonder. Is this just another projection?  Have I got it wrong again?  Is this my self-tree? And for the first time I notice another, on the other side of the track - larger, wider, more solid.  And he (for this one, surely, is he?) doesn’t stand alone like my tree.  Other trees bustle around. Young beech saplings crowd around his roots.  And the thickest ivy (as thick as my upper arm) sticks like a vice to his trunk.  I tentatively tug it but it’s clinging tight.  And again it bothers me. But then I figure he probably likes it like that, really.  But then again, if you’re a tree, what choice do you have?

There are bluebells everywhere. 

The scent sends me back, thudding through time, to Gaunts House.  I had gone to write about retreating, was only able to spare a few days – how ironic.  And I was restless, a bit lost without the flurry of deadlines and the thrum of the city.  And so I walked, mind-fretting – and came across a bluebell wood.  

And cried, if I recall.  And sank into it.  And that was a point at which I could have taken my life in a totally different direction because, I realized, I didn’t need anything.  And I meditated a lot and did yoga and helped out in the garden, planting stuff, and didn’t really talk, just smiled, and it was good.  But then I went home and ego said ‘Be normal! Be successful! Be a good cog!’ and soul shrank back again, shy as bluebells. 

Anyhow.  Every walk in the woods is a medicine walk for me.  Things appear on my path and talk to me.  A while back it was all death and decay.  Bones, skulls, a broken wing nearly every step I took.  So I picked them up and adorned the small wooden hut with them – an offering to Baba Yaga.  And I laid low, hoping the Morrigan would fly past.

Today, however, it was all runes.  Twigs and branches in shapes of the runic alphabet.  Futhark. Tree messages. Chatty.

And what did they say? What did they say? 

They said…

Protection. The Spiritual Warrior’s battle is always with the self.  

And they said….

Flow.  The River. The Self.  Conjunctio; the sacred marriage. 

And then they tried to say something else but the SP bounced on them and scattered them to the wind.