The Curious Traveller

His tattered coat flaps like crows wings, feathers of fabric lifting in the breeze, positively flying in the gale almost causing the thin man to take flight if it weren’t for his burdensome bags. His worn boots and holey socks, his feet with skin like cured leather, give evidence of steps distinctly felt upon the road, every stone and bank and verge known, tattooed on each sole. This stick man with legs like wiry branches, with scarecrow-style, bent by time and weather, I wonder, what is his story? He no longer scares the birds, he is of the birds.

Always he walks along the roadside, never the quiet path by a field, or through a sheltering wood or over bright fenland. Always on the road and the verge and the bank while the steady sweep of traffic brushes by him. Perhaps the verge is where the faery folk reside, where time moves more slowly or faster depending on where you fall. For the traveller is ageless and always somewhere along the road, either coming or going I know not which. Eternally leaving footprints on the roadside where few men ever tread.

He only stops to save a snail, frog or hedgehog from ill-advised road crossings. Befriender of wood pigeons high in the trees and rabbits nibbling bark, he is lonely for human company only. His kin are deer, badger, blackbird, crow. He is wise in their ways, erudite in their language. He writes about what he observes in poetic form, his journal crushed and treasured deep in his pockets with a tiny pencil stub. Silently he eats wild blackberries, the haws and toadstools, the carcasses of unlucky animals felled by fast moving humans.  Taking into his body the soul of each being he eats.  He has eaten a lot of crows.

Generations can recall this bowed back and bags with the wings of a crow, plodding down the track to the nearest market town, if that is his destination. So here he is, the man of myth and nightmare, unwitting protagonist in many a story. Perhaps his tale is sad and fearful, of a man trapped in a faery verge, time slow and ponderous for him and high speed for us. Today we see only brief glimpses of him. We sense his age, his lost soul, his clouded mind that cannot remember where he has been but knows he will be home...in a short while...soon...

‘Home’ is a shambles of beams and vines and branches around a cold old chimney of crumbling red brick. He is weary from the road, tired of the verge and the staring faces from cars. He longs to sit and rest his feet. Crouching, he attempts to light a fire, a small comforting glow with yellow hair and red lips and eyes of such dark, deep blue as to be almost purple. He lies before the flame to let in warm dreams of lost love.

Gradually the flame becomes an ember and the ember turns to ash and the ash to dust. The vines of ivy slither across the broken floor toward the broken man, curling around his thin limbs, pulling his ragged coat more tightly, now a shroud as his hollow breath ends in a rough sigh of longing. Slowly entwined in the arms of nature, the man of sticks and wings and bags and crows becomes part of his house as he never was in life, always the road and the verge were home, but now the house becomes the grave of the man. Gradually they fall into the earth, under the leaves from the trees of this hidden woodland corner. Only one lone crow observes the silent end to this tale of travelling men homeward bound.

By Amber Caspian, 26 May 2011

Elemental Walk

At the weekend I went for a long walk with one of my Snow Sister’s that turned into a wild and elemental wandering.

I just love walking and have many favourite walks of varying lengths around my home and near my parent’s house.  One particular walk has become a sacred way to journey - time stretches, paths change and that which is familiar becomes wonderfully strange.

The first time I came this way was as part of a Day Walk, an adventure to be told in another post no doubt.  I have taken a few of my Snow Sisters and Soul Sisters with me since and each walk is contemplated in silence or peppered with conversation as needed.  It is a road to inspiration where I enter the realms of the imagination.

Silver Fox and I walked up the hill to the corner of a tree-lined field, where the view is glorious and the sky seems vast.  We were drawn to a place I have named Foxwood after the foxes den and skull I found there on a previous walk.  One of the many woods in this area yearly transformed by bluebells, we entered the shady space among the fading blue remains of the flowers.  The fierce wind was tamed and all was calm within.  I led the way further into the wood down towards a trail that I had walked several times.  Yet now it is overgrown and full of nettles, thistles and briars. Hawthorns with fierce spikes tore at our skin and brambles curled around our ankles to bind us to their will.  Silver Fox was draped in silver spider threads and it felt as if we were in the lair of wild wood women sitting along the path with twig needles and bone pins, gossamer, silk and harsh twine.  In the end the only way out was through the smallest gap in a hawthorn hedge.  I ploughed through with my coat over my head and Silver Fox following.  We emerged bloody and scraped into a sea of oil seed rape with no way through to be seen. 

The tractor road had been planted and so we had to follow the tracks as best we could.  The oil seed rape was no longer yellow but pale green and thick. We moved through as gently as we could towards the dark tree on the hill, while attacked by a crazy wind and hidden thistles.  When at the tree I noticed that the action of my walking through the field had felted my leggings at the front!

Oftentimes I notice that a journey or walk can mirror the path of one’s way of living in the world.  For me it is often that I enter a period of intense difficulty followed by great ease and good fortune.  I have learned that often the joy is found in that moment between struggle and calm.

Gathering Threads

Welcome to The Tanglewood, where I attempt to gather many of the threads of my life, untangle some knots, follow some paths and perhaps see both the wood and the trees... 

Tanglewood was the name of a family home where we lived when I was 1-4 years old. It was built on an old cherry orchard in Mersham, Kent, and several of the trees were left in gardens. I always loved the name and recently found it in a story as being a faery wood.  Although it was a modern house at the time, I remember it very clearly as the magical place of youngest childhood.

Last night it kept coming up in my dreams, so it seemed right to give my blog the title - The Tanglewood.