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Moonrise over the snowy Staffordshire Moorlands. Freezing, with more snow on the wind. Right, I'm off to race the dogs back to the fire. Night night

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A shining fours stars out of five, and another winner from my wonderful local library.

Low key, honest, and beautifully formed, Julia Blackburn's writng walked me through a strange prehistoric landscape collecting fragments of bone, flint and revelation. A walking meditation on lost lands, fossilised footprints and the things we leave behind. As I turned the pages I ceased to hear the storm outside. Find a quiet spot and read this fascinating book.

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if the men find out we can

Shape Shift

they’re going to tell the church

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Life size driftwood horse sculptures by contemporary UK artist Heather Jansch 

@womensart1 

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I just found these photographs I took of a fallen tree on Alderley Edge, and I swear to god it looks like it’s about to move. Every time I visit this place my world becomes a little more pleasingly haunted - although I could live without someone summoning forth this creepy tarantula-tree hybrid.

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How I go into the woods.

The light is softening, the swallows are leaving and the horse chestnuts are aflame: time to go into the woods.

How I Go to the Woods

Ordinarily I go to the woods alone, with not a single friend, for they are all smilers and talkers and therefore unsuitable. I don’t really want to be witnessed talking to the catbirds or hugging the old black oak tree. I have my ways of praying, as you no doubt have yours. Besides, when I am alone I can become invisible. I can sit on the top of a dune as motionless as an uprise of weeds, until the foxes run by unconcerned. I can hear the almost unhearable sound of the roses singing. If you have ever gone to the woods with me, I must love you very much.

- Mary Oliver

I love Mary Oliver almost as much as I love autumn.

I’m looking for some autumn inspired poetry/writing. Any recommendations?

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Everything, Everything - Nicola Yoon

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Shapeshift

It is when life becomes difficult that we learn to shapeshift, to find a new skin, a new way of moving through the world. Maybe we learn to move more silently, to become a sleek thing, fox-like and amorphous against the many hedgerows blocking our path, eyes on the glinting wire, nose sharp.

Or maybe the way forward is to rear up from the thin, wavering path, to take up the space denied to you, to show your teeth and claws, to become the very thing they told you not to be.

Look at the monster before you; the river in flood, the locked door, the step into darkness, and choose your new shape. Use guile, words, wits or fury. Do whatever you need to do to pass through unharmed, to protect the wildness within. 

These are difficult days. Shapeshift.

Photography by Katerina Plotnikova.

“Metaphor, perhaps, is the tame, the civilised, version of shamanic shapeshifting, word-magic, the recognition of stories as toothed messengers from the wilds. What if we turned the old nursery rhymes and fairytales we all know into feral creatures once again, set them loose in new lands to root through the acorn fall of oak trees? What else is there to do, if we want to keep any of the wildness of the world, and of ourselves?"

by Sylvia Linsteadt.

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True story.

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My day off will consist of books, dogs and blue skies. Hope your Friday is as equally wonderful.

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cozy spaces

Pinterest • The world’s catalog of ideas https://www.pinterest.com

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The Holy Well

The Holy Well at Alderley Edge, Cheshire.

In place

When you give yourself to a place

it lodges in your bones.

Its mossy woods remember secrets

you poured into its waters,

your struggles through mud,

it gave you visions, songs

to sing to its racing stream,

oak to stand solid against your void,

hazel tips to brush skin,

wren’s beady eye to watch over you

its hearty clack for courage.

One night, years after,

you lie awake and remember.

You long to return to the bending stream

where aconite and orchids grow,

where imagination swift as the current

is caught by stoop of alder

rooted in black loam.

Your heart skips a beat as you walk

over the rise, down the slope where

your grief emptied itself.

The stream now swollen

with winter’s drenching

its banks a mud bath.

This time you stagger through – laughing.

By Rachael Clyne

If you look closely at the at the top photograph, you will see a small green leaf tucked into the mouth of the spring (although it is locally known as the Holy Well, it is in fact a natural spring). This leaf is replaced everyday; a task passed on from one Well guardian to another. This guardianship is a quiet, anonymous, generations-old tradition, which was still in practice when I visited the Well a few months ago. The present guardian was given the task by the old lady, who had looked after the well her whole life, before she passed.

Alderley Edge is a sacred landscape and very much alive, and the Holy Well is its beating heart.

“When you give yourself to a place,

it lodges in your bones.

Its mossy woods remembers secrets..”

More posts on the magic of Alderley Edge here, here and here

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Full Moon Reads.

More Library goodness, and three more books off my reading wish list. I've read a lot of Alice Hoffman, my favourites being Here On Earth, Second Nature and The Probable Future, and so I have high expectations of this novel.

I'm also a huge fan of the magnificent storytelling magic of Louise Erdrich, although I wasn't expecting to see her sitting on the shelves of my little, local library - this, surely, is more evidence of her far-reaching powers.

And lovely Alys Fowler; I love her style, her gardening tips and her out of control hair, as well as her little dog, and, as if that were not enough, I have the feeling that she is about to make me fall in love with the canals of Birmingham. A definite plot twist. What a stack of beauties.