Making a case for changing my focus...
I feel a sense of affinity with the little oak tree. There she sits, with no other oaks around her, and only the ruins of some human artifacts to keep her company. The human wisdom's drained out of these ruins... or, rather, what inspired the feeling for this site is now lost and it is maintained out of sentiment, tradition and habit, rather that out of a sense of the numinous or mysterious.
It maintains its potency in only a weakened and polluted form - as "consecrated ground" and as "one of the most haunted places in Northamptonshire".
There was something here... and there are ripples of it, a tremulous glimmering sense... something like... the ridgetop route that offered springs and shade... where a person could travel east to west, west to east, across the broadest part of the island. It was respite on a journey. It was a stop on the pilgrim's path.
In some ways, it still offers that.
Yet I imagine a past for this place which grants it more.
Walking through wildwood and coming to a grove where the vast ancient mother tree seeded a circle of oaks some centuries ago and the deer have kept the new growth down. A pine marten watches a red squirrel gather acorns. Above, more birds flitter and trill than we can imagine from our denuded experience. The tapestry of wild flowers attract butterflies, bees and a host of flying, crawling things. And, on the fallen branch of one of the older oaks, a tree with a stag's head and owl holes, a traveler sits. She is tired, hungry, thirsty and dirty, afraid to leave the path, and afraid to be found upon it.
The sounds of life in the grove reverberate as they would in a cathedral. The voice of the blackbird singing from an understory hawthorn is amplified, intense. And the traveler feels dizzy with the beauty of it and with the flickering pattern of light and shade. She feels her fears begin to ease.
At the edge of the glade, a movement. A stag stepping out from between the trees.
The traveler sits as still as a waystone.
The stag raises his head and turns to face her.
All around, the noises cease and the world waits.
The traveler lifts her hands into a prayer position and bows, eyes closing. When she looks up, the stag has gone, and a spring is bubbling where he stood. The water as clear as any promise.
No, I don't know what the story "means" either.
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