Making peace with the darkness

More confusion. It was volunteering today, but because of the late bats thing, I decided to meet them on site after they'd done some building of things in the shed. You really don't need the details. Plus I had some writing to do in the morning. I couldn't get through on the phone to work out where they were, so I sent messages and walked to the site... but no joy... so I had a walk instead and visited the Minerva Oak.

I asked about making peace with the darkness.

She reminded me that you cannot see anything when there is only light (or indeed darkness). "The play of light and darkness is the making of the world," she said.

Funnily enough this relates to what I am now reading in The Matter With Things. IMcG talks a great deal about relationships, in-betweenness and opposites. He says that if you cut the north pole off a magnet, you don't just have a south pole, you have a short magnet. I had been thinking of the tensile strength when something is stretched between two ends, and he then wrote about a tightrope walker. They keep their balance because the rope moves and they adjust: they could not balance if it were rigid, nor if it were too loose. the in-between space is mobile. The ends are static and that is where death lies.

Truly,it takes two (babe).

Minerva had a couple more nuggets:

How do you preach in silence?

Be radically open to the world and radically rooted to the earth.

In addition, another leafhopper hopped onto me. I remembered that they communicate with vibrations. And this is a SUPERB film, even if it doesn't go into details about the communication.

Anyway, the leafhopper's vibrating skills made me think of communication through reverberation. Rhythm. I started thinking about drumming.

On the way back I visited this tree, whom I once named something that I have forgotten, so from now and hereafter they shall be known as the Wyrd Oak. Only a very few tippy top branches are alive as the horse chestnuts, planted later but faster growing, have taken the light.

This is the tree under whom I always find bones. So I decided to make an artwork to demonstrate making peace with the darkness.

There's a little squirrel skull in there. Or maybe rat. And see the signature again?

And more making peace with the darkness... there is something strangely beautiful about the colour of the leaf miner damage on horse chestnut leaves.

Mischa called later to say that her WhatsApp does not beep and she missed my messages. They showed up at the site ten minutes after I did and left 20 minutes before I walked back past.