songs about field maples

in which i fail at pondling and argue with computers about my face

I have lately had the opportunity to try out a new flavour of cortisol withdrawal in which I can sleep for long stretches but when I sleep I only have nightmares. Apparently the “mare” in nightmare is from the Old English mære, which was a sort of demon or succubus as opposed to a nice female horse. While awake at 4am feeling like my eyeballs might explode I started to imagine what life might be like if kidneys returning to normal function instead involved being visited every night by a female horse. On moonless nights she would be deepest black, maybe with one or two flecks of white like stars, but during the full moon every mare that came to my window would surely be a shade of silver. Other mares for other nights might be red like Suffolk clay, or deep brown like the wings of night-flying moths, or sandy gold like rushes on the broads. I don’t know what we’d do together, me and these cortisol-reestablishing mares of the night, but I do know that in the land of sleep my legs work perfectly and I never get tired, so maybe we’d ride all night through empty villages and across black fields and under silent steeples, and then I’d come home before the sun came up, wild and well-rested.

It’s hard to maintain any semblance of continuity when my existence is so fragmented. In between stretches of sleep and non-sleep my body changes wildly, so it feels like I wake up each time in a slightly different life. Clothes that fit on Monday no longer fit by Thursday; on Tuesday I am ravenous and on Wednesday all food makes me ill; on Saturday I make plans to go for a walk and then by the time the plans roll around I can no longer walk again. Sometimes I find myself wishing that certain undesirable things were permanent, just for the sake of permanence itself, just for something, anything I could hold onto. I still can’t use facial recognition to unlock devices or verify my identity, so shifted are my landmarks that the computer refuses to believe my current face belongs to the same person as my pre-steroid face did. It’s quite surreal to be told firmly by a computer that you are no longer yourself.

We rescued another baby tree from the bed of lavender that runs along the front of the pightle. It was growing there quite happily as if it thought it too was lavender, oblivious to its own height and woodiness. Nettle dug a hole and planted it in the clay in our baby woodland, and I stumped out with my flute and stood in the smirr and played to it. I don’t know what possessed me to do this; I felt very sick and I wasn’t really thinking much except that it would hopefully feel nice to be rained on¹. Once I was playing outside it occurred to me that I had never played flute outside before, which was a bizarre realisation – in my years and years of lessons I had had the importance of scales and keys and time signatures drilled into me ad nauseam, but no one had ever suggested I take my flute outside and play to a tree. Outside there was no echo at all, so it was as if every note I played was immediately dissolved and absorbed into the rest of things to be recycled into something else. It was brilliant to play like this, just pouring out note after note and feeling them get instantly devoured by the world. I don’t know if trees know folk songs but just in case they do I played things like The Oak And The Ash and The Lonely Ash-grove so that the tree would understand that the concert was intended for it personally. Then I got worried that the songs were too ash-themed to be appropriate for welcoming a field maple, but I can only hope that trees feel an affinity with other trees regardless of type more than us humans seem to be able to lately. Alas, I do not know any songs about field maples².

We dug a pondle by accident last weekend – we were arguing stupidly about the rhubarb (a sign that perhaps I should have asked rhubarb permission after all) and at the end of the argument we were left with six correctly planted rhubarbs, several bruised egos and a surplus hole. I had read about clay puddling – if you are stuck in bed for months on a clay seam you will inevitably read about clay puddling at some point – so we started sifting through the excavation pile with frozen hands, feeling for those heavier, stickier lumps that could be clay. Then we puddled the thing, stamping and laughing red-cheeked in our wellies like a bunch of toddlers, and did a very bad job. It held water for two days and then drained out the sides, leaving only the bottom four inches or so where we had concentrated on the puddling properly. So we must repuddle, it seems, next time my legs are up for it, and I don’t mind even though it’s cold and soggy work. There’s something magical about finding clay in the ground, even when you’ve known you were technically “on clay” as long as you’ve known anything about the place. Of course I know clay comes from the ground, but does anything really come from the ground these days? Everything seems to come from shops, wrapped in plastic.

if i ever release an album of clay puddling sounds this could be the album cover

Imbolc is this weekend, the festival of Bríd and the very first stirrings of spring, though I think of it as still being very firmly winter so I don’t feel nervous yet. I have been doing Imbolc – doing pagan things in general – for a few years now, but this is my first year making an altar. I think I always felt silly about it, in the same way I might have at one point felt silly playing music for a tree. Not much makes me feel silly now; being very sick is humbling that way. Having an altar has been… life-altar-ing (sorry). My altar has candles and ivy and pinecones and my horn spoon from the Isle of Uist and a pearl circlet that I just made the other day³. I made a mailbox out of a nutritional yeast container so that we can leave messages for the season, ideas for winter to sow in its frozen ground so that hopefully they can germinate later in the year. Me, nettle and our friend Clover also drew winter wildflowers and mounted them on cards to display.

my winter wildflower contribution

Our altar is next to where we keep our instruments, which means I can sit by it in the dark and play my bodhrán while all of the other instruments resonate strangely along with me, creating the same sort of ghostly murmur that one gets in a good church⁴. Bríd was supposedly into poetry and so are we⁵ so every year on Imbolc we read and recite poems with our feast, and this year I have also been writing scraps of poems on bits of paper and adding them to my altar. It feels great to have an obvious way to elevate things I like to the realm of the sacred. Even if you aren’t into poetry, I bet there’s something you are devoted enough to to be worth having an altar for it. Devotion is somewhat unfashionable in this day and age but I think it’s cool.

I keep marveling that I played flute for twenty years without once serenading a tree. What was stopping me? All those not-sick moments and I never once thought to take an instrument outside and play something to the natural world, just for the sake of it. What was I so busy with? What are we all so busy with?

Today I was sick but not too sick to play to a tree, apparently. Perhaps the computer is right and I’m someone else now, maybe after my illness I have become lopsided and moon-faced on the inside, too.

And now it’s time for our newest feature, brought to you by my biblically accurate dogs:

Nobody who answered my poll indicated that this idea would fill them with horror, so we shall try it out! If you now find yourself overcome with horror, it is unfortunately too late, and you will have to just exist like that from now on.

An odde thing to read

This is a short story by Leonora Carrington, to whom I am very devoted and should possibly have a year-round altar. It is called The Debutante. Perhaps I was thinking of it because it involves borrowing a face and there has been much recent variability of my own face.

An odde thing to hear

Here you can listen to a guy somewhat going off the rails as he tries to invent an original sound to complete his radio program (apologies to any international readers, I don’t know if you can access the BBC).

An odde thing to do

This week’s odde activity is to use your kitchen implements as percussion instruments. You can do this alone or with your friends, your neighbours, even your accountant if they are so inclined. There are not many rules, though if all your implements are still intact at the end that is preferable. Some tips:

• metal pot lids make good cymbals

• wooden spoons can be used to drum on every surface

• glass has a pitch

• if you own a pastry brush that can produce an excellent tss sound

• barbecue tongs are a form of extended castanets, if you really think about it

This concludes this week’s chronicle. Thank you as usual for reading, and wishing you an Odde week,

1. It did feel nice. If you aren’t feeling well and are able to take yourself outside in the rain for a few minutes, I recommend it. Even better if you can serenade a plant. It’s ok to vomit afterwards too; plants might even consider that a sign of respect or enthusiasm.

2. If you know any songs about field maples, please let me know in the comments!

3. Making tiaras, circlets and other decorative headware has got to be one of my weirder hobbies (and the bar is high). I believe I have made close to fifty at this point; they line the walls of my room. Let me know if you would like to see more tiaras here.

4. I deeply love old churches,but also have a strong sense that Mr. Christian God might not be dead keen on the way I conduct my affairs, and hence I always feel a bit like I might get smote in His house (and fair enough, He might get smote in Oddements Pightle – or at the very least we’d beat Him at most boardgames). Lately I have been daydreaming about rescuing a deconsecrated church and turning into an animist plant church, where people could come to hear sermons about waterfowl or sing hymns to lichens.

5. We are fans of the ‘Neopaganism is a living spiritual practice’ approach, i.e. there’s no way to do this wrong, so you’re free to pick and choose whatever resonates with you out of the existing traditions, leave anything you don’t vibe with, and invent whatever wild stuff you like to fill in the gaps. We like poetry and nature and science in particular.