It is an undeniable fact that some woods are more alive than others. I should know, I have walked enough of them. Some woods, like this beech woods near Upper Enham, have a thickness to the air. Once you walk in, you feel yourself pass through some kind of invisible wall, safe in the liquid embrace of the life of the forest. There is an overwhelming sense of abundance and you hear something beyond the edge of sound. You cannot but be aware of the unseen energy of the forest. Feel it pushing up against your body, providing you with some essential thing you didn’t even know was missing. There is something undisturbed about some woods and in that peace, the trees swell out from themselves, filling the spaces between them with their spirit bodies. So when you walk—a quiet, slow walk of wonder—you come to know the life of the
This story begins with some fingers flicking this bauble back and forth through the air. Flick-flick, flick-flick, imagine the bauble swinging there like a pendulum; flick-flick, flick-flick, a sparkly metronome in time. When the bauble swings, it passes over invisible strings which call out in song in another dimension. Strings so clustered, that even a micrometer difference in direction results in a profoundly different tune. In that other dimension, music is the intelligent life form. Songs roam about in the air the way sunlight and shadows do here. In that dimension, the strings of existence are strummed by wind or rain and this is what causes procreation. Natural processes pass over the strings and give birth to song after song after song. Songs who roam that dimension, creating choruses and clustering in the sky the way starlings call and murmur here. Flick-flick, flick-flick. As the bauble passes over the strings in that
How do you like this stump? It’s lovely, isn’t it? Kind of like a melty Oscar the Grouch somehow. However, I’m sorry to be deceptive, but this isn’t actually a story about this beautiful stump. It’s just that I was unable to take a picture of the subject of the story, who was, right at that moment, behind the stump. As it goes, I was sitting down eating my lunch on the remnants of an old laid beech hedge opposite this glorious stump, when a ghostly lady slowly approached on an equally ghostly bay horse. The pair were smiling gently, clearly deep inside some shared reverie, as they ambled down the path before them. At first I was not sure if they would notice me, but as they came adjacent, the lady turned her vaguely opaque head toward me and said ‘good day’ as she doffed her top hat. After which,
You’re probably thinking this is a photo of a large patch of red hot pokers in the striking shingle landscape of Romney Marshes, and you’re right, it is. As beautiful as this photo is, the real magic happens at night in the presence of a real live Seeker, whereby in response to an ardent and sincere question posed by said Seeker, the pokers shoot up into the night sky and explode like fireworks to spread the answer to the question across the night sky. The reader may well notice that a lot of my stories document real life instances of prescience, prophecy, and prediction. I should explain that this is because I find life very confusing and have therefore been a Seeker since I was a child. Ergo, my sensitivities are particularly attuned to moments in which I can cop a plead for a little bit of clarity, and so that
[This is the second instalment of the legend of Stick Boy.] Stick Boy got lost here on Black Down on his way to Holmbury Hill. He didn’t know he was going to Holmbury Hill, you understand, it’s just that he wasn’t intending on stopping on Black Down. However, the heavy fog which sometimes sits on that hill was causing him to walk in confused circles. Stick Boy sat down at a cross-paths to think. As he was admiring how the yellow of the gorse still popped in its own brightness amidst the fog, Stick Boy saw a shadow emerging from a distance down a path. A small shadow, wandering and weaving along the sandy trail, and holding a piece of bracken in her hand. Her name was GG, but Stick Boy didn’t know that then. GG stands for Ghost Girl, but only meanies call her that. To those of us who