Tom’s writing group came out of the Library into my woods. A first for the wood.
And a pleasure it was to watch their eyes look up, necks lifted back, and hear their words emptied into the space.
Tom – perhaps a bit reserved at this distraction – and 2 cars set off from the library. Bill was already there. Sitting peacefully in a chair, under the dappled light coming through the still full leafed oaks. It was a sublime first of October day.
Cyrilla, looking like a naughty girl, bought her teddy bear!
Odd, I thought afterwards, how I began with the negative, amid all the oak tall magnificence: that the wood was too small, that I disliked the traffic noise and the habitual dog barking. Then laughing, I reminded myself that the trees don’t mind any of that.
I told them that of all stuff that one owns in ones life, one never owns woods. They existed long before and will long after. I feel a small piece in time passing through them. I am a witness. I told them the wood had healed me after a long dark time.
I walked them round, in silence I asked, down the old once coppiced tunnel, to the ponds, into the southern light, round and back.
Into the centre, they put some words. Pippa cooling pastures. Cathy toads. Linda spoke of Rachel’s wood. Sheila fingers of roots. Bev reminded us of oxygen and air, and Pippa questioning allowed me to amaze myself with this elemental primal gift of trees, to take our our expelled waste of carbon di oxide, process and give back the oxygen we need for life. Sheila, playful, calling roots the fingers. Cyrilla the compassion for her bear. Paul just said ‘You have no idea who good this has been for me’. Bill the detail of a leave caught in a spiders thread. Pippa the hills beyond warming up. Cathy imaginging toad stools in her jazz rhythm.
‘Have you ever been on a dating site?’ p asked.
Her mother dead, her house, her home sold. ‘I had to do it all’, she said. ‘If only they’d invited me, only for a week or even a weekend. She’d never seen her brothers house.
‘Everything was getting better, then then…’
Her younger brother died. ‘He never recovered from the death of our parents.’ And I knew she was also talking of herself . ‘And drink’.
Kaliwood 