Continued
from Writing Saga # 23; the House and its
Rooms and its Environs…
The orchard: The
living orchard! Through the apple
trees, slanting sunlight, making pale-gold hazy pathways through the basking
leaves. A magical leafy bower! The sunlight diffused through the branches, striking
the long soft grass beneath…its final resting place after it had set alight the
trees…the rays brought not only warmth but energy, giving pools of its shining self
to be explored by any who would sit at its feet. Between the scattered rows of
trees, the feet of the sun. And I sat.
And I was taught.
A place of elfin beauty the living orchard.
A fruitful arbour. An archetypal Eden wonder! As filled with invisible pages of
sunlight-writing, waiting, hovering, hidden in the trees, as it was with the
profusion of their counterparts, the natural leaves. For in among the trees, and
the long grass, the sun was all the time writing telling its own story. And, as
I listened, I heard.
This bowery sunny orchard! Beyond my garden
wall it held all the mystery that made it my very special trysting place. With life
and love and truth I wandered here. This lighted fruitful centre of newer
writing, amaranthine poetry, which once had been, and now was, and which was yet
to come: the path, shining brighter and brighter, unto the full day!
In amongst the fruit trees I found an
abundance of scattered stories. Flowing fragments, strings of words in curling
lines all telling the things the sunlight knew. Clear things. Hard to grasp
things. (Because they couldn’t be seen by the natural eye.) The inside mysteries
of every living thing: the substance of the sun in them.
No effort had been spared in the planting of
this orchard. Every conceivable kind of fruit tree grew here. And of all the
bounty of all the trees I could eat. The trees growing each in its own
particular way, each in its own season, each one had its own story. That is I
could read these books, ingest their content and learn their truth and write it
in very different ways; mostly back to front and inside out.
Apple trees lined the orchard wall, their
branches trained on wires to grow flat along it. A green door was neatly hid between
them. Even my barriers where unconsciously I separated things were places of
growing life: my door, open.
In the midst of the orchard was a small
fountain pool; a miniature white marble statue of a little child standing in
its centre. Only the smallest of love’s little children could live at the
centre of life. Beside it, on either side, grew two of the largest trees of the
orchard. One gave life; and one gave the knowledge about life. One was ‘it,’ and the other was not ‘it,’ but
a talking about ‘it.’ I had long ago learned which was best; after one of them
had tricked, and slain me, I knew to leave it behind.
The orchard! The mystical orchard! Live with
the singing of birds and the spirit of winged-things which inhabited it. Nesting
birds in the low branches, thoughts which lodged themselves in my head and there
reproduced and multiplied. And everywhere the voice of the turtledove, permeating
sunlit leafy boughs laden with apples of gold in pictures of silver. These the
pleasant fruits of the giver of all things working within my heart and writing redemption’s
surprise…a freedom in paradise, greater by far than one could ever, ever imagine!
‘Let yourself free to be what you will be. Those
who express even a little of themselves never become old-fashioned.’ – Robert Henri.
These
are the titles of the next two ‘ragged writings’ of amaranthine poetry:
Metamorphosis
The Glass Pebblestones
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