October's Microcosmic Circus

THESE EARLY OCTOBER MORNINGS astound me. Some kind of immense absent-minded god walks the common before anyone is awake and forgets a crystalline miasma all over the undergrowth, as if divine crumbs have slipped through loose stitches in his angelic satchel, and the god walks on unaware.
When the sun comes, these unearthly spilt treasures are ignited into brilliance.


A low mist hangs above our morning, wet and sunlit, the day is possible and just born.
I stand at some centrepoint where my spokes are made of dew & sunlight & cobweb & mist & grass & morning, but where the wheel I feel turning is an incomprehensible and devastating beauty refracted by these things straight into my heart.



A subatomic trapeze act is taking place. Gorse is wonder-stitched with high-wires on which to balance our wishes for the day. Teetering in the dazzling light, our hopes balance on spider-strings, and the white light of love is split seven-ways: a spectrum opened out onto the morning sky, to see what there is to see, and to meet the spectre of this apparent god face to face, to shake his hand, and to thank him for the hole in his satchel, through which spilled humble bedazzlement, and a promise of is-ness.



Everywhere is netted in cobweb.



Is this the Wyrd made visible? It is so beautiful. Autumn thorns are cocooned and sewn. This is a love-letter to us all written in the pearlescent ink of Monday-morning spidersilk. Every flourish of the evanescent handwriting is dew-dotted; the world is scattered, like by tears-after-crying waiting on eyelashes.



I kneel down and peer at these tiny orbs of water. Wet-kneed, I see this world again, but tiny, upside-down, and clear, washed new for this day. Who scattered these microcosmic scrying balls amongst the grass for me today?



And they ring, oh they ring! Bells they are: the bells of my wild church.

Here, the most beautiful sight in all the world, this moment ... divinity, this: Dew caught by a dandelion. Time suspended sacred in jewels of water.



And then I come across the artist of the morning. Giving birth before my eyes to lute strings for October's psalm. Little weaver, stringing her fine story into this day...




... This bright, clear, dew-ringing, spider-stringing, heart-singing day.

Little Yellow Stowaways

WHAT IS THIS strange yellow bundle clinging to the wheel-arch of our Bedford?


This Scottish June has brought us yellow all around.. yellow gorse along the roadsides, yellow buttercup-blanketed fields and these little yellow stowaways on our truck.
This silken nest of new scuttling spider babies is just one tiny corner of the arachnid population that has taken up residence in our home on wheels. In between fixing down floors and mending fuel tanks, Tui has had to wrestle with his spider terror every time one of these lodgers is disturbed by his screwdriver!
For some reason, spiders love our Bedford!


(click on that picture for a closer view!)

I leave you with a superstitious spider rhyme in German:

Spinne am Morgen
bringt Kummer und Sorgen
Spinne am Nachmittag
bringt Freude am dritten Tag
Spinne am Abend
erquickend und labend


(Translation:

Spider in the morning
brings grief and sorrow
Spider in the afternoon
brings joy on the third day
Spider in the evening
refreshes and nourishes)