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strange lights

Last night the sky was weft with strange lights. They appeared first in the north: an array of subtle green shafts glowing gently across the back of the sky. They were uncanny, difficult to focus on, seeming still at a quick glance but moving almost imperceptibly with slight shifts and shimmers. You had to look at them only intermittently, as if visually standing back from them, as they hovered above the horizon, until gradually, barely discernibly, they strengthened and spread and eventually the whole north-eastern sky was shot through with a shimmering green shine.

That was it for a while. Cloud came, covering the green shafts, and the night became damp and subdued. We went inside to warm up in front of small flames of gold and amber but when we came back outside, the sky was alight. Soft ribbons of rose and green streamed towards us from the west, flowing upon us in long sinuous tongues, and waving and wafting over our heads like smoke. Their colours were paler than the brighter green of the shafts to the north but they moved so sensuously; flaring and subsiding, weaving and dissolving in and out of each other, stretching and illuminating the dark width of the night.

It was difficult to get a sense of their scale. Their display took over the whole northern half-dome of the sky, arching over our heads and homes, appearing infinitely far and intimately near, and seeming to move both quickly and slowly at the same time. And the light itself looked both alien and familiar, eerie and incredible. The night felt hallowed and hollowed and filled.

Eventually cloud came once more, and rain, extinguishing the lights, and the sky became blanketly dark. A few hours later, however, when we stepped outside, the rain and cloud had blown over and the stars had been restored.

It seemed surprising to see the night showing itself again. The stars were so white – bright all the way down to the horizon – and the spaces between them so black. The north star had pinned itself overhead and in the time since the lights had begun, smothering the stars, the Plough and Orion had wheeled well around it. Time had resumed now, constellated and clear.

Even after the stars were restored though, a low arc remained, radiating from the north: stalks of faint greenish light lined upward into the height of the sky, like the backlit stems of tall pines in an invisible night forest. But there are no trees here, only rolling ground, and stars, and lights.

Balchladich, Assynt, Scotland
27th February 2014

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beach

The land is slow here. Green hillsides flow gently down and shallow lochs lie pooled in their hollows. Sheep, cows and horses lazily graze and the odd car putters along the small single-track road which curves along to the beach, where the gentleness finishes and the land disgorges itself between steep-cliffed jaws.

Great slid slabs and tumbled boulders lie piled around a choked throat of a beach, thrown up from a raw red gut. Some are smoothed into sensual bulbs and bulges by the steady lapping of the sea, but at the edge of the sand, worn rows of serrated teeth catch at the sea’s lips, and white waves rush over and smash into scudding cream foam.

Someone nearby told me that only a few years ago the beach was scalloped and sculpted with golden-white sand, before a few storms blew it all up onto the grass (and the farmhouse) behind. But I like it like this: rock-jawed, boulder-throated, and frothing wildly at the mouth. It’s not a beach to be folded into brochures. There’s no domestication here.

Balchladich, Assynt, Scotland
22nd February 2014

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by yon bonnie banks

Water is everywhere, pouring, rushing, pooling; the land is alive with water. White burns bubble through the woodlands on one side of the road; on the other side, trees are drowning in a wide field of water. It’s impossible to tell where the course of the river is or was – the whole field is flowing, and high on the hillside beyond it, huge falls roar where there were none before.

We’re safely north of Loch Lomond now, but as we wound round its banks, the loch itself was beginning to take its share. The outer half of the road towards Pulpit Rock had disappeared and road crew were there on built-out platforms rebuilding it – on stilts. It was a tight passage round the cliff there, squeezing between the water rushing down the rocks and the gouging maw of the loch.

As we come further north, the streams multiply. The steep hillsides are threaded by strings of white water and, as we approach Glencoe, the hills are scarred and scored in white. Snow fills each high crevice and ravine, highlighting the bare black bones of the rock shouldering through. Below the snow, streams continue the white lines, racing down the creases to the valley floors.

It’s not just the intensity of the water but its frequency that’s overwhelming. Each rock face is run over by a hundred slim streams. Even on the lower slopes and flanks by the roadsides, a new stream is gushing down every few yards, flooding the road and forcing us through ford after ford. Water is just pouring off the hillsides.

Water falling, water rising. And through the air too, great banks of rain move in horizontal gulfs. From safe inside the car, they almost feel sheltering, these great grey washes, engulfing us, until the wind harnesses them into harsh lashing whips. And so, through the water-ridden world we travel, sheltered and invigorated alternately, and all the while feeling secretly blessed by these thousand bright white streams.

Buachaille Etive Mòr, Glen Coe

Driving up the A82 (past Buachaille Etive Mòr, Glen Coe), Scotland
20th February 2014

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lily

In the heart of winter, white lilies are exploding quietly in my rough-walled room. Anthers thick with pollen hang heavily around an erect glistening stigma, like lusty vulvas, scattering their russet dust everywhere. The sexes are reversed in this case, the stigma being the female part rising from the bulb of the womb. The petals and sepals peel back like inside-out labia, thrusting their sex shamelessly into the world.

Even just looking at them, I feel myself spreading open; and the scent, rich and heady and sensuous.

Oh, lily of the winter morning, lily of the winter warming.

heart of a lily

Pontycymer, Cwm Garw, South Wales
2nd February 2014

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winter blossom

tree blossom

White crocuses poking through grass – the first flowers! A few steps later, pale blossoms leaning skywards on a tree. It’s raw out today though and doesn’t feel like spring: the winter is blossoming.

I’ve had white lilies in my room intermittently these last few months too. Despite their summer scent, they feel like winter flowers, opening secretly in the season’s dimness, and softening our hard stone edges in the absence of soft blooms of snow.

White flowers in the heart of winter. The crocuses look sort of virginal, like the snowdrops will when they bloom on the river banks beneath the trees. But lilies are obscene.

Walking by the Kelvin, Glasgow, Scotland
28th January 2014

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touchstone

Red is a touchstone, a transporter to all times and places.

This red door in a back lane in Pontycymer reminds me of a red door which I used to pass in a back alley in Montreal. These red leaves in the park remind me of the red leaves I used to sift through in Montreal gardens after the death of a dear friend.

Red is threshold and gateway, entrance and passage. The red door I used to pass in the hidden lanes of Montreal had ‘possibility’ graffiti-sprayed on it in blue paint. Red is for participation, for being there. Red is the belly beating, the heart moving through.

red-painted gate

Cwm Garw, South Wales
22nd January 2014

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a rain of light

A rain of light – a fine white veil sweeping along the sea horizon like a swishing curtain against a backdrop of slate grey. There must be a gap in the sky to the south but it’s gone now and the illuminated downpour becomes absorbed into the wall of cloud behind it. The tide is far out and the beach is flat and gleaming and, as I walk along the lacy hem of the water, I remember another rain of light.

That one was land-based but equally short-lived. It didn’t pass past but showered over, tiny particles of water scattering around me like myriad stop-motion gems.

I was pottering about in the corner of an overgrown stone-wall enclosure beside a ruined cottage on a green hillside up behind Fairy Glen, behind Uig, on Skye. I was standing in the slim shelter of a silver birch and the light beneficently showered down in the late evening summer sunshine. It was a sudden refreshment, gone as quickly as it arrived. But it was utterly beautiful. For those few moments, light was domain and dominion, and relief.

Coney Beach, Porthcawl, South Wales
18th January 2014