Here comes the sun

Soundtrack – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U6tV11acSRk

The north wind has ceased to dance and the sun again takes command of his heavens. Yesterday I briskly baby-stepped through the woods to the Great Mother and, placing my hands on her rutted bark, asked for an interval in the intemperate conditions.

As a bright orange butterfly lands on the grass at my feet this morning, I know she has granted my request.

What wonderful power we hold when in symbiosis with the spirit of nature! We who have been disenfranchised from our lands by force and now have no true conception of why. I myself had long believed the origin this violence lay in the sphere of economic power.

But in nature and through nature I have seen that we were forced to migrate to cities not because influence is increased in proportion of territory accrued; nor because human bodies were required to drive inhumane machines; nor that greedy persons needed lands to graze their greedy animals. These are merely historical, material explanations, that our continued suppression of land rights makes a nonsense of. After all these land owners believe in the mystical power that a piece of paper gives them over a physical reality, and it is legally possible, they believe for them to own land upon which we live. Their inhumane machines have long-ceased to clatter in Europe, finding instead other shores on which to carry out their pointless labours and now they feed their animals by unnatural means, having found a less sensible more lucrative alternative to grass.

The fundamental need for our umbilical cord to be severed from Mother nature by those who wished to wield control still remains though  in the fact that if we regained this connection, we would become uncontrollable. Our natural power is our secret history, concealed from us by the monotonous violent narrative of History espoused in school rooms and lecture theatres. We are taught to scoff at the naivety of primitive cultures that believed they could effect weather and crops by rituals and dance and song. I suggest you try it some time and scoff no more.

Shamans, witches, and mystics are always the first to be annihilated when ambitious hands reach out for domination – those who act as gateways of our interface with natural power must be shut up. Such natural power is not solely the domain of specialist, we are all witches, and they can not stake us all and light fires of oppression at our wriggling feet.

The sun, the moon, the weather, every star in the encrusted firmament, every grain of soil on our glorious planet is in you and of you. Manifestation, healing, magic – all at your daily disposal.

So fill up your glasses with brandy and wine

Soundtrack – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FJt4y4fH938
This apocalyptic isolation is fast driving me feral. I stalk about the kitchen, gnawing at a piece of bread, pouring myself red wine, refrigerated by the winter air.
I had been much less acquainted with alcohol when I arrived here, my party days long behind me, and whilst I was socially drinking again, a year of abstinence had ended any dependency I had on the drink.
I had seen at the London eco village and Westminster peace camp the true power of alcohol. It was not merely an evil perpetrated against the individual, infecting people with alcoholism, causing embarrassing behaviour and morning-after regrets. Alcohol’s power is much more prolific than that.
I watched as many times her corrupting fingers served to cause huge rifts within my community. At the peace camp any cohesion or even prolonged discussion was made impossible by the presence of alcohol and the effects it wielded on those who imbibed it.
It is not only colonised populations that have been controlled and over-powered by the state-sanctioned drug of choice. Where ever there is heavy alcohol use, community (aside from that based around the imbibing of liquor) becomes a non-entity.
It has not always been so.
I collect cherries on the first week of June, nervously teetering on the step-ladder. What a mouse I was – now I clamber unconcerned through windows, on wind buffeted scaffolding, over rocky outcrops. The Alchemist laughs at me and orders me to climb further, to over-stretch toward just-out-of-grasp crimson bounty.
With the baskets full and the tree almost bare, he strides off to his workshop – for tonight we make Aqua vitae – the water of life.
This alcohol, distilled from fruits using steam, the Alchemist tells me, has replenishing properties for both the material and spiritual form. It is not to be drunken casually and to be seen more as a medicinal tincture than a form of social lubricant. It is, however, drunk at any time of the day and I admit to occasionally having a sip or two from the communal vessel we supped from, at hours before nine in the morning. I felt no negative effects, no lethargy or dehydration or altered perception. In fact I would say it rather helped my labours on the building site and sent a feeling of warm strength extending out through every cell in my body.
The distillation process is slow taking many hours; my understanding is limited, but as I recall the fruits, being contained within a huge dome covered copper pan, are heated from underneath. The pan must reach a certain temperature and remain stable at that temperature for alcohol to be produced. Vapour from this pan travels down a pipe, to a coiled condensation tube, and then the sanctified liquor drip-drips into a vessel. Not all of the produce is fit for consumption. The liquid that first emerges is very high in methanol, if I understand correctly, and of no pleasure or benefit to drink; of course this is not wasted, but set to one side, in order to later make skin creams and medicinal balms. Several grades of grappa are produced, the smoothest and cleanest being known as the heart, and this is held to be the most beneficial liquid to drink. And that is about all I learned of the process, due as usual to my limited Italian.
Whilst the grappa distilled, I made cherry jam and cordial, and once finished we enjoyed the fruits of our labours together and with gratitude to nature’s cornucopia. I walked in the moonlight to the cherry tree and placed a slice of bread and jam, and a nip of grappa at her roots.
It was the first of many brews made during my time here and the only occasion that they were drunk without due respect or temperance was during a visit by some English friends, who were left to their own devices when we had all gone to bed.
In the morning the Alchemist looked in disbelief at the empty jar – I pulled a face to illustrate my discontent at his grappa being drunk. ‘Ma non e grappa’ he said eyes wide. It was the methylated spirits.
And were my country-folk in anyway adversely effected by this nasty brew? Why by all accounts their hangovers were less savage than a night drinking the liquor we are succoured on in Blighty.

The grey damp filthiness of ages

Soundtrack link – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CWBrWhrKchQ

It is so strange to spend my final days here in such desolation. All other human inhabitants have moved to places of comfort and security to sit out the Siberian weather. Ten months ago I arrived, a good friend at my side, to a dusk lit Eden populated by sun-kissed hippies, the first handful of hundreds of visitors that would pass through, but never stay. Only I stayed, I and the Alchemist.

You would not recognise in me today the well dressed, prettified woman who hitched her way this far. Instead you will find a bedraggled, coarse mountain woman, cloths and body filthy, hardened through months of elemental change, my upper body strong as an oak, my soul imbued with the tranquillity of nature.

I stayed because I was an exile, from a country I had no affinity with, from a lost love that would not cease to claw at my heart. From cars and computers, office jobs, recession, depression, addiction, desolation…there are some sorts of malaise that distance can not salve.

As this wind blew in, all thoughts of the road were fixed. Connected again, I love my homeland now.

Easy comforts, friendship, familiarity, small talk, blitz spirit, gallows humour, fish n chips, tea, rain

But dear England, I know you are no rose-tinted spectacle. If the world has cancer, then it is on your body the tumour grows.

A population more enslaved and disenfranchised than poverty ravaged faces pumped out through televisions on charity nights designed to remind us how fortunate we are. Fortunate to have had our ancestors evicted through force from their natural environs to alien cities populated by clamouring clacking metal monsters. Fortunate to live in a democracy where empty homes are denied to the displaced, where warriors of peace are silenced by houses of politicians. Fortunate to live in isolation in a red bricked cage with hot running water and a soft pillow on which to lie your exhausted head, the sole escape from your too-comfortable prison through the sweet elixir of slumber.

In exile the chains that bind me to my country-folk are reforged; I share in their bondage no matter what foreign soil I tread, what personal freedom I find.  Who would chose a solitary sunny utopia, over standing next to friends on the battle-lines?

Now I return to battle once more, your love an archived memory, the prize my sacred country.