These pieces are ongoing responses to Life, reflecting my interest in art and music, as well as what Buddhists call 'the manure of experience'. Future titles will include an essay on Silence, a piece on Aquinas and the Zen Master, and a short story called Chicken Legs.
THE TREE ANGEL
"I never did find the bridleway that led to the disused church that Saturday morning. I turned back in the car several times along the winding road but there was no signpost. I’d been there once before, to this isolated chapel of pale clunch built a thousand years ago when man’s soul was still tuned in to itself. I remembered it as a simple space divided by a squat arch, a chancel, a monolithic altar, the timbered roof of a barn, a flagstone floor. Light shunting through narrow windows, the silence a presence, a touch on the skin. Outside, gravestones half-hidden in the long midsummer grasses, tall elms shimmering, the sound of summer rain.
Some invisible hand did not allow me to disturb the memory that morning. It led me instead across to another part of the land under a wind-blown sky. The fields were breathing quietly on a planet seemingly deserted by Man. Where had everyone gone, fled from this beauty? herded into the safety of supermarkets and traffic jams? sucked down the vortex of a computer screen? No matter, sighed the land, here is peace. The branches of a plane tree dangled over the bridge, its leaves drinking from a pool like a deer lapping water..."