TBTM

Wild geese

TBTE - now available with sound effects

Well, things were getting so bad (see comments to previous post) that I simply had to get out for a head-clearing walk. The sun sets so early these days that it's a mad dash to catch the last of the light immediately after collecting Small Doyle #3 from school. But it was well worth it - cold, clear and crisp - and the only nuisance was that I was too late for the cafe at which I had planned to treat myself to a large, frothy hot chocolate (disappointment level = extreme).

Anyway, here's TBTE (ie the beach this evening) - and I've just been remarkably clever (which proves that the walk worked its magic on my befuddled brain) and uploaded a video clip as well, so you can listen to the Muddy Island at dusk (and the panting noises in the background are my dog, incidentally, not me (or anyone else!)).

(If you'd like to see more photos of Mersea, Sam's taken some amazing ones on the beach recently, which you can see here, here and here. )

Here's the video :

Mud

Mud is Beauty in the making,
Mud is melody awaking;
Laughter, leafy whisperings,
Butterflies with rainbow wings;
Baby babble, lover's sighs,
Bobolink in lucent skies;
Ardours of heroic blood
All stem back to Matrix Mud.

Mud is mankind in the moulding,
Heaven's mystery unfolding;
Miracles of mighty men,
Raphael's brush and Shakespear's pen;
Sculpture, music, all we owe
Mozart, Michael Angelo;
Wonder, worship, dreaming spire,
Issue out of primal mire.

In the raw, red womb of Time
Man evolved from cosmic slime;
And our thaumaturgic day
Had its source in ooze and clay . . .
But I have not power to see
Such stupendous alchemy:
And in star-bright lily bud
Lo! I worship Mother Mud.

(Robert Service)

Compare the photo above with the similar view taken on the day of the surge tide. In the distance is Mersea's historic Oyster Packing Shed.

Another bad Brent geese photo, though slightly better than last night's because taken half an hour earlier. Small snappy camera still couldn't cope, however. I will try to get out and capture them in proper daylight soon!

For a perfectly amazing 'TBTM' photo - taken while I was still tucked up in bed with a cup of tea, reading - see Sam's blog.

A dull, grey day

The sea is flecked with bars of grey,
The dull dead wind is out of tune . . .
And overhead the curlews cry

(Oscar Wilde)

This very poor photo was taken at dusk - 4.40 pm - with my unsophisticated little snappy camera. I'm only including it here because it shows the largest number of Brent geese I've seen at this end of the Muddy Island so far this year. As regular readers of Musings will know, I've got rather a thing about these birds. The noise was tremendous. I took some more snaps as they flew overhead, but those were even worse than this one (can this be possible? unfortunately, yes).

Four of the geese who decided to go for a twilight swim instead of returning to the fields with the rest of the flock.

'. . . holding up clouds with three syllables . . .'

Here's another Wild Goose Poem for you (see some of my previous posts).

This one is brand new and hot off the press. It's by Michael Gravel , who's a poet in Edmonton, Alberta. It landed in my email inbox one Friday last month because I'm on Michael's Friday's Poem mailing list (why not sign up yourself? - his poems are brilliant and thought-provoking and they can brighten up a working Friday in a flash).

I didn't publish it here when it first arrived (even though its timing was so very apt), because it's ©, and I couldn't link to it because it wasn't on Michael's website at the time.

But it is now, so click here to enjoy Wild Geese

The last goose

Just because it's National Poetry Day . . . here's another Goose Poem. Promise this will be the last . . . at least for a while.

THE WILD GEESE
Katharine Tynan (1861-1931)

Wild geese fly overhead
In the wild Autumn weather.
Souls of the newly-dead
Crying and flying together.

Home from the last great fight,
The souls of the Irish farin'
With a wild heart in the night,
A grey eye turned to Erin.

High and high in the sky,
From the red fields of slaughter
Ever they fly and cry
For the brown bog, the grey water.

Wild geese in the wild even,
Steady and strong their flight,
Their beds are made in Heaven,
All of the down white.

They have forgone that bliss
Till they have seen once more
The little land of peace,
Green and bright as of yore.

High o'er the sheep and cattle,
The bogs and the mountains lone,
The souls new-home from the battle
Cry their love and are flown.

From The Holy War 1916

More wild geese

Wild Geese
by Mary Oliver (b. 1935)

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting —
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

The Wild Geese
by Violet Jacob (1863 - 1946)

'Oh, tell me what was on yer road, ye roarin' norlan
As ye cam' blawin' frae the land that's niver frae my mind?
My feet they trayvel England, but I'm deein' for the north—'
'My man, I heard the siller tides rin up the Firth o' Forth.'

'Aye, Wind, I ken them well eneuch, and fine they fa' and rise,
And fain I'd feel the creepin' mist on yonder shore that lies,
But tell me, ere ye passed them by, what saw ye on the way ?'
'My man, I rocked the rovin' gulls that sail abune the Tay.'

'But saw ye naethin', leein' Wind, afore ye cam' to Fife?
There's muckle lyin' yont the Tay that's mair to me nor life.'
'My man, I swept the Angus braes ye haena trod for years—'
'O Wind, forgie a hameless loon that canna see for tears!—'

'And far abune the Angus straths I saw the wild geese flee,
A lang, lang skein o' beatin' wings wi' their heids towards the sea,
And aye their cryin' voices trailed ahint them on the air—'
'O Wind, hae maircy, haud yer whisht, for I daurna listen mair!'

Chasing wild geese

It's that time of year when geese are in the the skies, and in my thoughts. And not just mine, it seems - geese are suddenly turning up in blogs all over the place!

As I child I lived near a network of gravel quarries which were turned over the years into lakes and are now terrifically popular with anglers and windsurfers. Back then, before they were 'developed', the pits simply filled up with water and attracted all kinds of wildlife, notably large flocks of Canada geese , which used to make the most tremendous noise at dawn and dusk and keep small children (like me) rather miserably awake when we were trying to get to sleep and dream about The Woodentops or Tales of the Riverbank .

However, today's story of coincidental geese-related matters properly begins with My Boy (10), who, having been encouraged by his English teacher (and his mother, it goes without saying) to explore the world of books beyond Biggles and Commando Magazines, cleverly contrived to broaden his literary horizons whilst remaining firmly within the general theme of War. So we had Ian Serraillier's The Silver Sword and Martin Booth's War Dog and then I suggested Paul Gallicoe's The Snow Goose - on the grounds that not only is it set in the Essex marshes [tick] and is full of seabirds [tick] but it involves the British evacuation from Dunkirk [A** tick, tick, tick].

So off he went, enthusiastically, with one of the several editions still lurking in the family bookshelves (my first-ever copy I gave to someone whom I loved and lost) and yesterday he finished it, and was sad that it had come to an end, and wants to read it all over again (except that it's Readathon or Bookathon or somesuch at school, in which the emphasis is on quantity, not quality (or repetition) but since it is generally considered to be A Good Thing, we'll let it off).

I've loved The Snow Goose for many years – since I was not much older than My Boy, and long, long before I migrated to Essex (from London) and made these bleak eastern marshlands my home. I still read it regularly – it perfectly captures the ancient wintry loneliness of this curlew-haunted coastline and it tells of an unlikely and hopeless love and is very, well . . . ‘haunting’ is the only word, really. Especially so if you have ever trudged for many miles along the sea walls hereabouts, with their endless mud and wind-bleached sedges and rushes and sea-lavender and have watched the Brent geese flying in formation against the vast grey skies. I've never seen a snow goose, though.

And so to the blogs and the sudden flurry of goosey activity remarked upon above: On Dougal's Mersea Wildlife blog there's a note that the first of the Brent geese have arrived here on the Muddy Island - all eight of them. Dovegreyreader has recently considered The Snow Goose , and in particular the new edition with lovely illustrations by Angela Barrett.

Over on RandomDistractions, meanwhile, we have a post about geese arriving back in Devon and some interesting thoughts about the lessons that we can learn from the behaviour of these birds: geese as a model for corporate team building (not as bizarre as it might sound). This piece by Maureen inspired me to muse upon the fact that the early Celtic church in Western Scotland chose the goose as a symbol of the holy spirit - wild, free and very noisy - rather than the quiet and gentle dove adopted elsewhere.

On the Isle of Iona, the Iona Community, founded in 1938, explores Celtic spirituality alongside contemporary approaches to social justice, peace, and spirituality and has adopted the Celtic goose as its logo. The history of the Community, Chasing the Wild Goose, is published by its Wild Goose publications. Iona is one of the most special places on earth - certainly in the British Isles. St Columba called the island, ‘Iona of my heart’. George MacLeod, founder of the Community, described it as ‘a thin place’, where earth and heaven are not far apart'.

While searching for an image of the stylised 'Iona Goose' design, I happened upon another blog, Eternal Echoes, and a recent post which delves much more deeply into the fascinating Goose-as-Holy-Spirit connection.

Which brings me not very neatly to my next goosey musing. As a teenager in the 1970s (yep, 'fraid so), I saved up and bought the LP of Camel's 'concept' album The Snow Goose and thought myself no end of a hip, cool chick as I carried it proudly home. While my female classmates were bopping to the glam rock bands of the day, I was lost in a sound-world which didn't really capture what the novel meant to me, but it was nevertheless very interesting and gave me a useful entree into the conversation of the serious, grown-up boys with electric guitars in the sixth form, after whom I lusted (in a purely intellectual way, of course) at the time.

I downloaded a few tracks from iTunes earlier this year, to see how it sounded to my middle-aged ears (my vinyl version has long-since disappeared into a boot-sale somewhere or possibly still lives in the depths of my parents' garage). The answer was . . . 'very dated, but not without its charms'. You can listen to brief clips of all the tracks on Amazon, where you will also see that the digitally re-mastered CD version has amassed quite a healthy collection of five-star reviews from Listeners of a Certain Age.

And finally . . . . A book that has been on my 'to read' pile for literally years - which is disgraceful and I now feel inspired to rectify this as soon as possible - The Snow Geese by William Fiennes.

'With this beautiful, haunting debut Fiennes joins that small, very special band of writer-explorers - Emerson and Thoreau, Annie Dilard and Bruce Chatwin - who give us another pair of eyes: he has renewed the variety and wonder of the world' - Marina Warner. 'Fiennes is a very fine writer and this book is pure delight' - Peter Carey.

I knew it was essential reading when I bought it. I'm resolved to discover that I was right.