Greasy Joan and her pot!

My mother often used to quote the last line of this extract from Shakespeare and it always sounded rather unpleasant and made us all pull faces! How sad to have been 'Joan' and come down through the centuries as 'greasy Joan' - I wonder if she really existed?

The rest of it is so appropriate tonight as we go through another long winter of so much snow and cold...I love the line: 'when coughing drowns the parson's saw' since, wherever you go nowadays there is so much sniffing and coughing and ruddy cheeks in the cold!

When icicles hang by the wall
And Dick the shepherd blows his nail
And Tom bears logs into the hall,
And milk comes frozen home in pail,
When Blood is nipped and ways be foul,
Then nightly sings the staring owl,
Tu-who;
Tu-whit, tu-who: a merry note,
While greasy Joan doth keel the pot.

When all aloud the wind doth blow,
And coughing drowns the parson's saw,
And birds sit brooding in the snow,
And Marian's nose looks red and raw
When roasted crabs hiss in the bowl,
Then nightly sings the staring owl,
Tu-who;
Tu-whit, tu-who: a merry note,
While greasy Joan doth keel the pot.

Inherit the Earth

There is a beautiful short poem by Robert Frost that encapsulates how we feel sometimes:

The rain to the wind said,
"You push and I'll pelt."
They so smote the garden bed
That flowers actually knelt
And lay lodged - though not dead.
I know how the flowers felt.

England right now seems to be the 'land of endless winter.' I think it has snowed everyday in February - and we so long for the daffodils and snowdrops that are normally out by now. Day after day, the news reports are filled with the usual horrors of child murders and neglect, the horrific accounts from the Australian fires and the interminable arguments about who is responsible for the so-called credit crunch. People seem a bit down in the dumps to say the least.

It all brings to mind one question, though. Suddenly everyone is angry with the bankers, the government...and, in my view, quite rightly so, but isn't there something else to see? In whom or what do we put our faith? Let's face it, all the institutions to which people hand over their power are proving to be very corrupt or unreliable. Churches hiding paedophiles; government ministers feathering their own nests while telling everyone else to tighten their belts; banks, to whom we go a-grovelling for a loan, turning out to have made far greater financial mistakes than we have. And the part that makes me smile is the hammered-home message about global warming (another excuse for another tax?).

Meanwhile, there goes Mother Nature in all Her glory. She goes by Her cycles - sometimes there are ice ages; sometimes there are ages of global warmth, and the idea that somehow 'puny' man, who arrived on earth long ages after the earth came into being, can damage her is the utmost in arrogance. Funny how She can bring the country (well, London!) to a stand-still in one blizzard, and even then people refuse to see that She is the powerful one. The floods, melting polar ice caps, the whole of it, for which those who view the world as their domain like to think we are all responsible really, in my view, need to get over their arrogance and start loving Nature and acknowledging that they don't rule the world at all. How much more blatant can it get before they see? Before we all see that the real truth and power lies within ourselves.

When Hitler planned to command the world, the people who followed him were not all 'evil' or anti-Semitic (to begin with). They were simply led like sheep and allowed themselves to be brainwashed. We have all spent too long believing that someone else knows better than we do; that there are those to whom we must grovel, or those in authority whom we must obey. Of course, this isn't a call to anarchy. We need order too, for so many varied minds and beings so live in harmony. But, really, let's get over the notion that we cannot trust ourselves. Let's grow up and put our faith in something better than those who seek power. Let's not see ourselves in a constant battle against Nature. Let's not see Nature as something to be conquered. Let's love Nature in all Her expressions - the animals (not gorging ourselves, to our own detriment, on battery-farmed innocent creatures), the trees (not cutting them down because a child might climb one and be injured??), the oceans, even the cold, snowy, wet seasons. We don't have to go overboard believing what some arrogant ministers would have us believe. We, surely, need to listen to our own voice and be our own expressions of what it is to be a Child of God/Nature/Life....Who we really are.

"Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth." Indeed!

(Oh...since, from midnight last night all emails, telephone calls and probably internet posts now posted from England, and maybe our sneezes, hiccups and anything else we do, are being stored by our government - at an enormous cost in a time of economic crisis! and in a similar way to Soviet Russian bugging - I hope that which ever government department stores this one, you read it and enjoy it! Really, have you nothing better to do? Why not go out and look at the trees instead? You will learn a lot more there than here!).

The Windy Moors

The snow continues and, apart from the images it evokes of Imperial Russia - the winter balls, the opulent carriages, the wilderness of Siberia, and the snowflakes on the lamps of Grand Duke Serge's carriage, as he and Ella (Grand Duchess Elizabeth) emerge from the theatre only days before his assassination; Ella, kneeling over his remains in the snow...It also brings to mind the 'wily windy Moors' of Emily Bronte's beautiful experience (and Kate Bush's fabulous interpretation of it!).

Today, according to the local news, Haworth was deep in snow. The silence and bleakness of snow seems so apt for the fascinating soul of Emily Bronte! Seemingly sheltered, the daughter of a parson, cut off from the world, despising having to be in company - to the extent that she was ill if she were compelled to be away from the freedom of the Moors and her own inner world for any length of time - she lived within herself with so mystical and imaginative an inner life that she seemed barely capable of surviving in the day-to-day world. The contrast of appearances and what is really so, is so striking in Emily Bronte!

At the top of a hill, the parsonage overlooks a graveyard where many of the headstones were originally laid flat on the earth so that wolves didn't dig up the bodies, or so that - which is more macabre? - the undertakers could turn the stones over and engrave names on the other side to fit more bodies into the graves! This was the view from Emily's windows. All around was the great expanse of the Moors. She never married. She never did very much at all. A brief spell in Brussels, where she was viewed as unfriendly; working as a teacher and hating every moment that kept her away from the freedom to walk and think and be with her beautiful animal friends...And yet, what an inner life that came out in such writing as 'Wuthering Heights' with its darkness and shadow side, with its passion and sheer, raw, untamed emotion and 'violence' - truly Nature in the raw. No wonder she is seen as such a 'Pagan soul'!

To me, Emily Bronte is a true mystic. Her soul was forever 'in another place' and unfettered. If only she had found a way to live on earth what her soul was reaching for! Her brilliant poem The Prisoner speaks so clearly of that anguish of disparity between 'what the soul knows' and physical life; the sense of being enchained in a body:

...Mute music soothes my breast - unutter'd harmony
That I could never dream, till Earth was lost to me.

Then dawns the Invisible; the Unseen its truth reveals;
My outward sense is gone, my inward essence feels;
Its wings are almost free--its home, its harbour found,
Measuring the gulf, it stoops, and dares the final bound.

O dreadful is the check - intense the agony -
When the ear begins to hear, and the eye begins to see;
When the pulse begins to throb - the brain to think again -
The soul to feel the flesh, and the flesh to feel the chain.

I wish she could have found a way for her Spirit to be free, without having to leave at such an early age. But she loved the inner worlds, and the beautiful snow creates that sense of
stillness, wherein the inner and the outer merge.

Birds Singing In the Snow

December and there was snow - how perfect is that? It wasn't the beautiful depths of snow as on André's lovely photograph but perhaps it will come and go and, for the first time in years, we will have a proper white Christmas.
Once all the traffic rush and bothers about transport are over, there is something so calming about the snow; a sort of stillness when all the sounds are muffled, as though Nature is saying, "It's time to be still and reflective." Seeing the frozen grass and fallen leaves, like the white hair of the earth, it seemed as though it was the part of the year's cycle when Nature is old and wise and still. It brings a quietness inside.
Strange how the birds seem to rejoice in the snow! On the damp, grey days, the birds seem so silent but in the icy sunshine, they all start singing again. There is something so beautiful about the sound of winter birds singing in the snow.