Lost in Time

A reflection on the elasticity of springtime in the early weeks of lockdown, in this piece written in the middle of April 2020. Published on the Clearing by Little Toller:
https://www.littletoller.co.uk/the-clearing/lost-in-time-by-martin-maudsley/

 Recently I’ve lost all sense of time. At least, time in the conventional meaning of the word. Until recently, working as a freelance storyteller in schools and community projects and being a parent of primary-aged children, my time was planned, prepared and paid for. But now, like many, my diary has been divested of all dates and schedules for the (un)foreseeable future. The once familiar rhythms and routines of school and work, home and holiday have all blurred into one; or rather none. It reminds of something storyteller Hugh Lupton once said about there being two types of time: time that travels forward in a straight line and time that travels round in circles. By losing track of the straight arrow of daily life I’m finding a more acute sense of circular time: circadian and seasonal rhythms that regulate the more-than-human world around me.

This morning whilst writing my journal, which has become a welcome refuge in a time of sudden storytelling silence, I realised I had no concept of how long it had been since lock-down  – 10 days, 2 weeks, longer? I can no longer identify the exact date or day of the week, nor recall with any clarity the last day that I actually worked. Even thinking of such things seems suddenly alien. Yet in a short space of time my being and behaviour have adjusted, naturally, to the movements of the sun and the moon. I wake each morning, invariably, at daybreak with the curtains twitching and a dawn chorus of birdsong outside in full flow. I open our bedroom window at night in anticipation of the aural morning glory, and wonder why I didn’t do so before? As a consequence of becoming an early riser I go to bed earlier too but before then I crave being outdoors at dusk – to sense the soft blanket of darkness closing around me. Like a seedling becoming gradually frost-hardened I need to feel each degree of ‘dimmity’ – the slow seeping of light. If I’m forced to be indoors I don’t switch on the lights until the last moment; revelling in the strangeness of my own house in the gloaming.  We’re still lighting a fire in the woodburner in these times of warm days but chilly nights and I love its flickering light in the semi-darkness.

After supper, with the kids reading in their beds upstairs, I’m often compelled to step outside to take in the night air. If I haven’t done so already I’ll go for a walk, a circular peripheral route, around the edges of the houses, beating the bounds of the village on my own. I relish the stillness and the quiet (even more pronounced now) that attune the eyes and ears to the small secrets of the natural world at night: a fox tail disappearing into the shadows, a ruffling of someone’s feathers in the ash trees, the distant call and response of  tawny owls. I’ll saunter slowly, pretending it’s aimless. Yet there’s usually a pressing purpose behind my footsteps: to meet the other ruler of diurnal rhythms – the moon. A few nights ago it was a full moon and the thought of seeing it had been pulling at me all day. From our house I had to walk around two dark lanes of houses before I finally found its luminous form, rising huge and heavy behind a tree line. It was such a jolt of joy to see it in splendid isolation against the deep-blue, still-starless sky – just me and the moon. In Anglo-Saxon namings, which reflect the seasonal rhythms of the land, this was ‘egg moon’ – the time when wild birds begin to lay their eggs.

In the garden a sense of time measured as growth is palpable on a daily, almost hourly, basis. The onions, lost in their beds, are starting to reveal their locations with green shoots whilst overwintering brassicas provide a growing profusion of purple sprouting. Broad bean and beetroot seedlings that were put down before lockdown are now ready to be planted outdoors. Inside the greenhouse there are a dozen trays with seeds at different stages of germination. I check them obsessively, several times a day, giving the bigger ones a tickle to encourage strong growth, and I can tell precisely which individuals have emerged since I last looked. It’s a time-lapse wave of growth that nowadays I have chance to capture in slow-motion. My time is lovingly lost in the garden; a morning or afternoon is gone in the blink of an eye without any conscious perception of its passing. Completely absorbed by the completion of each task, one leading to another, I gain a sense of intrinsic satisfaction that I rarely find elsewhere. I’ve been reflecting that I don’t often get such opportunity to see the fruits of my labour: the story-seeds I’ve scattered over the years have taken root and borne fruit (or not), without me being around to witness them.

Time, more than money which has limited value these days, has become common currency within our family. Spending time with each other, to some extent enforced, has also become an act of intentional generosity. The other day whilst on a constitutional family walk I impulsively offered an hour of my dedicated time, freely and for whatever purpose, to the first person that saw our first swallow of the year. The next hour was consumed with four pairs of eyes scraping the sky, false alarms and playful pranks. Until, in the same moment I heard its chattering call, my 10 year old son spotted one soaring past and trilled in triumph. An hour later, an hour in the garden was happily spent playing cricket together. For a few days my 8 year old daughter has persistently requested to sleep outside in the garden, under the stars. It’s been warm weather for a while now but it’s still April-time, in Britain – not to be fooled with. Nevertheless the next night, on a make-shift mattress with hot water bottles in sleeping bags covered by more blankets, we lie side-by-side in the dark. We talk in whispers, as if we might disturb the night and spoil the magic. A story, a shooting star, then I’m listening to her breathing slowing into deep sleep-time. I stir well before first light and am surprised to hear an early bird, a robin, already rehearsing its song. By dawn we’re both wide awake and smiling, blanketed by birdsong in the chill of the air. Time well spent.

Away from the garden, in the fields and woods around the hill that constitutes our realm of recreational exercise (and the setting of a letter to Vodafone), the wildflowers are already flowing in spring tides of yellow and white. In a quirk of timing this time-off has arrived during the most prolonged and gradual of the seasons: spring. Where we live in Dorset it stretches from January’s first stirrings through to the exuberant final flourish of exuberance in May. These passing, anonymous days unveil a series of sights and sounds that weave together into a symphony of spring. The early snowdrops, in naked white, have given way to the yellows of starry celandines, sunny dandelions and perfect egg-moon primroses. As I write the cowslips have just arrived to graze amongst the shaded grasses at the field edges.

The April-flowering cowslips remind me of a haunting fenland folktale I’ve been working on called The Green Mist. It tells of a young woman who fell ill one winter and became so white and weak it seemed unlikely she would last a day longer. Yet she hoped that the fair folk might bless her with the green mist that unfolds the flowers and lengthens the leaves of spring. So that morning she whispered through her window in desperate hope: “If only I could be as bright and alive as the cowslips that grow by the door, I wouldn’t mind if I faded, like them, in summer.” The capricious fairies listened and took her at her word. The green mist came. She revived the next day and was full of vigour and vitality through April, May and just into June but then as the cowslips faded in summer so she too withered once more; her season at an end.

I’m currently trying to write a book on seasonal folktales and folklore. With time on my hands it should be a good time, you’d think, to get on with it… except I’m missing a sense of urgency. Although inspiration is all around I’m so caught up in sensing the season it’s hard to find motivation to be particularly industrious. But it’s a good time for listening, letting stories settle in their own time rather than rushing to write them down. I’ve surprised myself how averse I’ve felt to any form of digital storytelling, or sharing stories online, although many others are doing so eloquently and generously. Losing my voice and vocation is teaching me to be still and quiet; to look at and listen to the world where stories are formed. My friend and fellow storyteller, Peter Stevenson, remarked recently how the time of year in folktales is often denoted by wild plants and animals, each with their seasonal specificity. Whilst the folk that first told these tales undoubtedly had intimate experience with the rhythms of the natural world, we still have that capacity for seasonal sensitivity that is both expressed and enhanced through stories.

As I think on these things a brimstone butterfly, fractured fragment of golden sunshine, floats in and out of the garden, in a flutter. By the gate a little holly blue, a scrap of cobalt sky, flits fussily around the overgrown ivy. All morning speckled woods have flirted with the garden hedge, but kept their social distance.  Then I suddenly feel the zing of spring as an orange tip arrives and alights on purple flower: an open-hearted honesty. Butterflies are such soulful sights – the ancient Greeks named them pyche, which also means soul. I recall a strange and charming Japanese folktale I’ve sometimes told about two friends who were walking together admiring the cherry blossom of spring: sakusura season. After lunch one of the friends falls asleep, beneath a bower of flowers, and dreams that he becomes a butterfly. On waking his friend tells him that whilst sleeping a little blue butterfly flew out of his mouth and fluttered around the trees. Man dreaming butterfly, or the other way round?

Springtime brings other welcome wings: migrant birds returning with the annual regularity that regulates our well-being. From the beginning of March my ears are attuned to hear the two-tone tune of the chiffchaff – the archangel of spring’s heralds. The skylarks, in fine voice this year near our house, elaborate the soundtrack of spring with a mellifluous melody that seems so happy it might burst their own hearts. A week ago my own heart was bursting to see that first, solitary swallow of the year, sweeping from the sea on warm, southerly wind. They say a single swallow does not a summer make, yet it certainly made my day, made me feel more at home somehow. Reading a book at home, Welsh Folktales by Peter Stevenson, I find a flighty fable accredited to Iolo Morganwg… One springing morning a skylark rose up on her ladder of song above a little orchard where an old pig was tied to a tree. The boar looked up with small, squinting eyes to grunt loudly at the frivolous bird: “Why do you fly so high and sing so long when no-one down here give a straw for your song?” The lark replied: “I sing because it’s spring and the sun is shining, and because I’m not tethered to a tree.”

I’m lost in time. Like all of us, I don’t know when this time will end. But I navigate naturally through each day, I look at the moon rather than the month and stop to sense each subtle shift in the season. And I’m caught by the moment: between swallows and swifts, after primroses and just before bluebells. Like a lark I’m happy it’s springtime and that, for now, I’m not tethered to anything as straight as time.

Autumn Holloway

An old sycamore is singing 
From its precarious perch on the edge of the bank
Catching the fleeting voice of the wind
And bringing it down into the roots of the holloway.

Yellow-green field maple leaves
Filter the slanting sunshine from above
Creating a cathedral of stained-glass light
Sanctified by terce-time birdsong.

The fields beyond are drenched with dew 
But here, beneath my feet, the fallen foliage
Is dry and drained of summer's sap 
Weaving a tapestry of faded colour.

Sitting on a stile: I smile
Looking back
At a morning's moment's magic
In the shifting spell of the seasons.

Still Swallows

Still swallows
scything the patch of pasture
neatly hemmed by threads of hedges
flourishing with flowers
a summer's afternoon ago, now
thickly thatched with blackberries
although the rain and wind
and frugal foragers, perhaps,
have pecked and picked the best

already
as I look again
across my field of view
the swallows have disappeared -
not yet departed -
but flown a little further
towards the sea and the south,
beyond my compass

Summer Time

A morning walk; along an old, familiar route on a brand new summer’s day. The way was flanked with fluttering wings - speckled woods spiralling through the holloway, merry mobs of meadow browns fussing over the verges and marbled whites dancing over bracken-top ballrooms. Here and there a basking gatekeeper guards the gaps between fields.

After an hour or so I stopped to sip and savour a flask-cup of coffee, finding shade in the westerly lee of hawthorn hedge. There I’m captured by another butterfly. In a buzzing blur of orange a large skipper lands on an extended stem of grass just a few inches from where I’m sitting. I smile. They’re such inherently happy creatures - skippy by nature. Maintaining my stillness I watch as it curls the tip of its teddy-bear abdomen and gently dabs the inner curve of the leaf-blade with a single white dot - an egg. I’m filled with pleasure at the privilege of seeing such a thing, unlooked for and unexpected. What’s more, there’s mercurial magic in that image-ful moment: a glimpse of the wistful mystery of summer. For me, more than any other, summer is the season that resonates with its own poignant reason: a febrile focal point of peak passion.

Spring is all about beginnings. We eagerly search for signs of incipience with no thought of its middle or end - it simply swells and blossoms into early summer.  At the other end of the seasonal spectrum autumn is open ended, more process than period, with its slow and mellow fading. Winter, of course, holds its own sense of stasis, when the earth is dark, cold and still. But despite the low-point of light the experience of winter is more fluid, mediated by the whims of weather that conspire, now and then, to cast a winter’s spell.

In contrast to these, summer’s time-induced tenderness can feel almost painful. In the build-up before mid-summer there’s a flurry and fluster, a sense that we need to be ready and in the right place, physically and mentally, to take advantage of the apogee that’s been accumulating and anticipated for weeks. Afterwards, there’s a sense of sadness, that summer's zenith has slipped through our fingers before we ever had chance to hold it. One moment there’s greenery and flowers, the next its seed-heads and browning. From then on it seems like a gaping chasm of time, spanning over a year, before we tread once more the hopeful slopes of summer’s summit.

Writer and storyteller Hugh Lupton speaks of two types of time: time that travels in straight lines and time that moves in circles. I like the imagery and its heuristic possibilities. It suggests a refraction of time, bending around us in a double-helix so that our inevitable forward trajectory is accompanied by the reassuring repetition of the seasons. It allows us somehow to feel rooted in movement. Each year I seem to notice something new about each recurring season that I haven’t perceived before; a distinctive expression of colour, or texture or sound. Such seasonal experiences annually accrete around us like growth rings of a tree - itself is a powerful, natural symbol of straight and circular time combined.

For us, as sentient seasonal beings, what better way to bring those two types of time together than through annual celebrations at important positions around the calendar? In doing so we share our sense of seasonality with others, and intentionally mark the intersections of people, place and points in time. In my own place, within my own community, I’ve regularly celebrated the merriness of May by raising a glass of ale to the rising sun from the top of a hill, at Apple Day by gathering together as we gather in the harvest and feast from the fat of the land and in deepest winter by wassailing the trees with mulled cider and sitting around the fire, dispelling the darkness with story and song.

But this is the first year I’ve had opportunity to meaningfully mark the peak of summer. I was invited, along with a few musicians, to help organise and facilitate a celebration – a brand-new ancient ceremony – to mark two times: the final completion of a new stone sculpture and the summer solstice sunrise, to which the sculpture was intentionally aligned. I arrived with two friends the evening before, better than setting an early morning alarm at home and an opportunity to see both sunset and sunrise at summer solstice. We were lucky with the weather - clear enough to see the slowly sinking sun on the Western horizon, but enough cloud to then scatter the sky with iridescent colours of crimson and vermillion. We stood and stared in awe for an hour or more, a dram of whisky moistening our mouths and minds. As the gloaming grew around us the air was strained with strange sounds. From the stand of trees below nightjars began calling – churring – in a continuous whirring and warbling; unearthly and unnerving but as much a blessing on the occasion as the blushes of the sunset. I laid out a mat and sleeping bag besides the stones but soon the weaselly wind moved to the north and sneaked its way alongside me. I didn’t sleep, surrounded by nightjars and night breezes, and illuminated by a week-old half-moon bright enough to bridge the night between sunset and sunrise.

Before sunrise a pale easterly light was washed across the hilltop heath; I wondered if we’d somehow missed the moment. But it was still only 4am, an hour before daybreak. The pre-dawning morning was suddenly punctuated with a thud of car door, and then more. People slowly arrived, shuffling around the stones in shadowy silence. We began with a tale of the dark, the Wild Hunt chasing the dawn in the form of a hare. Then merry music led us in procession to dance three times around the stones, clockwise with the sun. Together in a circle we declaimed words in praise of summer, invoking our peak passions both personal and communal. Someone shouted their affection for swifts, prized symbols of summer, and in response a drift of them swooped down from hidden heights and screamed a salutation. We pointed and smiled at such magic made manifest from the sky.

At the expected moment of dawn, pre-ordained but not presumed, the sun kept its appointment and crowned the crest of the hill with gold. Its bright beams poured through the stone-framed window created in its honour. Gasps of delight from all around were mingled with the sound of three gongs, in a shimmering melody of beaten-metal. To my side the sculptural creators, astronomer and stonemason, looked at each other anxiously then fist-punched the air. We finished with a tune and a tale. I told an Estonian myth, from the north lands where winter is night and summer is light. It tells of the sky god once calling two humans, a young man called Dusk and a young woman called Dawn, to become his celestial assistants in exchange for everlasting youth. Each evening Dusk cradles the sun in a blanket of night, each morning Dawn rekindles its flames and send it soaring into the sky. Eventually those two keepers of the sun fell in love, and begged the sky god to allow them to be together. To fulfil their desires he proposed a choice: either become mortal once more and live together, day and night, but only for the span of human life; or remain immortal in the heavens and come together, fully and freely, for just one night of the year – on summer’s solstice. They chose the latter, and in gratitude the sky god made summer solstice - when dawn and dusk are closest, the time of their peak passion - to be perfect as possible: the stars twinkle gently, the air is warm and soft, and the sweet scent of flowers rises up from the earth as they walk together across the sky.

On my own morning walk there’s the image of an egg-laying butterfly. It holds me spell-bound and still, until eventually I can appreciate and enjoy the sweetness of summer without holding too tight or fear its fading by looking too closely. Like the skipper I’m flying forward through the year, straight through and beyond peak passion, but the egg of next year’s summer is already laid and waiting to hatch, in its own circle of time.

#BirdWords #6 Rook

I awoke

beneath a raucous rookery

a cacophony of caws

as if the ash tree, near me,

had sprouted black feathers

instead of leaves

and was complaining loudly

at such an outrageous indignation.

The rooks eventually took to the air

flapping away from the tumescent ash

like tattered shreds

of plastic silage wrappers.

In twos and threes

they sailed off across the valley

like black knights dispatched on a quest

to accomplish dark deeds

in a kingdom of green.

Beltane

Meandering along the river: three friends

Through the woods in its growing verdure,

At the edge of April

The water ripples and riffles

Catching the last light of evening

Filtered through luminous lime-green leaves.

Cow parsley and hawthorn line the way

Buds newly bursting to gild the green

With frothy white flowers.

An orange glow in the gloaming

Guides us into the open Arms of the Royal Oak

Leaning against the grain of the wooden bar

To toast the season, fizzing

With fresh watercress ale brewed by a giant

We savour the moment and the company

By raising our glasses

To chink and drink accordingly.

Outside: a full moon, Egg Moon,

Breaks through the thinly clouded sky, until

It’s caught in the branches of a still bare ash

Where we stand and stare with wide-eyed wonder.

It’s still dark and starry as we stir

(Not quite) the next day

Dawn dreaming itself into being

As we stand innocently awake

Drinking tea and tasting the time between times

Others, from other places, assemble around us

Moving as strange shadows, but with common purpose

Silently stepping from the sleeping woodside

Towards a long-appointed meeting-place.

Now, there, then:

A blackbird, breaking the stillness

Then all around and all at once

The sound of more birds singing

A chorus of approval for the dawn.

A barrel of beer, Beltane-brewed,

Has been brought to the summit

At the peak of its powers

For this golden crowning moment

Relished and then instantly refreshed.

Behind us, in April: the pale full moon

Fading but flirting with its consorting star

Sublimely shifting from Evening to Morning.

But now the golden chariot of the sun has gathered speed

And inexorably climbs up the green hill

To kiss the white giant

Rudely defiant and holding us together with his presence.

A song and a dance

A dalliance between ancient and new

Until merry with May, and smiling,

We slowly roll down the hill

Following an empty barrel of beer.