online: 8 december 2006
modified: 7, 8 december 2006

7 december 2006 after a storm


I was delayed by a very local storm, a dark grey sky with much rain and thunder for a few minutes, and then sunshine... (i heard later that there was a small tornado about 2 miles (or 3km) away... i see now that it ripped off a house roof, threw cars and debris about the street, and broke open windows and doors... i don't remember hearing of tornadoes in Britain but apparently there are many small ones each year, more so than in the mainland of Europe...)

My thoughts are in tumult also today... reading, radio, websurfing, and the suddenly popular phrase 'out of the box', are leading me to rethink my ideas (yet again)... to wonder at the contrasting worlds inside organisations and outside them... and how my current fiction the electric book will i hope relate to our experiences of being both trapped inside the consumer culture and yet able to look beyond it and even to change it... looking and acting beyond it may be the only way to solve global problems that the consumer culture creates, or forces us to!... (time to say this more publicly, perhaps?)

...storms often seem to bring the best out of me, i think!... i remember several diary entries about storms but cannot find them at the moment



...walking in the still strong wind from a random point near to the outdoor cafe (where i had some soup and read a dreadful forecast of more conflict in Iraq) to another random spot in the utopian valley, as i call it...

...on my way between these points i took a little detour to see how Barbara Hepworth's sculpture (Empyrean) looks after heavy rain... its mosses, (yellow, green, white, black) look brighter and the tilt of this upright figure now seems slightly greater, and the graffiti looks worse when wetted by the rain...

...as i walk through woodland about a dozen crows rise, as one, from the ground... to perch in the branches as i approach...

...i am pleased that i found a way through unfamiliar woodland to arrive exactly at a narrow gate leading to the bridle path in Sandy Heath...

...on the way i see a huge (beech?) tree trunk growing so strongly and so robustly out of sloping ground...

...in Sandy Heath: the bridle path is swept clean of mud and leaves - in little river beds of sand and pebbles left by rain water... there are no footprints or horse-shoe prints today - am i the first to walk here after the storm?...

...and i realise, as i walk, that writing this diary is one way of living 'outside the box'*... and at this i feel content, no longer wondering 'what it is for', this play-like work!

...then i see bright metallic blue-green micro mosses growing on the trunks of twisted oaks... i bring back a fragment of moss-growing bark to remind me of the artificial appearance of some things natural...

...a shoe-deep pool of water on the path forces me to step onto the wet and muddy ground...

and as i sit briefly on a seat by the bridle path i notice how the trees, now bare of leaves, seem alive today, twisting and thrusting with the energy of growth, even in winter...




*outside 'the box of rationality' i was thinking of the deadliness of industrially fixed aims and reasons... rationality is not good, to my mind, unless it is free to change...
'the ratio of all we have already known, is not the same as that it shall be when we know more'
wrote William Blake in 1788 (in
There is no Natural Religion)!





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