Dangling

A curious orange glow an hour before sunset, setting off the russet in the beech and oak leaves, and in the bracken hill cover. And, If I`d seen any, from past memories the roe deer too would be a dull brown, setting off their white tails nicely, as they bobbed into cover.

I wanted to set myself another 10 second timer challenge: this time to hang by my hands from a branch: . . . Click ! . . .  But, as I`d been bouldering with Robin yesterday all strength had seeped from my arms and so instead I hoisted myself (eventually) up the easy branches of a 50 year old oak tree. At twenty feet or so (and once I trusted my hand and footholds not to snap. as has happened) I took in the view, enjoyed a long moment: the dusk gathering everything into that orange filter, reminiscent in a way of the orange pallor hanging over New Zealand skies today.

In a peripheral way I`ve been thinking about art and more particularly about my exhibition in Peebles, and what to do next. All my endeavours of any creative worth are there. Together in that beautiful space. All these inner havens, reliquaries of meaning, are corralled into one room. Whether people buy the pieces or not, their value is in not being materially useful; each of them has provided me with warmth and transformed mundanity into something elevated and enriching. And, in a world where skies grow ominously orange: to invest so much time and energy in creating objects of no practical utility is a gesture of faith and of hope. And of love too.

Clambering down from the tree (a small grouping of oak amongst a larger cluster of beech, in a forest mainly of larch and spruce) and picking through clumps of dead fern fronds, I found the logging road. If turning left, after a hard climb I would find myself up on the Minch Moor. To the right, the trail leads home. The sky was darkening and so together the path and I ran rightwards, alongside the Stell Burn, until I turned in at my wooden ex Forestry house at the forest`s northern gateway, while the water continued past until merging with the Tweed, a quarter mile beyond.