Forget -we-not

This has been one of those weeks that seems to have already lasted at least eleven months. There’ve been three seasons, two birthdays, a family gathering, a new war to keep us scrolling pointlessly, some expensive and possibly terminal noises emanating from the nether regions of my 16 year old car, many impenetrable online forms to deal with, one scheduled overnight hospitalisation and much talk of wedding plans. Two of us are limping-

I haz a serious hurty. Not a limping. When I rise from my Golden Retreevr slumbers, one of my three, two, five? fourlegs feels like it’s been chewed by teefs. I would like extra snac to compensate because clearly it’s all your fault, Hoom.

and one of us is seriously wondering if she can go offline/dark and thus avoid the eye of Sauron tracking her rebellious utterings. On reflection, these days it’s well-nigh impossible to be unsurveilled ; even out here in the Boonies, I’m tracked by a series of Ring doorbells monitoring me as I walk past on a single track lane. Admittedly, plotting the downfall of 21st C capitalism, but still…We are tracked from dawn to dusk and more.

Ahem. We’re not. We’ve gone properly Dark and are slowly becoming Tree. While we’re here though, one of us would like to say thankyou to their dedicated Slave for the regular morning graveside visits and convos. Much appreciated. It is peaceful down here in the dark waiting to be transformed into a being of bark and branches, but it’s also pretty quiet. The regular morning babble from a still-grieving Slave breaks the monotony and reminds us that all lives, no matter how small and brief, matter.

Transmothgrified. Ink and pencil, personal work marking the loss of a beloved family dog and guinea pig within the same month.

The moth image came from somewhere deep in my memory - the idea of a soul ( if you go in for such notions) as a moth or butterfly is nothing new, but surfaces in my thoughts from time to time, and very much did so the day after we buried Vesper-who-will-be-Tree. I took myself out for a walk and weep howl and met a moth, hovering at eye height, on a freezing cold morning when no sensible moth would normally venture forth.

And I may have been clutching at straws, but there was a huge comfort to be had in seeing this airborne avatar of a soul at a time when I’d just consigned a beloved guinea pig to the earth. To my raw sensibilities, the moth brought a message about the cyclical nature of birth and death and felt, briefly, like Vesper was part of everything, and that nothing essential had been lost.

Er… I miss my corporeal body, actually. That felt pretty blooming essential to me, at the time. And I miss Pippin, the big galoot.

Rude! I is not galoot. Wotever that might be. I is Pippin, destroyer of basil, renderer of cavolo Nero, masticator of carrot and emperor of the Kingdom of the Magic Bean. And misser of Vesper. Where have you gone, Bro’?

To return to the Vesper-moth. Or my psychobabble surrounding my meeting with said insect. May we all meet golden moths, or energetic beings of light, and may they grant us wings to raise us from darkness into light. Because, right now, we are stumbling around in an ignorance as black as night. Boy, what a week.

You must mean - what a wheek.

Sorry. Couldn’t resist. Lying out here of an evening, under my counterpane of earth, I can’t actually see the spin of the stars, but I feel them just the same. The tidal pull of the full moon, the sun’s changing tempo of light and dark, and, if you’re so inclined, the momentous alignments and influences of the gas giants and other orbs that hang in our night sky. Once I’m completely Tree, I’ll begin to bud and unfurl and s..t…r…e…t…c…h upwards to meet the sky. I’ll become a creature of earth and air, existing between two worlds and merging with the atoms of both. This isn’t death in the traditional sense, it’s a rearrangement of particles into many differing but still coherent forms. Onwards!

Oh, man. That was deeeeeep. You can pigsplain it all to me in due course when My Time Comes, but for now, I am staving off the where-are-you-bro’ blues one stalk of Timothy hay at a time. Nom, nom, nom..

The rest of this week has been spent reacquainting myself with my Lino cutting tools, sharpening them and then starting work on a little Maker’s Mark that I’ve tried ( and failed) to make before. This time, I swear, this time.

working drawings for Lino cut maker's mark

The idea is to carve it, print it, photograph it and sling it on here and also my website¹ so that if you’d like to use it to point out the fact that you too have handmade your artwork, composition, artefact, or unspecified creative endeavour without the use of artificial intelligence. Although the last word in that much-used couplet is under review. Is it intelligent? I have no idea, all I know is that I do not want it to be part of my creative process. I’d love if it would do the bureaucratic grunt work and thus free me up to paint and draw and make art, but so far, I’ve managed to resist the siren-song of letting a bot loose in my affairs.

And the recent deal between open AI and the Shite House is terrifying. Surveillance central, anyone? Death dealing drones without human oversight? Oh boy. Dark times. Bring on the golden moths. May our thoughts take flight on the wings they bear. The light is in the ascendant, spring is here, hold onto Hope.

And talking of Hope… I’m heading out to poke green things through letterboxes. Not plants, or grasses but small leaflets on behalf of the Scottish Greens. May 7th is an important local election. I don’t know about you but I definitely do not want the same old, same old doing the same old not a whole lot again. And I most definitely do not want the frog-faced, pint-swilling hypocrite that rhymes with garage. That’s such a terrifying prospect, it made me finally nail my colours to the mast and join the Green Party. Twice. Once for the Green Party of England and Wales and once more for the Scottish Greens. Double greens! Broccoli and spinach. Join me. Join us. Hope, not fear.

Slainte, y’all. Hope no dogs take exception to me posting things through their doors…

1. Of course, all this Lino-cutting activity is me delaying the ghastly moment when I re-engage with the digital hellscape of redoing my website. A colleague and pal alerted me to the fact that my laboriously hand-wrought ( by me, dammit, by me) website wasn’t loading properly but it appears to be loading just fine for the bots who leave me messages on my contact page. They can get it to work perfectly and are queueing up in droves to inform me how badly some of my books are doing on ye olde amazon rankings and informing me that what I need is basically them, working for me, at vast expense to ‘realise my books’ full potential. To which, if I could be arsed, I’d reply with a resounding FOAD, but frankly, life is too short. Anyhoo. Website seems to work just fine. If you’re so inclined, you might go have a look at it and let me know if it's working.