Leaves and Falling Rain

A quiet day, warm and a little stuffy, as it has been these last few days. Waiting-for-a-storm weather, misting the hills like a Japanese painting, with the sort of light that intensifies the Green Man darkness under or inside the trees. We drove across the border to Bleddfa, a tiny village on the edge of the Radnor Forest, the foothills of the Radnor hills; a long long straight road, up and up, winding along the valley in swoops and hairpins; pine forest and fields knee-deep in buttercups and brown cows; it could be the foothills of the Alps. Bleddfa is famous for its artists' community and the old schoolhouse is now an exhibition space, with an exhibition of charcoal drawings by an artist called Celia Read. Strong, powerful work, intense, unsettling, but also strangely calming. She had hand-written quotations from Rilke and a book called The Poetics of Space, quiet deep thoughts about inner landscapes and domestic vastness, a beautiful idea which illuminated the dark drawings. The church next door was also part of the artists group but was seven hundred years old, a plain simple space, deep windows and a fantastic wooden roof. The huge wooden door alone - studded with nails, repaired and patched, bone-dry and bone-coloured, as if made of massive driftwood timbers - was worth the drive. And in the Lugg valley as we neared the house, a red kite being mobbed by swifts and swallows; a bird made of blades, a bird raggedy-sharp, razor-edged, being swooped over at by birds like black scythes.

And now it rains and in green darkness and wet gloom the month draws to an end. At the beginning of the Journal my time-sense looked backwards, as the days lengthened I remembered the dark months just behind me; now I look forward to warm summer nights and have lost the sense of the days lengthening. Tomorrow it all ends...