Bumblehill

centuriespast:

Ibn Bakhtīshū˓, (d. 1058)
Manāfi˓-i al-ḥayavā (The Benefits of Animals), in Persian
Persia, Maragha, between 1297 and 1300, for Shams al-Dīn Ibn Żiyā˒ al-Dīn al-Zūshkī

the Morgan Library

Beautiful.

(via khushushban)

The months come around again,
and we are in the same place;
full moons, cherries in bloom,
the same deer, the same frogs,
the same helpless scratching at the dirt.
You leave poems I can’t read
behind on the sheets,
I try to teach you songs made of twigs and frost.

— from “The Fox-Wife’s Invitation” by Jeannine Hall Gailey

Read the full poem here.

Image above: an old Fox Wife sketch of mine, as rumpled as a poem left on the sheets….

I want to learn to sing songs of twigs and frost.

alexdallymacfarlane:

I’ve seen this photo a couple of times in fox photosets - I wonder where and when it was taken. Who the girl was/is. What her story was/is.

Ellen Kushner alerted me to this wonderful fox girl. I love it…as she knew I would.

“Love is a powerful tool, and maybe, just maybe, before the last little town is corrupted and the last of the unroaded and undeveloped wildness is given over to dreams of profit, maybe it will be love, finally, love for the land for its own sake and for what it holds of beauty and joy and spiritual redemption that will make wilderness not a battlefield but a revelation.”  - T.H. Watkins

Deep peace of the running wave to you.
Deep peace of the flowing air to you.
Deep peace of the quiet earth to you.
Deep peace of the shining stars to you.
Deep peace of the infinite peace to you.

- Gaelic blessing

gregorycolbert:

Day forty-nine.

“In a society so estranged from animals as ours, we often fail to credit them with any form of language. If we do, it comes under the heading of communication rather than speech. And yet, the great silence we have imposed on the rest of life contains innumerable forms of expression. Where does our own language come from but this unfathomed store that characterizes innumerable species?

“We are now more than halfway removed from what the unwritten word meant to our ancestors, who believed in the original, primal word behind all manifestations of the spirit. You sang because you were answered. The answers come from life around you. Prayers, chants, and songs were also responses to the elements, to the wind, the sun and stars, the Great Mystery behind them. Life on earth springs from a collateral magic that we rarely consult. We avoid the unknown as if we were afraid that contact would lower our sense of self-esteem.”

- John Hay (A Beginner’s Faith in Things Unseen)

“I want to extoll not the sweetness or placidity of the dog, but the wilderness out of which he cannot entirely step, and from which we benefit. For wilderness is our first home too, and in our wild ride into modernity with all its concerns and problems we need also all the good attachments to that origin that we can keep or restore. Dog is one of the messengers of that rich and still magical first world. The dog would remind us of the pleasures of the body with its graceful physicality, and the acuity and rapture of the senses, and the beauty of forest and ocean and rain and our own breath. There is not a dog that romps or runs but we learn from him….

“Because of the dog’s joyfulness, our own is increased. It is no small gift. It is not the least reason we should honor as well as love the dog of our own life, and the dog down the street, and all the dogs not yet born. What would life be like without music or rivers or the green and tender grass? What would this world be like without dogs?”

- Mary Oliver (Long Life)

This exhibition at Green Hill Arts in Moretonhampstead (Devon, UK) will feature work by Chagford artists Alan Lee, Virginia Lee, Brian & Wendy Froud, David Wyatt, Rima Staines, and yours truly, along with three other artists inspired by Dartmoor: Hazel Brown, Paul Kidby, and Neil Wilkinson Cave.

The show is running most of the summer, so if you’re local or making a trip down to Devon, keep it in mind…

There will also be a program of events (talks, readings, workshops, etc.). For more information, go to Green Hill Arts.

“Watch young children outdoors. It’s very rare to find a young child who is not enthusiastically curious about the life around him, whatever form that life takes. I was just with my two-year-old grandson this past weekend. A stroll around the yard with him takes a while. He points to a butterfly with great excitement and wants the name and tries to repeat it. He brings a very tiny golden-bronze seed to me to hold and keep. And treasure. ‘Bug’ was one of his first words. He can watch a trail of ants with an enduring focus. ‘Moon’ was an early word for my sons and my grandsons, too. The sight of the moon always occasioned joy and rapt attention. And dandelions, even to my five-year-old grandsons, are amazing and beautiful. And they are right to be so amazed. The life forms on our earth are amazing to children, and they remain amazing for many adults. The more we learn about them the more amazing and mysterious they become. The same is true for all the stars and cosmic bodies existing in the heavens. The universe is overflowing with passion. For my own sake, I try with words to tap into that passion, that intense will-to-be, the tight hold against oblivion, the yes-power existing within all the manifestations of light.”

— Pattiann Rogers (interviewed by Jeannine Hall Gailey in Poets & Writers)

Image: Fairy and friends (pencil sketch)

“Many of us in this time have lost the inner substance of our lives and forgotten to give praise and remember the sacredness of all life. But in spite of this forgetting, there is still a part of us that is deep and intimate with the world. We remember it by feel. We experience it as a murmur in the night, a longing and restlessness that we can’t name, a yearning that tugs at us. For it is only recently, in earth time, that the severings of the connections between people and land have taken place. Something in our human blood is still searching for it, still listening, still remembering. Nicaraguan poet-priest Ernesto Cardenal wrote, ’ We have always wanted something beyond what we wanted.’  I have loved those words, how they speak to the longing place inside us that seeks to be whole and connected to the earth. This too is the place of beginning, the source of our living.”

- Linda Hogan (Dwellings: A Spiritual History of the Living World)

Image: Shy desert fairy (pencil sketch)

Tilly and I pause on the hillside in the clear morning light to look at the good green valley below. Down in our village, friends and neighbors are waking, or working, or wondering what the day will bring, and we bless each one with the magic of the hills:

the strength of rock,
the quickening of wind,
the tenacity of gorse,
the audacity of flowers,
the soft, steady flow of
water over stone,
and the sure-footedness of
the little black dog
who leads the way….

Who will lead me home.

Elizabeth Siddal drawing Dante Gabriel Rossetti, in Rossetti’s studio at 14 Chatham Place, Blackfriars, London, 1853. The drawing is by Rossetti.

“The Animal Bride or Bridegroom in folk tales represent the wild within each one of us. They represent the wild within our lovers and spouses, the part of them that we can never fully know. They represent the Others who live unfathomable lives right beside us — cat and mouse and coyote and owl; and the Others that live only in the dreams and nightmares of our imaginations. For thousands of years, their tales have emerged from the place where we draw the boundary lines between animals and human beings, the natural world and civilization, women and men, magic and illusion, fiction and the lives we live. Those lines are drawn in sand; they shift over time; and the stories are always changing…..”

— from Married to Magic: Animal Brides and Bridegrooms in Folklore and Fantasy