Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ

A new book of poetry, published with CreateSpace like Hill of the Magic Hare. I must say that after many misgivings I'm really pleased and surprised at the quality of the books they produce. There's no noticeable loss of colour to the cover because files created in RGB are somehow cleverly converted to CMYK for printing, leaving one free to create the cover artwork and forgo the interminable tweaking before submission to the printer, knowing that one won't (as is normally usual) be slightly disappointed

The interior is lovely too - cream paper indistinguishable from bookwove - perhaps it is bookwove - resulting in a real book that looks and feels good.

Hearing Voices, Singing Songs features twice as many poems as the mystical Hill of the Magic Hare, and although some from both books have been published previously in poetry magazines, I felt the need to divide them into two collections rather than publish them all together, mostly because for me, Hill is seeped in memories and green magic.

And Hearing Voices? Well, the title may give a clue to the diversity of voices and moods between the covers, the truth and illusion of Life, the Universe and Everything. It could be fun deciding which is which.

Another project completed - this little book of poetry newly published with CreateSpace.

The poems were created over many years as I wandered a magical hill on the South Downs - a hill with forest on its northern side, farmland and open country to the east, the sea to the south and a deep valley to the west. I had as companion the little earth dog, now gone to the Summerlands, although I shall carry him in my heart always. We had many adventures and happy times during our fifteen years together, but a dog's time on Earth is sadly always too short and the time inevitably comes when one has to let a precious friend go.

But, as always, there is no shortage of dogs needing rescue, and I now have a slender black companion who can run like the wind. I can't help referring to him as the lovely boy, and he really is the most loving dog one could imagine and one of the joys of my life.

As I wander through the oak groves near the top of the hill with my dark companion, I sometimes imagine the little earth dog walking and running beside us, although truth to tell he'd probably have been dashing through the bushes and rummaging in burrows. Happily, the magic hare, lying in her form among the summer grasses, always proved too elusive.

Hill of the Magic Hare: Poems

It has been a long journey, interrupted by both life and death, but at last Incarnations of Crow has been published as a Kindle. I think this will be my final novel - my eyes have suffered in the writing, editing and formatting of this one, and I still have art projects to complete. As yet I have no reviews, probably due to my dislike of social media and self-promotion in any form, however well-disguised. It doesn't help that Amazon assumes that if an author chooses to tag their work as occult, then that work must come under the designation of horror which, although there are some dark happenings, this book is not. No matter, it is out in the world now and can simply be what it is - imperfect no doubt and certainly idiosyncratic - peculiarly mine. :)

Is it ever possible to breathe a sigh of relief and truly believe a project has been completed?

In March 2004, when I published the first of two pagan novels, I believe that sigh did pass my lips to escape into the wide blue beyond the clouds.

Having researched needful things, lived Ellie's journey while writing, learned how to format and publish the file, created a cover and found and coped with printers, I wanted little more than see my work go out into the world. But that was not to be.

Most of the first edition sold quickly to collectors keen to snag a first edition. They seemed to have spread a rumour that I was the new JKR - after all, the novel was about magic. I suppose I should have told them that this was not Harry Potter's sort of magic...

Then came a rollercoaster ride and eventually another sigh - yes, of relief. I like my peaceful life.

A hardback edition followed, which did well, then the planned sequel. Cue for another sigh.

Now, at last, after many glitches and setbacks, are together as a Kindle, so I've made it free until the 21st May, and thought I'd post the brand new cover here to celebrate. I do hope you'll feel tempted to accompany Ellie on her journey, but I'm not risking any more sighs...

Early this morning the terrier and I left the footpath on the top of the hill, squeezed under the barbed wire and crossed a fairway of the golf course to slip through a patch of gorse. A whirr of wings, two flashes of red - startling against the brilliant green of their backs - and a pair of woodpeckers shot away like bright missiles without the birds' usual distinctive call of alarm to alert other wild ones. They'd been only yards from my feet, possibly feeding on ants, although I'd never seen two together before and wondered if I'd disturbed a tryst.

As always when something natural yet unusual concerning birds happens, I began to think of augury and how important the behaviour and movements of birds were to country people in times gone by. We now know that many of the things that they noticed and had been taught by their elders have a scientific basis and can impart information about the weather; the arrival and departure of the swallows and other migratory birds, the timing of mating and nest building to name just two, but augury has since been consigned to the realm of superstition.

Yet it's tempting and - dare I suggest it - natural to look for signs or messages in events of this kind. I think I've been doing it since childhood and have found a special sort of joy in seeing the magical side of nature.

So when we arrived home I found my copy of The Gods had Wings by W.J. Brown, a nondescript little hardcover published in 1936, with woodcuts by John Farleigh. And guess what? I opened it right in the middle of Chapter Five: The Woodpecker...!

All three English woodpeckers have that conspicuous red crest, which connected them with with the deity to whom they were sacred; the Norse God Thor, the red-headed, the red-bearded, the thunderer. Thor was endowed with the attribute of lightning, and his magic hammer, Miolnir, was the mythological representation of the thunderbolt or lightning flash.

The woodpecker was identified by the ancients with the lightning, and his neat round hole driven straight into the trunk of a tree denoted the appearance of powers which only lightning (or Thor's magic hammer) possessed.

There's more - much more - in Chapter 5, but I always think of the woodpecker as 'the lightning bird'. In a good way.

The woodpeckers above are from the Page of Arrows card of the Greenwood Tarot - magical messengers, or perhaps messengers of magic...

The clocks went forward a week ago, and still I find myself taking an hour off the given time in order to know the 'real' time. Perhaps I just don't like change.

But who could fail to notice and be cheered by the fact that that Spring is well and truly on the way? The trees are showing signs of waking after their winter sleep - some are dressed in blossom; lily-like ramsom leaves already carpet the woods at the end of our road and baby rabbits wait until the last minute to dash to the edge of the park for cover as I stop breathing and hope the little earth dog hasn't seen them. He has of course, but he'll be fourteen this year and although still pretty fit is less interested these days.

I haven't yet heard a cuckoo, but the hollow tattoo of a woodpecker drumming high in the bare branches of a sycamore echos through the woods, and I wonder whether he's enlarging a hole for a nest or simply looking for insects.

The quatrain on the card is from Edward Fitzgerald's creative translation of
The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. I don't know which bird symbolized Time for either Omar or Edward, but it's good advice.

Come, fill the Cup...

Sometimes the strange and mysterious workings of Stunning Synchronicity, Dame Fortune, the Fates, and Gods and Goddesses known and unknown come together and something happens. I shouldn't be surprised after all these years, but today I'm blown away.

I'm not a true collector of tarot decks, as I only seek out those whose artwork attracts me. For a long time time now I've been drawn to The Greenwood Tarot: Pre-Celtic Shamanism of the Mythic Forest and the mystical artwork of Chesca Potter, but it's long out of print and I've never held out much hope of finding one. Seeing it mentioned here on Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ brought it wistfully to mind again, but it seemed as far out of reach as ever.

But...

As my husband was going out of the front door this morning for his weekly tour of the car boot sale, I called out to him to look out for a Greenwood for me.

A few hours later he came back and handed me ('Oh, by the way, I bought you these...') a bag containing a few well-used tarots. This is not an uncommon event, and I love these surprises. I could see the Druid Animal Oracle at the top, but I already have one of those, and laughed quietly to myself at the thought that it would take some sort of magic to find a Greenwood at the bottom of the bag.

Under the large oracle set I found a Goddess Tarot and the Arthurian, both slightly battered, but complete.

And below these, right at the bottom of the bag was a precious Greenwood, sans box, well-used and loved but all present and correct and attached to its book by a black ribbon...!

I cried.

So, in celebration I've posted the magical Queen of Wands card from the Greenwood Tarot and a poem I wrote years ago about an encounter with a hare.

Hill of the Magic Hare

I came across it unawares,
Still, dark sides a footfall away,
Flattened in the summer grasses.
At first I believed it dead
And walked past, face averted.
But something about the form,
Like, yet unlike a rabbit
Took me back to gaze into
A yellow eye, wild yet wise,
Before she took flight.

And afterwards I imagined life
In all the dead things I chanced upon.
Things of flesh, and bone and shell.

Nell Grey

(first published in Obsessed with Pipework)

Feeling reflective today, torn between completing the work of formatting the rest of my novels for Kindle and continuing with the artwork for the new tarot, so I'll just post a card from I must paint again soon...

...or in other words, people we perceive as strange, either in their dress, their speech or their behaviour. Slight eccentricity can be endearing or annoying, and no one thinks too much of it, but at what point does it become bizarre enough to be memorable, even fifty years later?

Last week I had an odd and slightly surreal conversation with a lady on the Downs. We both walk our dogs on this particular hill and often exchange a few words, but somehow, this time, the subject of eccentricity came up.

Once we began remembering these characters - often only seen in passing - it was amazing how many we had in common.

One of these was a man my brother and I named The German Spy. The logic of why a spy would wish to draw attention to himself in any way at all didn't enter our heads at the time. He used to stand next to the A27 - at a T junction if I remember correctly - near the old toll bridge at Shoreham. He was always immaculately dressed in tweed jodhpurs, matching tailored jacket and deerstalker, yellow waistcoat, cravat and long, brown, highly-polished riding boots. He may have been holding leather gauntlets, but these could be an imaginative delusion on my part.

He seemed to be posing - the image I have of him is with one hand on his hip, holding a monocle to his eye. Behind him, propped on its stand, I see in my mind's eye a powerful motorcycle with a smaller identical figure reflected in its gleaming chrome, but memory could well be be playing tricks on me, as the lady on the Downs remembers just a very clean bicycle.

As children, my brother and I would look out for him every Sunday on our way back from a family walk in the country - usually in the woods at Arundel - and wave out of the car window. I think he was pleased at this attention, as he used to preen a little and stand even straighter. Some motorists used to hoot, but it was all very good-natured.

He must have been around fifty then, so if he's still alive he'd be at least a hundred, but as I haven't seen him for many years now, I'd guess that he's no longer with us.

As I left the lady on the hill other memorable eccentrics came to mind, and I couldn't help feeling impressed at the ability of perfect strangers to leave such a lasting impression.

So... I have to ask myself: will the eccentric characters in my books survive in the memory of strangers? Perhaps it's time for me to wear purple...

A year or so ago I began creating a new tarot. I'd already painted 76 images to illustrate a set of meditation cards called , (one for each verse of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, plus a title card), a set of 22 tarot majors in pen and ink called and another, , inspired by the work of the artist Marc Chagall and the precious wild herbs that thrive unnoticed all around us. The new tarot was (and is) to be a full deck of 78 cards plus a title card.

Working through the minor arcana, I came to the Six of Swords. When there is an image on this card (rather than simply pips, as on the Tarot of Marseille), it usually depicts a boat crossing a body of water. There are three figures in the boat; usually a standing ferryman, a woman in a hooded cloak and a child - all with their backs towards the viewer. Six swords stand upright next to them. The meaning is basically of moving on, but interpretation is very much an individual process, and can depend on the subject, the reader's intuition and influences of the surrounding cards.

I'd sketched some ideas and decided which to develop - I'd even made a small model. But that was it - all inclination to begin the painting fell away. Instead I decided to re-edit and format my books for Kindle. The process turned out to take far longer and involve more than I'd ever imagined, but I feel I have to complete it before moving on with the tarot images.

I think that what I'm saying here is that in life, or in any creative process - and life is surely creative - one needs to listen to the rhythms, feel the tides, and if possible go with rather than against them. I'm hoping I'll travel more smoothly by listening and flowing - that's the theory anyway. I'm not sure what the swords are for, but when the time is right I'll carry them with me.