It’s October and I am at the start of my third year being properly interested in fungi and starting to get a bit more confident about being able to identify some – more than ten with confidence, more than 40 with some hedging of bets but reasonable confidence, kind of thing. I am utterly lucky…
Author: theoreadexpress
A wannabe dryad in human clothing, based in the midlands of Ireland, interested in all things woodland
Cadamstown – amanitas, brittlegills a giant’s grave and the Silver river
Sunday was grayer than I was anticipating, but on an excellent suggestion I went in search of some fast flowing water and some trees in Cadamstown. When I arrived there was that loose swarming of hikers hastily dragging their hiking shoe heel up or tying waterproofing around waists en route to their meeting point in…
Walking in an ancient wish
Sometime several hundred years ago somebody walked along a path I walked on Tuesday. This is not as remarkable as my brain somehow spun it up in the moment, we walk through the eddies of other peoples’ lives all the time, but something about stone reminds me forcefully of this truth once in a while….
Where time is marching on ..
… and we’re all stuck at home losing the thread of it all. I strongly suspect I would actually be pleased enough with the phenomena (of the change in the experience of time) if I didn’t feel like I was losing stuff to work or making work fit in a box that’s managed somehow to…
Making trains appear
Sometimes I wonder that I am about 80% longing and 20% laziness. As I was saying last time, I am having some difficulty with this whole lockdown situation and apparently my own custom brand of handling things (somewhat badly) is some kind of weird grief for lost opportunities, as if I wouldn’t probably keep on…
Mandatory ranty bits
I’ll be honest with you, I don’t know quite how to rejig my brain to accept some stuff and get on with things right now. First off I am perfectly and completely aware that I am lucky, fortunate, blessed, all that good stuff. Yes, honestly. No there is no but. I know the first reaction…
Woolgathering in lockdown
It seems completely ridiculous to me in these monumentally significant and historical times that I’ve been unable to write down a single word. There are all sorts of things to say and think about but I’ve remained weirdly paralysed. I don’t mean as some agent of the preservation of history, as if someone would ever…
Seeking a muse in an oak tree.
I’ve been meaning to return to the subject of the Oak, specifically notes on the notion of an oak in Irish culture, our beloved Dair, first and foremost of the airig fedo, protected to the maximum extent of Brehon law (as documented in the Bretha Comaithchesa). I have no ability with medieval Irish, alas, so…
Complicated feelings require woods.
I have become sufficiently practiced at sloughing off whatever thing is sitting on my shoulders for a while the second I get my first eyeful of whatever the woods want to show me that day, at least for the duration of the visit. Breathe. Blow it all away, grin, and step on along to see…
What a leaf means
I have a particular fondness for skylights. I don’t have one currently at home but straight out of my office door, in my view above my computer screen, is a large, square skylight. A small batallion of very straight trees marches across the top of a high bank behind the office building itself and provide…
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