theoreadexpress

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…

Wanderings

It was an odd day, but it got a lot better. There are some days when thoughts that ordinarily trickle through the humdrum domestic suddenly swell, careen, scour all before them down new paths thrown open with reckless abandon. Rather than give the torrents all their own way, and especially given an unexpected reason to…

Wind scattered, scattered thinking

I am completely unsettled, I have spent my morning desperately trying to apply myself to my tasklist and am failing, miserably. My hope in clattering keystrokes in this direction is that I can unstick something and then get on with things, so I’m taking an early lunch. Ex hurricane Lorenzo is passing on by, thankfully…

Things need to change, and soon.

My twitter account is full of it, all the thousands or thousands of ways things could be better, should be better and especially at the moment, so soon after Greta Thunberg’s passionate speech has been ringing around the internet and stupid people are all trying to silence her for being Aspergers, young and a girl…

Seasons turning

There are days when I wake up and almost immediately the brain starts to supply me with the list of all the things I haven’t done, all the ways in which it is displeased with me, all the shoulds and musts and have tos. I’ve been wading through a treacle soup of should have, could…

St. Melruaen’s Tree

For reasons I will come back to shortly I’ve been looking for a fruiting walnut tree in Ireland for a while now. Ireland apparently can quite happily support them but they’re not common here at all, and certainly not native. I only found out very recently that the familiar brown nut actually grows encased in…

In between spaces

My feet are still warm from shoes. The river is steps ahead. The core dragging chill of the compacted slick of dark mud I launch my first step from is not enough to truly forewarn of the pleasurable flare of chill, hiss-gripping my shoulders. A frisson, goosebumps, then all dissolves, sleeting back through my body…

The boletes of Birr Castle

I brought my niece and nephew to Birr Castle at the weekend, they were keen to go mostly because of the promise of cake in the cafe and the *magnificent* castle treehouse they have in the playground, but also because I mentioned I had seen squirrels there on my last visit. It turns out neither…

Weird things in ordinary places

I mammy taxi’d my youngest and some of his friends up the mountains last month, they had their plan for the day which included jumping in water and firing things at one another in the manner of teenage boys everywhere, and I just wanted to pick some fraocháns, explore some woods, take some pictures and…