A visit to my homeplace recently while my parents were also hosting my brother’s kids had me wandering with a fresh eye around some places I first discovered aged 11, newly transplanted from city living in Dublin. My niece, at 8, is madly curious about everything and adores being outdoors, so I was quickly conned…
Category: Musing
Grounding exercises
When I was in secondary school we briefly had a religion teacher, a nun whose name I can’t quite remember, who used to enthuse about God’s beautiful birds singing beautiful songs in God’s beautiful sky. In my memory she is a round woman of pleasant but remote and scrupulous appearance, much given to theatrical sweeps…
Okay so maybe I’m being overly simplistic..
I’ve long been bemused, wondering why there isn’t an aggressive forestation policy the world over. They took great care in teaching me as a child in national school that trees and forests are the lungs of the earth. We have a serious problem with an over abundance of carbon dioxide and bad quality air and…
Some wild wanderings
This time of year I find it hard to convince my brain that just because it’s dark when I arrive home doesn’t mean I need to sleep straight away. Sleep is a wonderful thing though, especially in Winter. I have a special fondness for that that glorious feeling when you wake in the middle of…
A dryad considers
It’s unlikely to amaze anyone who happens upon this tiny corner of the Internet that I am a little fond of forests. If there was a story about chasing through cracking, snapping woodland, or dream-fully sleeping in birch bowers under a star swept sky, or crouching in the leaf litter to converse with grouchy badgers,…
A networking world
The idea of worlds within worlds completely fascinates me. When I was very young I was easily convinced that fairies existed in their own miniature domain, flitting about between the plants doing alternatively sweet Disney things and darker, weirder things because I knew of old fairy stories too. I invented landscapes inside myself because I was…
Finding a way in the dark
There was what felt like the last golden day. Sun warmed the face, the wind countered by encouraged buttoning and belting up the coat. I was walking to work, a short but lovely walk where at one point a path sweeps in from the right curving around a small patch of young oak trees. The…
Looking Up
Truthfully I spend a significant amount of time looking down towards my feet, partly because as a dedicated believer in not wearing shoes I’ve learned to carefully – and by now skillfully – assess the path ahead. The rest comes down to a mixture of bad social habits (I’m an eye contact avoider) and the…
Water, water everywhere
So much that it rushed and curled under the bridge I passed over at lunchtime today, making that faintly indecent schloop noise of swollen water with current fingers weaving and plunging to outpace one another to the next set of rocks or obstinate river bank. Race over, it lazed contently basking in sunshine and the…
dryadzen.com 