Eliza Daley ~ Wordcraft & Musing on Home & Hope
The Old Farmer's Almanac claims that raccoons begin their courtship on this day. I wonder how they know this. I also wonder how they find each other when burrows are so deeply buried under the snow. But they find their way to the trash cans, so perhaps they have good snow-clearing services in Raccoon World.… Continue reading The Daily: 31 January 2023
Distaff Day, or St. Distaff’s Day, is an obscure and faded custom that has rather a bit more weight behind it that one might expect. The day is observed most often on January 7th, the day after Epiphany, the last day of the winter holidays. Less commonly, Distaff Day falls on the first Tuesday after Epiphany, being known as Distaff Tuesday in keeping with Plough Monday.
Turn your head and squint at the stories you’ve been told and you may see the traces. Delicate razor-thin reminders. Forgotten runes etched deep into memory. Ghostly echoes inherited through the ages. We know what we do not remember, what we have disregarded until the capacity to see is lost. But it is still there,… Continue reading Palimpsest
Born Again (Nacer de Nuevo) by Remedios Varo (1960) she is breaching reaching through rent flesh for hearth sense brushing past grasping cilia and bleached branches deserting the void-dark garden of ghosts coming into the clotted intimacy of small spaces penetrating deep the root-riddled walls of womanhood she is suffused with maiden’s hopeful lust one… Continue reading coming through wisdom
I closed the shop early. No point to staying open in this storm. If anyone were foolhardy enough to venture out, I’d not want to sell books that would likely only get ruined on the walk back home. But there were no people, nobody dashing from one shop to the next, nobody walking the dog… Continue reading The Man in the Moon
The seventh moon of the year is the Flower Moon, or the Faerie Moon. It is new between 23 April and 21 May. It is full between 7 May and 4 June. This is the burgeoning time. Bulbs are flowering. Forsythia is a wash of gold. Lilacs are sending scent out on the breeze. Bees… Continue reading Flower Moon in Eclipse
i came across a forgotten sugar bush craggy boles as wide as doors to another time bark cracking and sap-dampened with abandoned tap-holes writing jagged lines layers of leaf mould counted more than my years and heartwood ringed older than human endeavors on this inhospitable hillside primordial mother trees these and all about each grand… Continue reading the lesser species
Come, now a roundel by Arthur Rackham (1908) she made her feathered nest in the tangled boughs of oak, ash, thorn and found mushroom echoes of moonbeams she delved for essence among the hawthorn roots and brought woven certainty to light she entered the ring where faeries are dancing and knew the wheel’s ceaseless turning… Continue reading the thorn path
Bernat Martorell, Saint George and the Dragon (1434-1435) Sir George, he went a’questing, as gallant lads will do, to prove his mettle and his fine fettle — a knight both brave and true. He came upon a kingdom wherein misfortune reigned. The dragon blight, a dire plight, a land become blood-stained. The dragon charged the… Continue reading Saint George and the Dragon
It is time for regeneration. Nests of new life in satiny shells — white, blue, green, pink, yellow, speckled, mottled, striped and solid. No doubt our urge to paint chicken eggs for the late spring holidays is inspired by the wondrous works of art in every nest. And it’s also not surprising that humans have… Continue reading Spring Eggs
By My Solitary Hearth 