"Yet, no matter how deeply I go down into myself, my God is dark, and like a webbing made of a hundred roots that drink in silence." - Rainer Maria Rilke
"Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror. Just keep going. No feeling is final." - Rilke
"Surely all art is the result of one's having been in danger, of having gone through an experience all the way to the end, to where no one can go any further." - Rilke
“The work of the eyes is done. Go now and do the heart-work on the images imprisoned within you.” - Rilke
to earth’s intelligence we could rise up rooted, like trees.
Instead we entangle ourselves in knots of our own making and struggle, lonely and confused.
So like children, we begin again...
to fall, patiently to trust our heaviness. Even a bird has to do that before he can fly.
— Rainer Maria Rilke (from the poem "How Sure Gravity's Law," published in Rilke’s Book of Hours, translated from the German by Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy)
Photos: Above, an old tree stands guard at the entrance to a neighbor's field, with Meldon Hill behind (or is it Middle-Earth?) Below, Tillyin the field - surrendering to the intelligence of the earth...as dogs do so well.
“Were it possible for us to see further than our knowledge reaches, and yet a little way beyond the outworks of our divinings, perhaps we would endure our sadnesses with greater confidence than our joys. For they are the moments when something new has entered into us, something unknown; our feelings grow mute in shy perplexity, everything in us withdraws, a stillness comes, and the new, which no one knows, stands in the midst of it and is silent.” - Rainer Maria Rilke (Letters to a Young Poet)
This week, tunes from a British folk dynasty: Martin Carthy, his wife Norma Waterson (from the famous Waterson family of singers), and their daughter Eliza Carthy.
First, above, Martin and fiddler Dave Swarbrick perform the traditional folk ballad "Sovay" on Yorkshire tv, back in 1989.
Below, eighteen years later, Martin and Norma back up Eliza in a performance of "Raggle, Taggle Gypsies," accompanied by Tim van Eyken and Saul Rose. (The song is followed by a Victorian-era hymn, "Stars in my Crown," sung a capella.)
In the final video, below, father and daughter perform another traditional ballad, "Cold Haily Night," as members of The Imagined Village.
The Imagine Village was formed in 2004 for the purpose "of exploring our musical roots and identity as English musicians and music makers....We are not trying to re-invent the wheel or for that matter re-invent the English folk tradition. What we are interested in is building an inclusive, creative community were we can engage in the debate passed down to us by the late Victorian collectors of English song, dance and stories spearheaded by Cecil Sharpe and his contemporaries and brought into contemporary resonance by Georgina Boyes in her book 'The Imagined Village', Billy Braggs recent works 'The Progressive Patriot', academics such as Paul Gilroys in 'After Empire Melancholia or Convivial Culture' and the commentaries of musicians such as Chris Wood, Eliza and Martin Carthy amongst others.
"We all walk in the footsteps of our Victorian song collecting ancestors but feel it is more relevant now than ever to question who decides what it is to be authentic and English and more importantly what it is that makes us proud to be English musicians."
Eliza Carthy used to play down here in Devon back in the '90s at a little dance club buried in the hedgerows near Ashburton (now gone, alas). I remember her as a young girl with brightly colored hair (usually red or blue), punk-romantic clothes, biker boots, and an absolutely wicked way with a fiddle, keeping the club heaving into the wee hours. Afterwards, my companions and I would drive home over the dark, mist-covered moor...slowy, slowy, edging the car around Dartmoor sheep sleeping on the road and wild ponies looming suddenly out of the dark, Eliza's music, or The Levellers or The Saw Doctors (who also played at that same club) on the tape deck. Sweet memories...
That's Chris Wood singing with Eliza on "Cold Haily Night," by the way. He was featured in a gypsy-themed "Monday Tunes" post last year (singing Ewan MacColl's "Moving On Song"), with a voice that makes me weakin the knees.
Eric's old allotment shed at the edge of the woods
Wildflowers around a stone mushroom
Nettles growing in the woods, with bluebells
Freshly picked nettle tips, with columbine
Tilly, wildflowers, and a basket of nettles in the studio garden
Golden evening light out the kitchen window
Preparing nettle soup
The soup is ready
Soup for supper in the gold evening light...
...watched over by Our Lady of Bumblehill (a statue made by Wendy Froud)
* If you look very, very closely in the "pot of soup" picture, you'll see the beginning pencil lines for a Bunny Girls mural on the wall above the kitchen hearth