Part Three of The Unseen Sea: adrift in the enneagram

The busy square is suddenly hushed. He watches as the four-year old girl with the golden hair runs ahead of her mother towards him.

“Grandad! I beat mummy!” she says, gleefully, climbing on his knee.

The constant pain from the arthritis makes him wince – she is getting heavier, but he makes sure that his eyes, though wet, do not show this. Instead, the emotion they display is one of wonder at the demonstration of symbiosis of his inner thoughts with the unfolding of the world in front of him.

Jessica’s mother, the old man’s daughter, is suddenly there, before him, sharing the intensity of her father’s love… and his wonder at what the world has just brought in on the tide.

“She beat mommy, yes,” she says, wistfully, staring into the face of the invisible devil seen only by…

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‘Of circular possibilities’…

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‘Eyeing the Chasm’…

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‘Extending a welcome’…

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‘An Other Time’…

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‘Presence is everything’…

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‘Two O’Clock Shadow’…

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‘There was an Old Woman’…

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‘Who looked out’…

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‘Through a Shoe’…

It has been a week or more since the last post about our recent workshop in Wales… illness got in the way of finishing the series, but it would be a shame not to share the interior of the Cathedral at St Davids…

I had barely raised the camera to start photographing the interior of the great cathedral at St Davids before a gentleman approached and told me that I could not… or, at least, not without paying for a permit. Now, I know that these ancient churches cost a good deal to keep standing and pay for their conservation, but I have a problem with those that demand exorbitant entry fees before forcing a ‘no photography’ rule on unsuspecting visitors. Especially when they quote ‘copyright’ as the reason; I fail to see how something the best part of a thousand years old can still enforce copyright law.

St Davids…

Part Two of The Unseen Sea: adrift in the enneagram

LUCA didn’t know it back then, but her birth as the all-mother of organic life on Earth was witnessed by the entire solar system. The ‘positive’ energy behind life, a higher variant of light as we know it and relayed by the Sun, began its spiral into the Earth, in an arc that took in the seven planets that were visible to the ‘ancients’. There were no ancients as we now think of them, of course, four billion years ago, but later, much later, they would come to be aware of a remarkable signature in the night sky.

The day sky was dominated by the life-affirming Sun, later identified as the centre of the harmonic system that contained the Earth as only one of its children.

In the warm womb of the deep ocean trench, Luca’s struggle for sustainable life…

Image: Steve Tanham for his #NoirWednesday

She was young, beautiful and the sun rose in her eyes. A stranger child… found by the wayside and raised by the elders. The village lads vied for her favour. Their mothers nodded doting heads and grandfathers remembered their  vigour when the sun struck her midnight tresses, painting them blue.

Superstition is insidious.

The small creatures of wood and field came to her hand and flowers bloomed brighter where she passed. She healed the wild things with her herblore and the dogs were silent as she passed.

Jealousy is a black art.

She danced for joy beneath the full moon, crowned with oak leaves and they who watched saw a shower of stars fall to earth.

They gave her a house, a tiny house, built just for her upon the bridge that spanned the stream, surrounded by stone and far from the green places…

Picture by: Stephen Tanham

It was a house like any other house. A little house over a bridge, doing what little houses over bridges did. Only it wasn’t.

This house long thought to be a small house in which shelter could be sought when crossing the bridge held a dark and sinister secret.

So dark and sinister that it curled the hair of straight haired people and straighten the hair of the curly headed.

People avoided it if they could, which made it hard if you wanted to cross the river in the most direct way.

The house was one in which murder was a preferred event. Once the location for birthday and anniversary celebrations it also had a dark and dangerous past. Every birthday, every celebration was marked with death. Be it poisoned cake, exploding candles or spiked drinks there wasn’t a single event anyone could remember where death…