Cosmogyro...

A tiny spinning universe - birdsong, fizzing and fading.

Hello dear ones, welcome to a few words spun together, some in a windswept hurry to keep up with the next violent gust (before it whisks an already temperamental connection to ‘no signal’ for the umpteenth time this week), a few from my kitchen and Roger’s a few others from the calm.

It was a strange—fizzy—week.

At this moment it has calmed…

Life depicts that we accomplish many things in the twenty-four short hours of one day, mostly they are the non-negotiable type that leave you with a complete incapacity at the end of it all for doing any one of those you love, why writing on any particular day for me is as intangible as the pot of gold at the end of a rainbow and a fact that riddles me with guilt when I think of all who enjoy reading my missives and a hundredfold for those of you who have shocked and delighted me in equal parts in so generously paying to do so.

I thank you from my heart for your support.

The following are a few random notes from a week, like all weeks, that was…

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Seatherny (n.) “seth-er-nee,” – The serenity one feels when listening to the chirping of birds (I cannot find a word for the sadness one feels when a bird doesn’t sing as it should)

Of birds…

• A small brown bird with a speckled breast I cannot identify—I spend many hours trying, a female sparrow perhaps, please tell if you know—makes frequent visits to the terrace at the front of the house. I watch her quietly as she lands, closing elegant wings over her tiny back as she settles. I wait for her to sing. She opens her beak as if the sweetest song is about to be sung through the open door to fill my kitchen but no sound escapes, she is silent. I wonder if she has a tiny bird deformity in her throat and feel an unbearable forlornness for her. A bird with no voice, the thought is too sad to contemplate.

• Every morning this week I have opened the shutters to the now unmistakable scent of autumn and the raucous twittering of two robins squabbling. One sits in a Mulberry tree gracefully shedding its yellowing heart-shaped leaves outside the barn, the other perched in an Italian Cypress resolutely cherishing its scented needles. The two trees are but feet apart, their branches tangle the one into the other inextricably. The Robins yell, or so it seems, from their respective perches, one berating the other, like children mithering—thank you for reminding me of this word

  David Knowles
  —over unequal shares of a favourite sweet, or maybe a lovers tiff? A guess at best, I don’t understand their language any more than I do the wind or the thistles.

• For three dusky evenings a Tawny owl hoots his presence from the branches of the vast Tilleul (Tilia cordata) on the corner of the chicken field. The sound is so close and yet despite diminishing leaf cover, I still cannot spot him, he makes not the slightest movement or noise as I stand beneath peering—ridiculously, its almost dark—up, not even his huge round eyes catch in the lamp light as it startles me with its automatic brightness. I know damn well he sees me, I can feel him watching.

• The morning after the harvester lumbered out of the maize fields—missing both house and barn by millimetres as it rumbled its great metallic body between trembling walls, was it only a few seconds?—hundreds, perhaps even thousands of crows and pigeons swoop in for grain left behind, they are adept in their knowledge of the schedule of farm life. They sweep the field, rising in variations of low clouds in charcoal black and smokey, f(h)eathery, grey as they move from one corner to another with enviable efficiency. I watch for as long as my hurried morning walk allows, their differences fascinating. Crows hop, their wings barely moving, sideways mostly, unceremoniously landing on flat feet, they don’t do this together, one after the other, hop sideways, land, it is not graceful but neither is it ugly. Pigeons move together, forwards, rising bare inches above the ground, flapping wings furiously to land in their original loft¹ Both crow and pigeon have a sentry who circles their flock, alert, and frequently alerting, of possible danger. In my case they are both mistaken…

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From inside and far away…

• I’m gazing into a star filled sky on a clear night—Monday I think—the moon is bright, glowing white in its final phase before fullness. Both sky and moon are celestial beauty’s, unimaginably vast. There are six thousand stars visible to us on earth, a bare fraction of the trillions more we can’t see. I read not long ago that the Milky Way sits within fifty other galaxies ranging in size from dwarf galaxies—galaxies with just a few billion stars—to Andromeda, our nearest large galactic neighbour. Breathtaking facts, yet, as I stand beneath this infinite sky, I feel a weight I cannot shift, not in awe, but in despair. The stars above seem indifferent to this chaos we call earth. Every conflict, every heartbreak, every horror unfolding on our fragile planet seems so insignificant against this backdrop of eternity. Do we matter in a universe so immense? Our tragedies, our joys, our lives—they flicker out like dying embers, lost in the cold expanse, unnoticed and unremembered. Wars are being fought over slivers of land, hatred passed down through generations over eons and eons. When measured against the silence of the stars it seems so futile. They have seen it all before—civilisations rise and fall, species come and go—and still, they remain untouched, distant, as if our struggles are no more than whispers in an endless void. We are so very small.

• While I am driving through wild, wind driven rain, I think of a friend from Germany, within minutes of arriving at my destination, she calls me.

• I am not comfortable in my skin this week, it and I are fizzy, disorientated, as if the light is leaving us. Only walking calms the discomfort. I drift for miles, the fizzing fades into the wild wind and the leaves with shimmering sunlight shining through them and the strings of glistening dew on cobwebs but the moment I’m still it returns. As if all the star dust from the ark of galaxies we spin within has fallen and landed on my skin. Star dust prickles.

• If I were an artist, I would like to paint like

  Felicity Keefe
  . I think perhaps we have similar blurry visions.

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My old friend is fading.

• My time is taken up ever more frequently by my dear friend Roger. His journeys behind the wheel of his car have slowed to a halt and he is reliant on kindnesses—they are far too few. Mostly, now, he sits in a remote controlled chair, watching the blur of his huge flat screen TV, he changes channel often also by remote control— buttons learned by heart—listening to voices without a face because there is little other option left for him to fill his long day. I make him and I coffee, we sit a while talking—he imagines my face—shows me photographs he can no longer see, his grandfather and sister, his violent father who beat him every day, he tells me many stories of his youth, of his wife Loulou. He forgets that I looked after her too, he forgets, also, not only the day but the time. I don’t want to imagine la suite but feel it already germinating.

“When you consider things like the stars, our affairs don't seem to matter very much, do they?”
― Virginia Woolf

With love and star dust

Susie x

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A FEW POSTS I’VE LOVED THIS WEEK;

Andrea Gibson

- A brave and beautiful human writes;

My bucket list of little things aims to live every moment as if it’s my first. To find the glory in what a seasoned eye might falsely consider mundane. In the process of writing it, I was reminded how incredible every single moment can be if I allow myself to be truly present.

Just tap below, you can thank Andrea when you’re ready!

To Make A Snow Angel On a Stranger's Grave

I fell in love with this post about beautiful words from

Nathan Slake

and

L.J. Gearing

, it felt like a permission to take and hold on to for liberal use later.

A cabinet of special words

The gorgeous, dreamy, blurry artwork of

Felicity Keefe

that I mentioned above can be found below, I have swooned over every piece.

• Loft is one of the name’s for a group of pigeons, I had to look that up!

1.