DE MIRACULIS

DE MIRACULIS

All shall be ruled by fellowship I say,
When we are ruled by the love of one another.
All shall be ruled by fellowship I say,
In the light that is coming in the morning.

Sidney Carter: John Ball

Sir Rainald’s servants found the young man lying beside the track leading to the Manor House. His clothes, though dishevelled, were made of fine cloth and his hands were pale and soft, but his eyes were blank and he could not speak. He had no visible injury and allowed himself to be led to the long time empty cottage close to the Manor Farm. There Sir Rainald himself brought him a blanket of coney skins, a bed, a stool and a six-board oak chest black with age and beeswax. Each day food and wine, wood for the fire and candles to light the dark evenings of winter were sent to the cottage. Not a word did the young man speak, but he bowed low to Sir Rainald and nodded briefly to the servants.

One frost white morning as the reluctant Christmastide sun rose behind the low timbered walls and the reed thatch, a boy of perhaps ten years lifted the latch of the young man’s door, and went into the small dark room He was ragged and grubby, but he smiled and bade the young man a Good Day as he unpacked his basket. The young man looked silently away, unsmiling. Was there anything else the master wanted Aldret persisted. The young man hesitated, then pointed to the small wooden pipe which hung from the boy’s belt. “Play me a tune.” he said, and lay back against the wool filled mattress. Aldret put the mouthpiece to his lips and the young man shut his eyes

As he always did, the young mand saw in his mind’s eye his wife Ysolt in her coffin, her new born babe lying on her breast. The pipe filled the December gloom with the trilling of birds and the soft song of running water, and suddenly the gloom of the cottage seemed to be overwhelmed by a midsummer sun. He could hear laughter and there was Ysolt in her blue gown, her corn gold hair flying out loose behind her as she danced with him in her father’s hall. He walked with her once more across soft green fields and amongst the dancing dappled shadows of the ancient forest, and he came alive again.

“What miracle is this?” Sir Rainald came into the cottage as the young man, smiling while the tears ran down his cheeks, put a hand on Aldret’s shoulder and a silver coin in his scrip. “No miracle, my lord,” the young man said, “as when our Saviour was born of a Virgin and cradled in a manger. Rather it is the uniting of your abiding kindness to a mind-sick stranger together with Aldret’s generous sharing of his music with me, that have opened my eyes again to the loving presence of my lady who lives on in my heart’s memory. If such courtesy and compassion were always to direct us thus towards all whom we may meet, then my lord in this world we should perhaps have little need of miracles.”

Naomi

PARLEY OF INTOLERANCE

PARLEY OF INTOLERANCE

First Peace and Silence all disputes controll,
Then Order plaies the soul;
And giving all things their set forms and houres,
Makes of wilde woods sweet walks and bowres.

Herbert; from ‘The Familie’

“This” complained the Death Watch Beetle “is my sacred space. I have my home here and am nourished by it.” “It’s you who are spoiling my home with your selfish larval gnawing, piles of dust everywhere , and your arrogant claims to be superior.” protested the mouse. “You’ve got no respect for my sacred space.” “Well that’s a joke” said the Beetle. “What about that heap of mouldy crumbs and those disgusting rotten apples you hide behind the old chairs? Uncivilised I call it.” “Look out,” squeaked the Mouse, “there’s the awful Bat. Now, he is uncivilised and disgusting, with horrible noisome habits. I don’t see why any of the rest of us should put up with him. Oh, no...”

The bat landed and hung upside down from the Beetle’s beam. “Room for a little one?” he piped. “No, definitely not.” they chorused. “This is our space.” said the Beetle. “There’s no room for anyone else.” added the Mouse. “You don’t fit in with us.” protested the Beetle. “You are not of our persuasion. And besides, you stink.” “Why don’t you go outside , or into the porch with the Wren?” suggested the Mouse. “She’s a flyer too, and she doesn’t trouble anyone - too obsessed with those eggs. She wouldn’t mind.” “I would mind.” snapped the Bat, “I am a mammal like you. Beetles I can put up with - they taste quite good. But I don’t consort with birds.”

“That, gentlemen, is enough.” It was the Voice speaking in the darkness behind the curtain, through the crack in the door, from beneath the flagstoned floor, from the apex of the vault, louder than the loudest clap of thunder, more silent than the silence of a still feather. Whose voice it was depended on who was listening. It might be Bramha or G-d, Confucius or Amaterasu, Isis or Baku, even Jesus. “This” continued the Voice “is no one creatures’s space. It is sacred precisely because it belongs to no-one. It is made sacred because of the care and love of each for the others within it. We observe precious little of that love here, gentlemen.” The bat began a shrill protest, but the Voice was not to be interrupted. “And by ‘love’ We do not mean ‘like’. We do not expect you to find each other agreeable. We do not require you to worship the same gods, or indeed to worship any god at all. Resolve therefore to look care-fully at each other, to try to understand each other, to respect each other.”

The Voice paused. The Bat, the Mouse and the Beatle moved closer together, looking outwards with wonder and awe, no longer glaring at each other. “I’ll give it a go.” the Beatle muttered. “I’ll try.” the Mouse said softly. “I suppose it might work.” the Bat admitted reluctanly. “It has to work,” responded the Voice, “or you betray that purpose for which you were made, which would indeed be sad.”

Naomi

THE ODD TRIO

THE ODD TRIO

Who practices hospitality entertains God - Ancient Proverb

The Secretary bird sat disconsolately in the empty saucer-like nest she had made high in a massive old oak tree. She thought about her chick seized by a marauding eagle and her mate who with clipped wings had struggled into the air, lost the thermal on which he was riding and crashed to a cruel death on the razor wire which topped the fence of the dreadful menagerie in which they had been trapped for the past five years. She flew upwards and then laboriously crossed the boundary fence to an uncertain freedom. She walked across the Norfolk Brecklands, fifteen miles a day until she found, near South Dereham, “The British Raptor Sanctuary” where the Man welcomed her, gave her fresh food and some little hope for her future.

A Posse of British Raptors - a broken winged Barn Owl, two tailless Sparrowhawks, a club-clawed Goshawk and a rather less than enthusiastic purblind Kestrel - listened to her soft mewing cry. She was a conspicuous bird, almost four feet high, elegant in her grey and white and black plumage with long black knee britches, quilled headress and orange eye patched face. They envied her her exotic beauty; they feared she had more than her fair share of fresh food brought to her by the Man; they mocked her African song; they despised her hunting technique - although she had wings and a beak she ran after her prey, for Horus’ sake, and stamped it to death!

Sitting quietly in an adjacent tree, another immigrant outcast watched and mused. He was a young undersized Spanish Griffon Vulture brought to the Sanctuary from Belgium where, searching for food many hundreds of miles from his home in the Pyrenees, he became separated from the rest of his flock and was found distressed and exhausted wandering in a park near Ghent. An exceedingly nervous bird, constantly terrified of an imagined attack from his own shadow, he nowadays rarely finished his dive from his nest to the raw meat put out for him, but soared back empty-beaked and hungry to the safety of the tree-top. He had to be hand fed and so had become the butt of the Posse’s cruel jokes.

A few days later he flew low above the ground close to the running Secretary Bird. She did not turn him away, but left for him a dead mouse and a grass snake, and there was no swooping shadow to terrify him. Guided by the sound of her running feet the Kestrel joined the strange pair and found a short tailed vole which the Secretary had stunned and kicked in his direction. As they made their daily sorties like some dignified avian Battle of Britain Flight emerging modestly out of a misty morning, the Posse shrugged its collective wings, turned its collective ire upon a flight of young marauding buzzards who were creating havoc amongst the older raptor residents, and finally left the Odd Trio to work out their lives together in peace.

Naomi

SHIVA DANCING

Only in the dance do I know how to tell the parable of the highest things....

Nietsche: Zarathustra, "The Tomb Song,"

The Rabbit limped across the blackened stubble to the patch of low Autumn sunlight underneath the old tree which spread its leafless branches thickly across the corner of the field. He stretched out his limbs gratefully on the still warm dusty earth, closed his eyes and quietly, gently, died.

Lucy and Anisha, on their way home from school to the farm cottages on the ridge above the field, found him there, looking already as if he were returning to the earth on which he lay. For a moment they gazed at him, and then hurried away. They returned with Lucy’s own small spade and a piece of fine Indian cotton, from Anisha’s treasure box, embroidered with an image of a blue skinned, four-armed dancing Shiva, a belt of skulls at his waist and a cobra, symbol of divine power, around his neck.

They took it in turns to dig a grave deep in the soft dry earth under the tree. These were country children who had little fear of death; they wrapped the stiffening body in the delicate cotton and then, carefully and reverently, lowered it into the hole they had dug. They filled in the grave with the thin brown dust and stood for a moment, solemn under the tree.

As they passed the small grave, each day the girls checked that it was undisturbed. The long Autumn rains had turned Summer’s dust into damp mud and the Rabbit lay safe beneath his loamy pall. In January the first snow fell; the frosts were hard and the blown white flakes lay blanket thick under the tree until March. As the snow melted Lucy noticed small green shoots pushing through the dark brown earth; weeds perhaps, the girls thought.

By the end of April it was obvious that what they had thought was some old weed was growing into a strong thick stemmed plant. Spring gave way to Summer and the plant pushed its way upwards in a clump of a dozen spikes, with tiny grey-green narrow leaves, bases and sheaths tinged with violet. As full Summer approached it flowered, covering one side of each spike with a mass of heads - pale green upper petals like pointed shells, brown lips tinged with pink. Nothing else grew in that patch of dried up earth, just the plant now maybe 18 or 20 inches high and shining like a cluster of far away pale stars in its drab and shaded home.

The girls were puzzled - they had never seen flowers like this before. Anisha’s father brought a local botanist to look at this miracle of new life. It was, the young man said, a rare wild orchid, a Violet Helleborine which did well in woodland and in shaded places, but in this old patch of untended barren earth, its success was quite remarkable.

“It was because of the Rabbit who died.” said Lucy, “His bones must have fed the plant.” “And the Lord Shiva.” added Anisha. “First he danced at the Rabbit’s death but now he is dancing for the birth of a new life.”

Naomi, February 2008

NO BIRDS SING

Go, go, go, said the bird: human kind
Cannot bear very much reality.
Time past and time future
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.

Eliot: Burnt Norton

From her quiet corner in the the Cloister Garth where she had taken coffee out into the early morning June sun she watched as the monk emerged from the gloom of the Infirmary Cloister, walked through the herb garden, passed the Prior’s Staircase and, just before he got into the Great Cloister, turned sharp right and walked through the wall. The monk wondered why had the high round arched door been bricked up, and why had anyone thought the old stone staircase well replaced by pallid marble and black iron. Then his prescient mind’s eye saw the fireballs of 1942 raining from the night sky, heard the crash of falling masonry and felt the acrid smoke in the back of his throat. He remembered then that what for him was a tragedy yet to come, for the young woman, whom he knew watched him from her place in the Cloister, it was already a piece of history.

The girl spotted the pale face under the brown hood peering at her from a window high up in the Library, close to where he might once have had his cell in the monastic dormitory. She wondered why he had lately been so persistent in his appearances. Were they random or did they have a purpose? Perhaps he wanted to talk to her, but how did you talk to a monk who had died centuries ago? What could he have to say to her, who was not even a Christian, let alone a Catholic.

The monk leaned against the stone windowsill watching the girl, silently challenging her to look and listen with him. He closed his eyes and flooded his mind with images of men afraid, women angry, young men hurling stones, young girls circling their bodies with belts pocketed by death. He heard mothers weeping for starving babies, a mob screaming and the terrible death march of children burying their virus stricken parents. He felt the anguish of centuries circling the globe in a never ending river of terror and pain.

The door at the far end of the long Library room opened and the monk knew the girl had returned. He slid behind one of the fine old book presses and went into his cell through the portrait of a sweet faced seventeenth century Dean. The girl clattered past his doorway and then paused to stroke a venerable red Turkey binding. He could hear her thoughts quite clearly: ‘How could people do.... Can’t they see... Perhaps I could .... Perhaps...’ The sound of a telephone, urgent in the heavy silence. She ran off down the aisle between the presses; another door banged and she was gone. The monk made the sign of the Cross and sighed. Was another pebble of understanding to be added to the defences against the infernal flood? If only his work here were done and he could sleep again. Outside the window of his narrow cell, a blackbird sang.

Naomi 31 December 2007

THE TREE

"I have come here to be amazed " Goethe

It stood in the yard of a small Georgian court - a flowering cherry, Prunus Ichiyo, tall with spreading branches and snow-dusted buds, like an Kyoto fan etched against a sky of new Spring blue. There was no garden there in the yard, just the tree. No-one knew who had planted it or how, in an old neglected part of Leeds with stones stained ugly black by two hundred years of industrial pollution, it had survived. But survive it had and become as much part of the life of Salamanca Court as that of Number 4’s ninety year old Mrs Sewell.

The tree reflected both joys and grief. In the chill sad days of early February it was hung with black streamers to mark the passing of Deaf Jonty, born, lived and died in Number 1. Pritam, dark eyed and beautiful, was born in March and the tree was decorated with blue ribbons. Although the quiet Guptas at Number 10 did not know why the ribbons were blue, they saw their baby son thus made welcome to the Court.

Rosheen Sewell sat in her kitchen and looked fondly into the yard. In the lengthening June evenings the Japanese students of Number 8 put down a mat beneath the tree and, to the delight of the Latvian Balodis brothers at Number 5, practised their Aikido. July was hot and Rocheen and Caleb from Number 2 took chairs out into the shade of the tree and shared memories of long hours in a Yorkshire mill and the winter cold of sheep-herding on the Pately Bridge high moor. Children played round the tree through August and Gladstone of Number 9 got a bollocking from his dad for trying to carve his initials on its trunk. “Boy, we have to care for that tree. It’s our piece of paradise in this grey land.”

She thought about Jonathan and Gary of Number 3 who held their September wedding party out in the yard. The tree was hung about with pink hearts and everyone got drunk and danced long after midnight. She remembered Middle-Aged-Mercy, the Quaker lady at Number 6 who last October hung a banner on the tree saying: “Save Our Planet” and all the neighbours threw coins into her Save our Planet Bucket. As if not to be outdone in generosity, the tree rained down purple-red leaves, a rich carpet spread over the cold black ground.

In November Rocheen refused to go to a retirement home in Headingley. She did not want to leave the Court where her life and the lives of her neighbours seemed all bound together within the life of the tree. For Divali there were firecrackers and lanterns round the tree; the Levine boys dug a hole between its roots as a hiding place for their Hanukkah gelt. As the year neared its turning, Pagan Morganna made the Solstice fire outside Number 11 and the tree’s branches turned dark red in the glow of the flames. In its Christmas coat of gleaming tinsel and silver bells it lit up the cottages of Salamanca Court like a great Star of Bethlehem shining over them all.

Naomi
illustrated by Liz

The Hamster and the Rats

“Those whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad”
Euripides


The Hamster lay in his burrow beneath the Syrian Steppe. He could not see what was happening above his nest, but he could hear. He could hear the rumble of tracked vehicles, the thud of guns, the screams of missiles and men dying in the hot sun of the dry Steppe. But it was all nothing to do with him. The accumulated wisdom of many generations of ancestors told him that a wise creature is one who lives apart even from his own kind, expresses no opinions, indeed has no opinions about anything, who guards his own burrow, gathers his own food, and lives out his short life in solitary safety. This was the Hamster’s philosophy and it had served him well - until he met the Rats.

There were three of them, quite ordinary Black Rats, surprisingly friendly but, their eyes blazing with the fires of righteousness, quite manic in the darkening evening. With them they had a pair of Jirds, your cousins the Rats said, to act as scouts and guides. The Rats had come to the Middle East by ship, but the Jirds were natives - from down there, waving their paws towards the South East. Their mission? To seek and to destroy. To seek for and to destroy what, the alarmed Hamster wanted to know. Snakes, the Rats answered in an excited unison. Their Masters’ Intelligence agents had discovered an enormous colony of killer MacMahon’s Vipers hidden not three kilometres from the Hamster’s burrow. Their Control had fitted the rats with mouth pouches, rather like the Hamster’s they thought, only theirs were filled with poison. When they released it into the Vipers’ waterholes, it would destroy the terrorising reptiles and the Hamster would be free again from danger.


The Hamster, much perturbed, filled his pouches. He ignored the water hole - like the Jirds he had no need of water - and scuttled back to his burrow fervently wishing that he had never met the Black Rats. Shivering in spite of the warmth of his deep home, he lay in his nest for many days until hunger drove him out once more into the night. Some irresistible impulse took him back to the Black Rats’ waterhole.

He found them all returned - two sad Jirds and three dead Rats. They had found no Vipers, no terrorist snakes of any kind, but they had poisoned the water holes as they had been ordered and many small creatures had died, too many to count. The rodent platoon fled back to this place where, forgetting that this was the the first hole they had poisoned, the Rats drank their fill and they too died, victims to their own deadly weapon. “What shall you tell your Masters when you return home?” the Hamster asked the Jirds. “That like men we have tried to play the role of the gods,” they replied, “and that now, like men, we are become mad and shall be destroyed.”

Naomi
Illustrated by Liz