Holy Grail and Spelt from Sibyl's Leaves

I need to add Herefordshire to my road trip. I’ve noticed something about people’s home-grown vegetables. All is fine when the weather has been behaving itself. But not so fine when the garlic has rotted in the ground, the celery stalks are as skinny as pencils and the Brussels sprouts are being devoured by thousands of cabbage butterfly caterpillars. All the trouble that goes in to growing these vegetables is rarely rewarded. This is usually due to the weather, slugs, snails, caterpillars, lack of watering etc. Some crops will be wonderful and all is fine if you don’t mind having green beans and tomatoes with every single meal you eat. But I still think I'd rather go to the market once a week and meet the people who really know how to grow vegetables and choose the most wonderful specimens for my plate.

I had a Reiki session today in Herefordshire that was quite wonderful. It’s one that helps you find your very own holy grail. I think it worked! Watch this space.

It was one of my daughter's eight grandparents who was doing the Reiki (it's a long story...). He is a mystic and has discovered a new way to practice Reiki. I get along with him well and after the session I asked him to recite this Gerard Manley Hopkins poem to me:


Spelt from Sibyl’s Leaves

Earnest, earthless, equal attuneable, vaulty, voluminous..
stupendous
Evening strains to be time’s vast, womb-of-all, home-of-all,
hearse-of-all night.
Her fond yellow hornlight wound to the west, her wild-hollow
hoarlight hung to the height
Waste; her earliest stars, earl-stars, stars principal, overbend us,
Fire-featuring heaven. For earth her being has unbound, her
dapple is at an end, as-
tray or aswarm, all throughther, in throngs; self in self steeped
and pashed – quite
Disremembering, dismembering all now. Heart, you round me
right.
With: Our evening is over us; our night whelms, whelms and
will end us.
Only the beak-leaved boughs dragonish damask the tool-smooth
bleak light; black.
Ever so black on it. Our tale, O our oracle! Let life, waned,
ah let life wind
Off her once skeined stained veined variety upon, all on two
spools; part, pen, pack
Now her all in two flocks, two folds-black, white; right,
wrong; reckon but, reck but, mind
But these two; ware of a world where but these two tell, each
off the other; of a rack
Where, selfwrung, selfstrung, sheathe- and shelterless, thoughts
against thoughts in groans grind.