In autumn trees store up energy in the roots and stems in order to survive the winter wit this thought in mind Miles and Dacombe decided that a battery / bird-box which emitted a vibrating hum
and sugar glass acorns suspended from the branches of a beautiful willow tree would make an eloquent end to their walk through the seasons.
Participants gathered round the tree, sat beneath the branches and listened to my poem
We Follow The Seasons
We follow the seasons,
bare, then budding,
greening up, fruiting.
Gold leaves turn brown
as we devour ourselves,
sucking ourselves dry.
We see in red, follow the light,
seek out the sun,
drinking it in.
Breathing out oxygen,
we are your vital organ.
Lungs of the world.
Our roots talk and twitch,
threads dividing to a
thousand tiny tendrils.
Microscopic fungus
delving through rock
extracting nutrients.
We play the long game,
here before you, still here
centuries after your passing.
A timeline of tales in peat, in soil
in the rings of our seasons which swell
then diminish as climates change.
Our presence soothes you,
our shaded spaces cool you,
mind and body, heart and soul.
Our songs, our sighing
carried on the wind with a
creak-crack of bark and twig.
We are male and female.
Pollen, flower, root and branch.
We are patient, opportunistic
clever seed stored up,
lying dormant waiting
to become viable.
Carole Miles 2017
The photographs from this part of the walk can be found here
Continuum was commissioned by Deep Roots Tall Trees as part of the Our Woods Festival
deeprootstalltrees.org/ http://deeprootstalltrees.org/about-us/who-we-are/
