Breakthrough - To The Trees Edition #75

The landscape is brimming from ear to ear as spring overflows into summer. The pastures are now heaving, hip high with grasses and brushed golden with the spilling buttercups and grass already turning to seed.

A strong wading action is required to pass through the fields in June, so thick is the eager growth in the wake of spring’s eruption. I stand for a moment at the field gate, delaying the gratification gained in disturbing the green swathe, eyeing it like unstepped snow waiting for my trail.

So thick is the eager growth in the wake of spring’s eruption that a strong wading action is required to pass through June’s fields. I stand for a moment at the gate, delaying the gratification gained in disturbing the green swathe, eyeing it like unstepped snow waiting for my trail.

These green baths will soon be cut down and wrapped in black plastic, the surviving tufts left around the pasture edges for the cows to graze. The fields become a rather intense and relentless place once the cooling grasses have been mowed and so every spare moment I have is spent spooned in their grace.

When sat in the depths of the pasture I can disappear under the grassline. From down here the horizon is sliced by tall bladed stems and the buttercups are day stars in a lake of sky blue. While the oak hushes in the wind and the wren still sings, my inner chambers are filled and I am blissfully at one with them.

I recognise this place now as an extended back garden, a place I can visit on foot and know so well that I might also walk its lanes in my dreams. It’s a place where I fill my being full of awe, send roots downward, and grow my inspiration as I sit for long uninterrupted hours gazing long distance waiting for nature to fidget.

On first meeting, the Isle of Glastonbury is a maze of lanes wandering through pastures spread delightfully over rolling hills. An arrangement of land where one might have little concern over a loss of direction or wrongly chosen turn, but which is also strangely disorientating as the tall hill keeps altering its form and the lanes don’t seem to meander where you expect them to.

Beltane Sunrise – Morris dancers

As long as one doesn’t meet the willows, marking a descent onto the long straight droves across watery moors where a wrong turn costs miles; upon the island one can be pretty sure that their path will at some point soon resolve into a full circle and the big hill will again shapeshift and indicate the way home.

The area of the island in its fullness is no more than two kilometres from top to toe and tip to tip. Though its paths meander and its hills undulate with such regular irregularity that one is sometimes unsure that we haven’t left time and space entirely behind and stepped into some otherworld place where time and distance are elongated or circular in form.

As one familiarises with the oscillations of this isle through repeated excursions on foot an exchange occurs between walker and landscape, the place becomes worked into the mind and body, as if its being sculpted into one’s being, removing material that is not necessary, and allowing a relief to emerge within. Upon one’s interior cavern is revealed a map of Avalon.

At the same time the walker leaves their impression upon the landscape, creating personal maps and stories of favourite places, memories of encounters with creatures, and the time one kissed beneath the ash. Wearing the paths beneath foot, dispersing pollen in plumes, distributing seed and pressing acorns into the soil, sweat dripped and blood dripped catacombs of memories.

At a certain unknowable stage in one’s relationship with the land it feels like an adequate exchange has occurred that an image of it emerges and resides inside, and likewise, an imagination of you is allowed to walk the paradisiacal planes in perpetuity.

After years moving through the same paths, what it is and what I am are no longer separated, we are entwined, any movement away from this place would dissect my existence, it would be more than a removed limb and more like the loss of a whole layer of personage. Who I am now extends far further to the distant horizons banked around Avalon’s bowl, deep into its temple core, pieces of me exist in the apples and so the apples exist in large numbers within me!

After decades a walk across this relatively small area of earth the depth and density of story in this scape becomes especially apparent and starkly obvious. It’s partly down to this density of feature within such a tight vicinity that lends Glastonbury its power of attraction, as well as its intensity, the form of Avalon is impressed to some extent into each being who dares wander over the boundary.

The landscape’s closeness to its lore, stories overlaid upon stories and woven together by name and number create a web that hangs under the potency of the love heaped upon it by its former inhabitants.

All these overlays make for a place where thought, dream and feeling become tangible and a place that is only wrongly interpreted if one is adamant their means is the only means of approach. These multiple tracings make it near on impossible to fathom in its fullness without being drawn down into the depths by the tendrils of madness.

All these overlays make for a place where thought, dream and feeling become tangible and a place that is only wrongly interpreted if one is adamant their means is the only means of interpretation. These multiple tracings make it near on impossible to fathom in its fullness without being drawn down into the depths by the tendrils of madness.

The intensity of this vicinity is made more visceral by the floods of people who still pilgrimage this way along with their various intentions and baggage. It is possible to gain a great deal from foraging crystals in the high street, or partying for five days straight at Pilton, likewise to explore the town’s landscapes and hills, a lot can also be gained from reading the lore of the land, so too from becoming it. We are each on our own path and Avalon’s embrace meets us as we meet it.

This process is beyond metaphor. The landscape and its trees feel you and this becomes as clear as the moment one’s gaze falls onto the eye of an elephant. Or another human. These hills and all that has sprung from them is an untouched font of wisdom, it knows you more than you know it, and more than you know yourself.

MW 1/6/26

Enjoy a video from our recent Glastonbury Beltane Celebrations: