Sweeping

The hut is a place of solitude set among trees: birch mostly, but maples too, as well as ash and oak.

The equinoctial gales, quiet at the moment, have blown the early autumn leaves under the door. The first of these, as ever, are the small postage stamp birch leaves.

I sweep them through the open stable door of the kitchen, out where they belong, in the curl of wind and pulldown of earthworm.

My broomstick is a fine ashplant I rescued from a Glasgow University skip many years ago, along with two iron tipped bamboo javelins. One of those became a curtain pole in a Maryhill flat. The broom handle, painted for some reason in gold, serves still, a dozen years later.

Things come to rest here.

The gold of the handle is faded by use as the lit birch leaves I sweep.

There is no wisdom offered here from the maple or the birch.

As my friend Barry Graham has said: when we are open to wisdom, leaving ourselves behind, we see it’s there all the time.

It might arrive at a place like this, ringed by trees.

Wisdom fleeing like birch leaves in autumn gales and settling.

Wisdom might be found while sweeping.