Somewhere between waking and sleeping on our journey towards the unfathomable deep, there comes a thin moment where we have one foot in the waking world and the other is in that other world where we relinquish conscious control.
Pausing here and straddled between two planets that drive one another like gears, the attentive traveler will notice and narrow door only wide enough to sidle through.
This is the border of sleep, where imagination and reality are braided together, a chasm in the crust of consciousness, venting the hot pumice of imagery into the irresistible magma of narrative.
Welcome to episode 56 of Stories from the Borders of Sleep, curious tales from bordersofsleep.com created and voiced by your host Seymour Jacklin at the website bordersofsleep.com you can find more information, leave feedback Join the email list to stay updated on what I'm up to and the inspiration behind the stories, or find out how to support me to keep writing.
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However, you might get in touch and I will always try to respond the soundtrack for this week's episode is by Laura Incara.
That's from the album musical incense volume one, which is available from magnitude.com so if you are ready to journey with me, then I shall begin the Copse by Seymour Jacklin Humans rather think that they can write the story of this or that piece of woodland in the landscape.
You'll hear folk tell the stories and hear such things as that old grove of sturdy oaks was once part of a much greater hunting estate where the king would ride after wild boar with his nobles or so, and so managed this plantation to supply timber to the great ships in the Napoleonic Wars.
But these are mere sketches of any woodland's true story.
In most cases the slow evolution of a forest is longer than any human's life, and the thousands of dark nights that roll through it are not witnessed by the so called owners, much less the self appointed historians of the land.
But let us nevertheless begin with a preliminary sketch of the planting in question.
This copse at evening resembled the silhouette of a ship on the horizon, the great masts being fulfilled by the taller trees in its midst, the beech and the ash, which were also the elders of the community.
Underneath the full sails of their canopy, the lesser masts and spars of the underwood included hazel and elder, and the deck of the woodland floor was awash with ground elder and creeping tendrils of anemone and celandine.
In human terms, the function of the copse was aesthetic.
Looking from the windows at the back of the great house, it drew the eye deeper into the land where the formal gardens gave way to long lawns and then to rolling parkland and pasture, often grazed by sheep.
The beech trees were, like so many in England at the time, deliberately placed by humans of a romantic disposition to enhance the pastoral ambiance of the landscape.
The rest of the growth arrived by degrees, blown in by the wind or carried into the shelter of the established trees by feathered and four footed creatures.
In those days people took the long view and rightly anticipated that a hundred years later their foresight in planting would be appreciated by their descendants.
But just how much they couldn't have known.