Silver Birch Quotes

A shaft of moonlight illuminated a row of sentinel silver birch in a phosphorescent glow, appearing almost ethereal in the relative surrounding gloom. Boris had stopped again, his silhouette a stark black juxtaposition against the background of illuminated branches.

I felt overstuffed and dull and disappointed, the way I always do the day after Christmas, as if whatever it was the pine boughs and the candles and the silver and gilt-ribboned presents and the birch-log fires and the Christmas turkey and the carols at the piano promised never came to pass.

She looked at a silver birch: it would have a soft, showery voice and would look like a slender girl, with hair blown all about her face and fond of dancing. She looked at the oak: he would be a wizened, but hearty, old man with a frizzled beard and warts on his fact and hands, with hair growing out of the warts. She looked at the beech under which she was standing. Ah! --she would be the best of all. She would be a gracious goddess, smooth and stately, the Lady of the Wood.

But now she loved winter. Winter was beautiful "up back" - almost intolerably beautiful. Days of clear brilliance. Evenings that were like cups of glamour - the purest vintage of winter's wine. Nights with their fire of stars. Cold, exquisite winter sunrises. Lovely ferns of ice all over the windows of the Blue Castle. Moonlight on birches in a silver thaw. Ragged shadows on windy evenings - torn, twisted, fantastic shadows. Great silences, austere and searching. Jewelled, barbaric hills. The sun suddenly breaking through grey clouds over long, white Mistawis. Ice-grey twilights, broken by snow-squalls, when their cosy living-room, with its goblins of firelight and inscrutable cats, seemed cosier than ever. Every hour brought a new revalation and wonder.

She turned back to inspect a bank of greens: olive, jade, leaf, kiwi, lime, a silver-green like the back of birch leaves, a bright pistachio.

She’s buried beneath a silver birch tree, down towards the old train tracks, her grave marked with a cairn. Not more than a little pile of stones, really. I didn’t want to draw attention to her resting place, but I couldn’t leave her without remembrance. She’ll sleep peacefully there, no one to disturb her, no sounds but birdsong and the rumble of passing trains.

Otherwise I got out of bed on two strong legs. It might have been otherwise. I ate cereal, sweet milk, ripe, flawless peach. It might have been otherwise. I took the dog uphill to the birch wood. All morning I did the work I love. At noon I lay down with my mate. It might have been otherwise. We ate dinner together at a table with silver candlesticks. It might have been otherwise. I slept in a bed in a room with paintings on the walls, and planned another day just like this day. But one day, I know, it will be otherwise.

Every moment the patches of green grew bigger and the patches of snow grew smaller. Every moment more and more of the trees shook off their robes of snow. Soon, wherever you looked, instead of white shapes you saw the dark green of firs or the black prickly branches of bare oaks and beeches and elms. Then the mist turned from white to gold and presently cleared away altogether. Shafts of delicious sunlight struck down on to the forest floor and overhead you could see a blue sky between the tree tops. Soon there were more wonderful things happening. Coming suddenly round a corner into a glade of silver birch trees Edmund saw the ground covered in all directions with little yellow flowers- celandines. The noise of water grew louder. Presently they actually crossed a stream. Beyond it they found snowdrops growing.

...and to his eyes, casually glancing upward, the silver and black-stemmed birches, with their characteristic tufts, the pale grey boughs of beech, the dark-creviced elm all appeared now as black and flat outlines upon the sky, wherein the white stars twinkled so vehemently that their flickering seemed like the flapping of wings.

When you are in trouble or at your lowest point, and have no one in whom to confide, a hawthorn would be the right choice. There is a reason why hawthorns are home to fairies and known to protect pots of treasure. For wisdom, try a beech; for intelligence, a pine; for bravery, a rowan; for generosity, a hazel; for joy, a juniper; and for when you need to learn to let go of what you cannot control, a birch with its white-silver bark, peeling and shedding layers like old skin. Then again, if it's love you're after, or love you have lost, come to the fig, always the fig.

In the moonlight David saw that Thoresby had become very peculiar indeed. Figs nestled among the leaves of beech-trees. Elder-trees were bowed down with pomegranates. Ivy was almost torn from walls by the weight of ripe blackberries growing upon it. Anything which had ever possessed any sort of life had sprung fruitfulness. Ancient, dried up frames had become swollen with sap and we putting out twigs, leaves, blossoms and fruit. Door-frames and doors were so distorted that bricks had been pushed out of place and some houses were in danger of collapsing altogether. The cart in the middle of the high street was a grove of silver birches. Its broken wheels put forth briar roses and nightingales sang on it.

Wayne tried to remember a time before he knew the word for sky. You explained away the mystery of the night, he thought, by naming its parts: darkness, Little Dipper, silver birch.

It was the day after Christmas and a gray sky bellied over us, fat with snow. I felt overstuffed and dull and disappointed, the way I always do the day after Christmas, as if whatever it was the pine boughs and the candles and the silver and gilt-ribboned presents and the birch-log fires and the Christmas turkey and the carols at the piano promised never came to pass.

But the delight of Earth, the wonder of it; the essential feeling as of the necessity for magic; that juggling with the golden moon and silver sun (such are they) that is man's universal pastime: these are the things to seek in the Kalevala. All the world to wheel about in, the Great Bear to play with and Orion and the Seven Stars all dangling magically in the branches of a silver birch enchanted by Väinämöinen; the splendid sorcerous scandalous villains of old to tell of when you have bathed in the 'Sauna' after binding the kine at close of day into pastures of little Suomi in the Marshes.

A wide half-circle of foam and glinting lights and shining shoulders of green water, the great weir closed the backwater from bank to bank, troubled all the quiet surface with twirling eddies and floating foam-streaks, and deadened all other sounds with its solemn and soothing rumble. In midmost of the stream, embraced in the weir’s shimmering arm-spread, a small island lay anchored, fringed close with willow and silver birch and alder. Reserved, shy, but full of significance, it hid whatever it might hold behind a veil, keeping it till the hour should come, and, with the hour, those who were called and chosen.

Miss La Trobe was pacing to and fro between the leaning birch trees. One hand was deep stuck in her jacket pocket; the other held a foolscap sheet. She was reading what was written there. She had the look of a commander pacing his deck. The leaning graceful trees with black bracelets circling the silver bark were distant about a ship’s length.

I have flown and fallen, and I have swum deep and drowned, but there should be more to love than 'I survived it.'" ~ Lisa Mantchev, So Silver Bright

There was something wonderful about the atmosphere at Stony Cross Park. One could easily imagine it as some magical place set in some far-off land. The surrounding forest was so deep and thick as to be primeval in appearance, while the twelve-acre garden behind the manor seemed too perfect to be real. There were groves, glades, ponds, and fountains. It was a garden of many moods, alternating tranquility with colorful tumult. A disciplined garden, every blade of grass precisely clipped, the corners of the box hedges trimmed to knife blade crispness. Hatless, gloveless, and infused with a sudden sense of optimism, Annabelle breathed deeply of the country air. She skirted the edge of the terraced gardens at the back of the manor and followed a graveled path set between raised beds of poppies and geraniums. The atmosphere soon became thick with the perfume of flowers, as the path paralleled a drystone wall covered with tumbles of pink and cream roses. Wandering more slowly, Annabelle crossed through an orchard of ancient pear trees, sculpted by decades into fantastic shapes. Farther off, a canopy of silver birch led to woodland beds that appeared to melt seamlessly into the forest beyond.

These women accept their beatings with a simplicity worthy of all praise, and far from considering themselves insulted, admire the strength and energy of the man who can administer such eloquent rebukes. In Russia, not only may a man beat his wife, but it is laid down in the catechism and taught all boys at the time of confirmation as necessary at least once a week, whether she has done anything or not, for the sake of her general health and happiness." I thought I observed a tendency in the Man of Wrath rather to gloat over these castigations. "Pray, my dear man," I said, pointing with my whip, "look at that baby moon so innocently peeping at us over the edge of the mist just behind that silver birch; and don't talk so much about women and things you don't understand. What is the use of your bothering about fists and whips and muscles and all the dreadful things invented for the confusion of obstreperous wives? You know you are a civilised husband, and a civilised husband is a creature who has ceased to be a man. "And a civilised wife?" he asked, bringing his horse close up beside me and putting his arm round my waist, "has she ceased to be a woman?" "I should think so indeed,--she is a goddess, and can never be worshipped and adored enough.

Scattered trees, never thick enough to be a forest, were everywhere. Shasta, who had lived all his life in an almost tree-less grassland, had never seen so many or so many kinds. If you had been there you would probably have known (he didn't) that he was seeing oaks, beeches, silver birches, rowans, and sweet chestnuts. Rabbits scurried away in every direction as they advanced, and presently they saw a whole herd of fallow deer making off among the trees.

Last Night’s Moon," “When will we next walk together under last night’s moon?” - Tu Fu March aspens, mist forest. Green rain pins down the sea, early evening cyanotype. Silver saltlines, weedy toques of low tide, pillow lava’s black spill indelible in the sand. Unbroken broken sea. — Rain sharpens marsh-hair birth-green of the spring firs. In the bog where the dead never disappear, where river birch drown, the surface strewn with reflection. This is the acid-soaked moss that eats bones, keeps flesh; the fermented ground where time stops and doesn’t; dissolves the skull, preserves the brain, wrinkled pearl in black mud. — In the autumn that made love necessary, we stood in rubber boots on the sphagnum raft and learned love is soil–stronger than peat or sea– melting what it holds. The past is not our own. Mole’s ribbon of earth, termite house, soaked sponge. It rises, keloids of rain on wood; spreads, milkweed galaxy, broken pod scattering the debris of attention. Where you are while your body is here, remembering in the cold spring afternoon. The past is a long bone. — Time is like the painter’s lie, no line around apple or along thigh, though the apple aches to its sweet edge, strains to its skin, the seam of density. Invisible line closest to touch. Lines of wet grass on my arm, your tongue’s wet line across my back. All the history in the bone-embedded hills of your body. Everything your mouth remembers. Your hands manipullate in the darkness, silver bromide of desire darkening skin with light. — Disoriented at great depths, confused by the noise of shipping routes, whales hover, small eyes squinting as they consult the magnetic map of the ocean floor. They strain, a thousand miles through cold channels; clicking thrums of distant loneliness bounce off seamounts and abyssal plains. They look up from perpetual dusk to rods of sunlight, a solar forest at the surface. Transfixed in the dark summer kitchen: feet bare on humid linoleum, cilia listening. Feral as the infrared aura of the snake’s prey, the bees’ pointillism, the infrasonic hum of the desert heard by the birds. The nighthawk spans the ceiling; swoops. Hot kitchen air vibrates. I look up to the pattern of stars under its wings.

Whether Whether anger quickens a lagging stride, and periodic burn-offs in the forest revitalize exhausted soil and flora—. Whether we should take pleasure in the wildcat jubilation of a lightning bolt that whips its silver vein of genesis through the night sky, flash-photo of a white birch upended, the root-system buckled to swollen thunderheads—. And whether naming an offense amounts to sour grapes and common bitterness, or even the conceited nonsense of unwashed yahoo multitudes, a yawping insult to civilized behavior—. Whether a July rainstorm, even when it drenches the unprepared pedestrian and befuddles traffic, might be extravagant, a joy, like the whoops and escalating bop glissandos of Gillespie’s upraised horn, cascading pitches a countersong to meteoric chalk marks Perseids burn across the House of Leo—. And whether peaceful ecstasy might float up from a fifteen-second avalanche reflected in the skier’s goggles, his jacket a spark of scarlet on the topmost slope, waiting for the homeward track to clear.

Lucy's eyes began to grow accustomed to the light, and she saw the trees that were nearest her more distinctly. A great longing for the old days when the trees could talk in Narnia came over her. She knew exactly how each of these trees would talk if only she could wake them, and what sort of human form it would put on. She looked at a silver birch; it would have a soft, showery voice and would look like a slender girl, with hair blown all about her face, and fond of dancing. She looked at the oak: he would be a wizened, but hearty old man with a frizzled beard and warts on his face and hands, and hair growing out of the warts. She looked at the beech under which she was standing. Ah!- she would be the best of all. She would be a precious goddess, smooth and stately, the lady of the wood.

I had started climbing trees about three years earlier, or rather, re-started; for I had been at a school that had a wood for its playground. We had climbed and christened the different trees (Scorpio, The Major Oak, Pegagsus), and fought for their control in territorial conflicts with elaborate rules and fealties. My father built my brother and me a tree house in our garden, which we had defended successfully against years of pirate attack. In my late twenties, I had begun to climb trees again. Just for the fun of it: no ropes, and no danger either. In the course of my climbing, I learned to discriminate between tree species. I liked the lithe springiness of silver birch, the alder and the young cherry. I avoided pines -- brittle branches, callous bark -- and planes. And I found that the horse chestnut, with its limbless lower trunk and prickly fruit, but also its tremendous canopy, offered the tree-climber both a difficulty and an incentive.

The air was cool and fresh and smelled of the kelp and salt that streamed in off the bay at the full of the tide. The sun was high in the tender vault of the sky, and the thunderheads that would sweep in late in the day were still only white marble puffs at the margins of the sky, solid and silver-lined. There was a blue clarity about the horizon and the distant hills that spoke of a weather change but not for another day or two. Along the meadows' edges, as we drove past, I saw pink clover and purple lupine, hawkweed and wild daylilies. Brilliant pink wild azaleas, called lambkill here, flickered like wildfire in the birch groves. Daisies, buttercups, wild columbine, and the purple flags of wild iris starred the roadside. Behind them all was the eternal dark of the pines and firs and spruce thickets and, between those, the glittering indigo of the bay.

Of course the children’s eyes turned to follow the lion; but the sight they saw was so wonderful that they soon forgot about him. Everywhere the statues were coming to life. The courtyard looked no longer like a museum; it looked more like a zoo. Creatures were running after Aslan and dancing round him till he was almost hidden in the crowd. Instead of all that deadly white the courtyard was now a blaze of colours; glossy chestnut sides of centaurs, indigo horns of unicorns, dazzling plumage of birds, reddy-brown of foxes, dogs and satyrs, yellow stockings and crimson hoods of dwarfs; and the birch-girls in silver, and the beech-girls in fresh, transparent green, and the larch-girls in green so bright that it was almost yellow. And instead of the deadly silence the whole place rang with the sound of happy roarings, brayings, yelpings, barkings, squealings, cooings, neighings, stampings, shouts, hurrahs, songs and laughter.

The bast, dispersing in shreds in the sunset whispered "Time has begun." The son, Adam, stripped naked, descended into the Old Testament of his native land and arrayed himself in bast; a wreath of roadside field grass he placed upon his brow, a staff, not a switch, he pulled from the ground, flourishing the birch branch like a sacred palm. On the road he stood like a guard. The dust-gray road ran into the sunset. And a crow perched there, perched and croaked, there where the celestial fire consumed the earth. There were blind men along the dust-gray road running into the twilight. Antique, crooken, they trailed along, lonely and sinister silhouettes, holding to one another and to their leader's cane. They were raising dust. One was beard-less, he kept squinting. Another, a little old man with a protruding lip, was whispering and praying. A third, covered with red hair, frowned. Their backs were bent, their heads bowed low, their arms extended to the staff. Strange it was to see this mute procession in the terrible twilight. They made their way immutable, primordial, blind. Oh, if only they could open their eyes, oh if only they were not blind! Russian Land, awake! And Adam, rude image of the returned king, lowered the birch branch to their white pupils. And on them he laid his hands, as, groaning and moaning they seated themselves in the dust and with trembling hands pushed chunks of black bread into their mouths. Their faces were ashen and menacing, lit with the pale light of deadly clouds. Lightning blazed, their blinded faces blazed. Oh, if only they opened their eyes, oh, if only they saw the light! Adam, Adam, you stand illumined by lightnings. Now you lay the gentle branch upon their faces. Adam, Adam, say, see, see! And he restores their sight. But the blind men turning their ashen faces and opening their white eyes did not see. And the wind whispered "Thou art behind the hill." From the clouds a fiery veil began to shimmer and died out. A little birch murmured, beseeching, and fell asleep. The dusk dispersed at the horizon and a bloody stump of the sunset stuck up. And spotted with brilliant coals glowing red, the bast streamed out from the sunset like a striped cloak. On the waxen image of Adam the field grass wreaths sighed fearfully giving a soft whistle and the green dewy clusters sprinkled forth fiery tears on the blind faces of the blind. He knew what he was doing, he was restoring their sight. ("Adam")

Hold Everything Dear for John Berger as the brick of the afternoon stores the rose heat of the journey as the rose buds a green room to breathe and blossoms like the wind as the thinning birches whisper their silver stories of the wind to the urgent in the trucks as the leaves of the hedge store the light that the moment thought it had lost as the nest of her wrist beats like the chest of a wren in the turning air as the chorus of the earth find their eyes in the sky and unwrap them to each other in the teeming dark hold everything dear the calligraphy of birds across the morning the million hands of the axe, the soft hand of the earth one step ahead of time the broken teeth of tribes and their long place steppe-scattered and together clay's small, surviving handle, the near ghost of a jug carrying itself towards us through the soil the pledge of offered arms, the single sheet that is our common walking the map of the palm held in a knot but given as a torch hold everything dear the paths they make towards us and how far we open towards them the justice of a grass that unravels palaces but shelters the songs of the searching the vessel that names the waves, the jug of this life, as it fills with the days as it sinks to become what it loves memory that grows into a shape the tree always knew as a seed the words the bread the child who reaches for the truths beyond the door the yearning to begin again together animals keen inside the parliament of the world the people in the room the people in the street the people hold everything dear 19th May 2005 Gareth Evans

Battered was my heart in the deep search, branded with cracks like slices of silver birch. An ignorant dream, a wish, just fool's gold -- that was the tale that love had sold.

Emeline couldn't remember when, exactly, things changed. Only that a moment ago she was walking down palace halls and now she walked a dirt path beneath a midnight sky. Tulip trees lined the path, their flowers unfolding like burning yellow crowns among their green leaves. The farther they walked, the taller the trees grew, until they were impossibly tall. So tall, they seemed to brush the stars. The path ended in a grove of silver birches. Moonlight pooled in from the canopy above, illuminating a bone-white throne and a man seated upon it. Atop his head sat a crown of rosebud thorns. His skin was sunbrowned, his hair moon pale; and instead of robes, water adorned him. It flowed in rivers from his hair, over his neck and shoulders where it began to gush, like a waterfall, down the rest of his body. Emeline could see no glimpse of skin beyond the cascade, but at his feet water pooled and sank into the brown earth. Wherever it touched, gray and purple thistles grew. The Wood King.

The darkness seems to pull her towards it, holding her in a freezing embrace as she moves down the lane and deeper into the treacle-thick night. The air electrocutes her lungs with each icy inhale, and her legs feel slick, sure of their new direction. She hears the stream bubbling by her side and the branches from the silver birch trees creak over her head like arthritic fingers knitting together. The moon shines its mottled, kindly face, silvering her path like a fairy godmother; she smiles up at it before it vanishes again behind a fast-moving cloud. She feels entirely of the world; it moves easily along with her, as though some invisible force has, with a small sigh, been released within her, and she's in step with life. She starts to hum, surprising herself, something made-up, childlike; it's nonsense but she doesn't care and she doesn't feel ashamed. Why didn't she notice before how smooth the world can be?

One dim wet evening in early spring, when a shabby old world was trying to wash the winter grime from its face before it must welcome April, there was wild music among the birches

the fact that so many women writers are drawn to fairy-tale material is also part of a long and honorable historic tradition: folk tales and magical tales (like other largely anonymous arts) have long been associated with women. As Alison Lurie has pointed out (in her essay “Once Upon a Time”): “Throughout Europe (except in Ireland), the storytellers from whom the Grimm Brothers and their followers collected their material were most often women; in some areas they were all women. For hundreds of years, while written literature was almost exclusively the province of men, these tales were being invented and passed on orally by women.” For centuries, fairy tales have been the voice of disenfranchised populations: not only women, but also the old, the poor, and social outcasts (such as the Gypsies—famed throughout the world for their wealth of magical tales). Fairy tales speak covertly, symbolically, about the hard realities of life; and these symbols are proving as potent to artists today as in centuries past.

You might even say there is a tree for every mood and every moment. When you have something precious to give to the universe, a song or a poem, you should first share it with a golden oak before anyone else. If you are feeling discouraged and defenceless, look for a Mediterranean cypress or a flowering horse chestnut. Both are strikingly resilient, and they will tell you about all the fires they have survived. And if you want to emerge stronger and kinder from your trials, find an aspen to learn from–a tree so tenacious it can fend off even the flames that aim to destroy it. If you are hurting and have no one willing to listen to you, it might do you good to spend time beside a sugar maple. If, on the other hand, you are suffering from excessive self-esteem, do pay a visit to a cherry tree and observe its blossoms, which, though undoubtedly pretty, are no less ephemeral than vainglory. By the time you leave, you might feel a bit more humble, more grounded. To reminisce about the past, seek out a holly to sit under; to dream about the future, choose a magnolia instead. And if it is friends and friendships on your mind, the most suitable companion would be a spruce or a ginkgo. When you arrive at a crossroads and don’t know which path to take, contemplating quietly by a sycamore might help. If you are an artist in need of inspiration, a blue jacaranda or a sweetly scented mimosa could stir your imagination. If it is renewal you are after, seek a wych elm, and if you have too many regrets, a weeping willow will offer solace. When you are in trouble or at your lowest point, and have no one in whom to confide, a hawthorn would be the right choice. There is a reason why hawthorns are home to fairies and known to protect pots of treasure. For wisdom, try a beech; for intelligence, a pine; for bravery, a rowan; for generosity, a hazel; for joy, a juniper; and for when you need to learn to let go of what you cannot control, a birch with its white-silver bark, peeling and shedding layers like old skins. Then again, if it’s love you’re after, or love you have lost, come to the fig, always the fig.

...they'll miss me so when I'm gone...to the spider crack in the kitchen window - to the old wing-chair - to the bed of striped glass - to the silver birch-ladies...that little window had always seemed to Emily to open on a world of wonder...Sometimes stars shone through it - sometimes the rain beat against it - sometimes the little greybirds and swallows visited it - sometimes airy fragrances floated in from apple and lilac blossom - sometimes the Wind Woman laughed and sighed and sang and whistled round it...

You might even say there is a tree for every mood and every moment. When you have something precious to give to the universe, a song or a poem, you should first share it with a golden oak before anyone else. If you are feeling discouraged and defenceless, look for a Mediterranean cypress or a flowering horse chestnut. Both are strikingly resilient, and they will tell you about all the fires they have survived. And if you want to emerge stronger and kinder from your trials, find an aspen to learn from – a tree so tenacious it can fend off even the flames that aim to destroy it. If you are hurting and have no one willing to listen to you, it might do you good to spend time beside a sugar maple. If, on the other hand, you are suffering from excessive self-esteem, do pay a visit to a cherry tree and observe its blossoms, which, though undoubtedly pretty, are no less ephemeral than vainglory. By the time you leave, you might feel a bit more humble, more grounded. To reminisce about the past, seek out a holly to sit under; to dream about the future, choose a magnolia instead. And if it is friends and friendships on your mind, the most suitable companion would be a spruce or a ginkgo. When you arrive at a crossroads and don’t know which path to take, contemplating quietly by a sycamore might help. If you are an artist in need of inspiration, a blue jacaranda or a sweetly scented mimosa could stir your imagination. If it is renewal you are after, seek a wych elm, and if you have too many regrets, a weeping willow will offer solace. When you are in trouble or at your lowest point, and have no one in whom to confide, a hawthorn would be the right choice. There is a reason why hawthorns are home to fairies and known to protect pots of treasure. For wisdom, try a beech; for intelligence, a pine; for bravery, a rowan; for generosity, a hazel; for joy, a juniper; and for when you need to learn to let go of what you cannot control, a birch with its white-silver bark, peeling and shedding layers like old skins. Then again, if it’s love you’re after, or love you have lost, come to the fig, always the fig.

—though the witchman greatly covetous and greedy for gold be,” mumbled the old woman, half-closing her eyes, “giveth ye not such a one more than: for a drowner, one silver penny or three halves; for a werecat, silver pennies two; for a plumard, silver pennies—” “Those were the days,” muttered the witcher. “Thank you Grandma. And now show us where it speaks of the devil and what the book says about devils. This time ‘tis grateful I’d be to heareth more, for to learn the ways and means ye did use to deal with him most curious am I.” “Careful Geralt,” chuckled Dandelion. “You’re starting to fall into their jargon. It’s an infectious mannerism.” The woman, controlling her shaking hands with difficulty, turned several pages. The witcher and the poet leaned over the table. The etching did, in effect, show the ball-thrower: horned, hairy, tailed and smiling maliciously. “The deovel,” recited the woman. “Also called willower” or “sylvan”. For livestock and domestic fowl, a tiresome and great pest is he. Be it your will to chase him from your hamlet, tamest thou—” “Well, well,” murmured Dandelion. “—takers thou of nuts, one fistful,” continued the woman, running her fingers along the parchment. “Next, takest thou of iron balls a second fistful. Of honey and utricle, of birch tar a second. Of grey soap a firkin; of soft cheese another. There where the deovel dwelleth, goest thou when ‘tis night. Commenceth then to eat the nuts. Anon, the deovel who hath great greed, will hasten and ask if they are tasty indeed. Givest to him then the balls of iron—” “Damn you,” murmured Dandelion. “Pox take—” “Quiet,” said Geralt. “Well, Grandma. Go on.” “…having broken his teeth he will be attentive as thou eatest the honey. Of said honey he will himself desire. Givest him of birch tar, then yourself eateth soft cheese. Soon, hearest thou, will the deovel grumbleth and tumbleth, but makest of it as naught. Yet if the deovel desireth soft cheese, givest him soap. For soap the deovel withstandeth not—” “You got to the soap?” interrupted Geralt with a stony expression turning toward Dhun and Nettly. “In no way,” groaned Nettly. “If only we had got to the balls. But he gave us what for when he bit a ball—” “And who told you to give him so many?” Dandelion was enraged. “It stands written in the book, one fistful take. Yet ye giveth of balls a sackful! Ye furnished him with ammunition for two years, the fools ye be!” “Careful,” smiled the witcher. “You’re starting to fall into their jargon. It’s infectious.

At evening Father became an aged man; in dark rooms Mother's countenance turned to stone and the curse of the degenerate race weighed upon the youth. At times he remembered his childhood filled with sickness, terrors and darkness, secretive games in the starlit garden, or that he fed the rats in the twilit yard. Out of a blue mirror stepped the slender form of his sister and he fled as if dead into the dark. At night his mouth broke open like a red fruit and the stars grew bright above his speechless sorrow. His dreams filled the ancient house of his forefathers. At evening he loved to walk across the derelict graveyard, or he perused the corpses in a dusky death-chamber, the green spots of decay upon their lovely hands. By the convent gate he begged for a piece of bread; the shadow of a black horse sprang out of the darkness and startled him. When he lay in his cool bed, he was overcome by indescribable tears. But there was nobody who might have laid a hand on his brow. When autumn came he walked, a visionary, in brown meadows. O, the hours of wild ecstasy, the evenings by the green stream, the hunts. O, the soul that softly sang the song of the withered reed; fiery piety. Silent and long he gazed into the starry eyes of the toad, felt with thrilling hands the coolness of ancient stone and invoked the time-honoured legend of the blue spring. O, the silver fishes and the fruit that fell from crippled trees. The chiming chords of his footsteps filled him with pride and contempt for mankind. Along his homeward path he came upon a deserted castle. Ruined gods stood in the garden sorrowfully at eventide. Yet to him it seemed: here I have lived forgotten years. An organ chorale filled him with the thrill of God. But he spent his days in a dark cave, lied and stole and hid himself, a flaming wolf, from his mother's white countenance. O, that hour when he sank low with stony mouth in the starlit garden, the shadow of the murderer fell upon him. With scarlet brow he entered the moor and the wrath of God chastised his metal shoulders; O, the birches in the storm, the dark creatures that shunned his deranged paths. Hatred scorched his heart, rapture, when he did violence to the silent child in the fresh green summer garden, recognized in the radiant his deranged countenance. Woe, that evening by the window, when a horrid skeleton, Death, emerged from scarlet flowers. O, you towers and bells; and the shadows of night fell as stone upon him.

For wisdom, try a beech; for intelligence, a pine; for bravery, a rowan; for generosity, a hazel; for joy, a juniper; and for when you need to learn to let go of what you cannot control, a birch with its white-silver bark, peeling and shedding layers like old skins. Then again, if it’s love you’re after, or love you have lost, come to the fig, always the fig.

There was something behind the glass, behind her reflection and the wash of clouded sky above her. She gazed past the surface, as though she were looking deep into clear water, ignoring the ripples and movements on the surface to search out what lived beneath. A tree, she realized, bending in a faint breeze, draped with purple leaves like streamers. Pure-silver flowers winked and sparkled in the deep foliage, swinging gently like bells, though Alaine couldn't hear anything. She gazed deeper, drinking in the beauty of a silver mist of moss on the ground, of a tangle of pale branches woven into knot-work unnaturally symmetrical, down to thorns bowing deeply to one another in vine-wrought curls. Something moved in the purple-and-silver forest, a figure, sliding like mist through the boughs. A woman--- Alaine started. She was tall and slim, shaped more than anything like a birch tree, with the same silver-pale gleam. Her hair was loose behind her, wound through with purple flowers, painfully bright against her fair waves. She looked up, gazing right at Alaine, almost meeting her eyes--- And then the mirror shattered in her hands.

your mind, the most suitable companion would be a spruce or a ginkgo. When you arrive at a crossroads and don’t know which path to take, contemplating quietly by a sycamore might help. If you are an artist in need of inspiration, a blue jacaranda or a sweetly scented mimosa could stir your imagination. If it is renewal you are after, seek a wych elm, and if you have too many regrets, a weeping willow will offer solace. When you are in trouble or at your lowest point, and have no one in whom to confide, a hawthorn would be the right choice. There is a reason why hawthorns are home to fairies and known to protect pots of treasure. For wisdom, try a beech; for intelligence, a pine; for bravery, a rowan; for generosity, a hazel; for joy, a juniper; and for when you need to learn to let go of what you cannot control, a birch with its white-silver bark, peeling and shedding layers like old skins. Then again, if it’s love you’re after, or love you have lost, come to the fig, always the fig.

If you have the right perspective, if your focus is true, if your daily outlook is balanced, you give to the requirements of matter what is their due and no more.

The whole of your earthly life is one long challenge and test. You are the centre of a battlefield in which all the forces of your being wage constant war. You have within you all the elements of strength and weakness, the remnants of the animal ancestry which are part of your physical evolution, and the divine potentialities that are the concomitants of your birth as a spark of the Great Spirit.

Before long you are so immersed in these problems, somelarge, some small, some real, some imaginary, but all of them transient, that you forget the power of the spirit is exercising its beneficent effect on you. You almost shut it out of your thinking and build a kind of wall that makes it more difficult for it to penetrate.

If the Great Spirit allowed me to transfer one gift, what I would love to do is to give the power to see to those I love, because I have such pity for you in this dark world in which you live. You have no idea of the radiance which is around you. You cannot see this beauteous universe in which you dwell. This fog of matter clouds everything. It is as if there is a thick bank of cloud obscuring the rays of the sun all the time. If you could see the radiance around you, you would know that there is no real trouble that could penetrate it.

Meditation at Lagunitas" All the new thinking is about loss. In this it resembles all the old thinking. The idea, for example, that each particular erases the luminous clarity of a general idea. That the clown- faced woodpecker probing the dead sculpted trunk of that black birch is, by his presence, some tragic falling off from a first world of undivided light. Or the other notion that, because there is in this world no one thing to which the bramble of blackberry corresponds, a word is elegy to what it signifies. We talked about it late last night and in the voice of my friend, there was a thin wire of grief, a tone almost querulous. After a while I understood that, talking this way, everything dissolves: justice, pine, hair, woman, you and I. There was a woman I made love to and I remembered how, holding her small shoulders in my hands sometimes, I felt a violent wonder at her presence like a thirst for salt, for my childhood river with its island willows, silly music from the pleasure boat, muddy places where we caught the little orange-silver fish called pumpkinseed. It hardly had to do with her. Longing, we say, because desire is full of endless distances. I must have been the same to her. But I remember so much, the way her hands dismantled bread, the thing her father said that hurt her, what she dreamed. There are moments when the body is as numinous as words, days that are the good flesh continuing. Such tenderness, those afternoons and evenings, saying blackberry, blackberry, blackberry.

She thought about his odd appearance, but could find no revulsion in her heart—perhaps only someone who was very ugly or very beautiful could understand how little beauty mattered.

Goosefeather padded to a smooth silver birch and started tearing off strips of the bark with deft claws.

To attain self mastery means a long and arduous discipline, a rigorous training, a constant refusal to allow your fear to dominate you.

but here it is, summer still, August 16 and you still sing to me and help me to find my way through the maze.

It was lined on both sides with birch trees that shaded the track. Wildflowers and wild grasses grew in abundance, and between the pale white trunks of the birch trees, the reflection of sunlight off the river came through in brilliant flashes of silver