Witches Broom

Glitches in the system

I love my little adventures. Put them in place to disrupt and distract, so I can see the world from a different angle. So I took a little trip and came home again.

And I come home and flail, unsettled, ungrounded. I forget how draining the movement, the talking, the changes in scene are, and that transitions can be tricky.

I find myself standing dazed in the kitchen wondering that what I'm supposed to be doing, making tea or making a decision? Resting or taking action? Surely I should be doing something useful. Surely. So I sit back down on the sofa with the TV on, numbing the tangled discomfort of zero motivation, hiding from the conflict between mind and body.  I'm just waiting for all the cogs to realign and start working in harmony again, but patience is not my forte.

Spring is doing her best, sending flowers and new leaves, a light warmth in the air. Sporadic glimpses of sun between downpours. She's tickling my bones and making me restless. So I go out for a walk, looking for direction.

No wind today and the birches, normally dancing across the sky are still, elegant skeletons in silhouette. I've noticed the tangled masses in the branches before, dense globes of disordered twigs, as if built for gremlins to nest in.  They are the ‘proliferation of deformed growth’ known as witches’ brooms. A fungus causes a glitch in the system. New buds grow willy-nilly and out of order as natural growth patterns are disrupted, all chaotic and ignorant of the predetermined plan. They do no harm, and add interest to the typified form.

Today, they make me stop and take notice like they've something to tell me. Today, they are a glitch in the matrix, that mirror my feelings to a tee. Today, I can see a small polypoidy fern growing out from one of them. A whole world of snagged debris giving rise to a new green shoot.

My little adventures are just the same. Disruptions that spark curiosity, offering tangled webs of connections; rabbit holes of disordered information that gather debris and break it down to compost. An incubation zone. So I have decided to give up the fight, to let myself be. I shall walk again tomorrow, out in this damp spring, new worlds sprouting up through my boots showing me which way to go.