A few years ago, through the visionary artwork of Jack Shalatain (EFBlog 8), I came across an amazing composer called Neil H - www.neilhmusic.co.uk - Jack’s wonderful paintings were gracing the covers of a couple of the CD’s, one of which being ‘Secrets of Faeries’, that Neil H had produced and fitted the sounds beautifully. Neil’s music is evocative and gentle, and having had the great pleasure of listening to his music with him live, I found it was an extremely relaxing place to be! This is music for meditation and inspiration, with melodies that soothe the spirit, aid clearer thought and take you to another realm if you wish. Neil is a lovely man whose entrancing and heartening music often provides the perfect music for us here.

(photo’s here) I wanted to share with you our experience last year of these two squirrels that had taken up residence in the roof of our old goat house. Now normally, these grey animals drive me nuts (!) not only because I am a huge fan of the gorgeous native Red squirrels that are so endangered possibly due to this grey variety, but that the ones in our garden were constantly hogging the bird food and had succeeded in munching through many feeders before I was forced to buy the totally squirrel-proof ones!! They would sit for ages, helping themselves to anything that dropped or manage to climb up impossible poles, hang upside down and balance with great agility. (JellyBean and I would keep guard and fly outside to shoo them off, but they’d just run away a few feet and boldly wait until we went back inside.) In the autumn we had been watching them with amusement prepare for the winter, collecting hazelnuts off the bushes, playing together and jumping on each other, suddenly sitting straight up like Meerkats, revealing their white bellies when they were alerted, and gathering leaves and dry grass for nest material with which they’d scamper back to their house with their mouths all stuffed full. Then, by late spring, there were three – yup, they’d had a baby and totally didn’t have him under control at all. This little youngster of theirs, had them chasing him all over the place, he was racing up and down the trees faster than his poor parents could follow and then trying to leap from branch to branch and often slipping, which had us all worried too. All the while he squeaked and squealed and had us in fits of laughter and educated in the facts that even squirrel parents have trouble too…

Magical Blessings, Be

“It is better to have lived one day as a tiger than a thousand years as a sheep.” – Tibetan proverb