from a spring hill - Aeipathy

no wellies necessary!

Hello dear ones, I do hope you are all bright eyed and bushy tailed! As always you are welcomed with a huge, very grateful hug which luckily for all of you is a virtual one!

Like a freak storm out of nowhere and everywhere, I was struck down by one of those suspiciously unidentifiable Covid(y) spring viruses. It picked me up, held me in the twisting and turning of its treacherous vortex for an entire week! Just as I was about to pull on my wellies… unbelievable!

As such, I have dragged myself into the first week of spring, armed with tissues, a sticky, exhausted mess, clutching a hot water bottle, trailing the scent of tea tree, eucalyptus, clove and ginger behind me. All through the days I couldn’t take off sick because someone else beat me to it—twenty-five eight year olds left to their own devices? Uh-uh…! I have whimpered and groaned, sweated and sworn—I am a horrible patient—but managed to haul my pathetic self through to the end and now I am wondering what the hell just happened because it’s Friday evening again and I am sitting exactly where I was sitting last week with the same amount of words written staring back at me from the page I began writing seven days ago with little recollection of the in between!

Groundhog Day comes to mind…

On hindsight, given recent running around like a headless chicken—more to come on the subject of chickens, but please, nobody mention the buzzard from there-on—it was entirely necessary and I do feel marginally fresher. Though this maybe the weather, which has flipped from bare-armed-warmth to three layers, two coats and fur lined boots arctic-blast-frozen while I was wallowing in piteous, viral dejection cursing loudly because I missed the opening scenes of springs sweet opera! I haven’t even seen the lambs I hear bleating on the hill yet—imagine many hundreds of sad emoji’s, then dozens more because, oh lambs… and the longing for. Next year, next year… I’m sighing… or crying, either way those emoji’s are real and it’s bloody freezing!

Anyway, a quick update follows with a few photos from the hill taken this beautiful March—excluding the first week of spring—because aeipathy remains even when the world about me is turning into a shit show!

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Aeipathy — meaning to have enduring passion. Of multiple origins. Either (i) a borrowing from Latin. Or (ii) a borrowing from Greek. Etymons: Latin aeipathia; Greek ἀειπάθεια.

Now, in the midst of any normal day, in any normal place, there are atomic seconds when I forget to breathe….

Under a streak of pale silk-grey sky, on an evening wrapped in the beginnings of night I stop breathing, for barely ten seconds but I stop nonetheless.

Being undeniably blessed to live in my favourite place in the world with a passion I believe in unquestionably, to open my windows every morning without fear is never taken for granted. I am still endlessly horrified by the cruelty and lunacy of a certain few, yet more by the flippancy with which their acts of violence are orchestrated. The hill and I are safe, as is all life upon it, change only occurring in the natural way that it has done for always. I revel in the stability of that. In these moments of awakening after winter slumber I am almost childlike, whispering hello into the wind at each new vibrant green-budded explosion. But regardless of all visible exultation I feel all this with an element of pain; joy, it seems, is tangible when twisted amongst the turmoil of other explosions; black, smoky, murderous.

There is no simple way to unfeel such pain either, to extricate myself from it entirely would surely be to ignore its very existence but belief in love is a great healer; not just a trickle but a shining perpetual belief that we are all in our own way capable of loving and being loved, of being profoundly good, that we only need to feel the goodness of others to reciprocate. I have said, written and implied many times in these last fury filled weeks, love begets love, and, although some will say we humans have an infinite capacity for self-deceit, I prefer not to dwell on such a philosophy long enough for it to take agency. I will continue to believe that love and kindness truly do beget love and kindness. As such, surely, if we all love, we can conquer all bad.

So, I stand, not breathing, because in noticing the blackthorn blossom exploding like an atomic bomb around two old oaks is to send thought and prayers from my safe beautiful place to those suffering. It is because of caring, because of love.

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the accused…

Briefly — Two creatures, one human one winged, threaten to overthrow my ordinarily peaceful resolve…

• My nature, when something riles me, usually, is pacifistic—often cinematic admittedly —a theatrical wave of the hands, a very french shaking of the head or index finger with an audible tutting, or muttering of words I remember hearing my father say like ‘worse things happen at sea’ or ‘nothing is that important’ or more recently similarly in French, ‘ce n’est pas grave’. Unless, of course, it is…¹ So when for the second time in the same amount of months there are footprints, behind the barn, all down the lane, along the tiny path that leads into the woodland, all along and to the sides of the paths within, when I find so many young trees snapped in half and an extremely efficient redistribution of all my flower beds has taken place, you will understand, I am certain, the torrent of expletives that ensued. Shamefully, I can tell you, I was angry, most inelegantly so, love was but an indistinguishable sigh reverberating in the distant violet hazed hills.

  Often, when I write of footprints, they are the shadows left behind after badger or pine marten, fox or hare, I am excited to see them so close to home, sometimes uncontrollably so. Even wild boar have been forgiven for scattering their mess but these are not the footprints of any one of those many wild animals. These are large and deep, with piles of dung scattered splattered at frequent intervals; they are made by cows. An entire herd of cows who ransacked my garden, the woodland and the lane oblivious to the dangerously deep holes they left in soft earth for me to trip on—as if I need any help in clumsiness. And, perhaps not worse than plant and tree devastation, but certainly as heartbreaking, was that they trampled over an ancient drain, snapping one of a dozen irreplaceable flagstones lain across the meticulous work of hands which undoubtedly spent many hundreds of hours joining five exquisite stone tunnels to each of five artesian wells on the surrounding land.

  Infuriatingly the owner of these errant beasts avoids me. When we finally cross a path with no escape—for him—regardless of my still bubbling anger I speak to him with empathy—animals escape their confines when elsewhere the grass looks greener, we humans are not so different—I even find a smile as I explain the damages, the time spent repairing them. He did not apologise, neither did he thank me for returning his herd to their designated green grazing or for repairing his failed electric fence. He simply smiled saying “Elles avaient un penchant pour le lierre”. — They had a taste for the ivy.

  I can find no appropriate way to rearrange my face as I realise my anger is no longer shaped like a footprint, it never really was, it is shaped like a whiskered smirk and ivy.

• Buzzard vs Chickens; Every two weeks since Christmas a beastly buzzard—Chloe and Jonathan and David, my dear friends, apologies for all bad feeling towards the buzzard—has returned to viciously slaughter one of my poor hens. She has defied every trap and every net, swooped in grabbed another of my darling red-headed girls, then left in her own cloud of brown feathers, her catch clutched in bloodied claws, a contrail of rusty feathers floating behind her. There has not been one single trickery in the ‘how-to- defeat-a-buzzard-who-wants-your-hens-for-supper’ list that has worked. Until such a time as we can make space—find sufficient pennies—to build a covered coop, my one remaining hen lives in the courtyard. At a safe enough distance from Wolfie, her unknowing body guard, that he too should not be tempted by buzzard tactics for his supper. Because, and he has no shame in this, he would if he could!

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Spring Equinox - first oak leaves uncurling…

My peaceful resolve returns; to the more equitable—less precariously close to tears or tantrums—calm that I love and long for at the end of each winter…

“She has taught me patience. And as someone who has made their living through words, she has made me consider the dignity and persuasiveness of silence.”― Chloe Dalton, Raising Hare: A Memoir

• I spend many hours watching for the long ears I love more than any others to appear, the days of waiting lengthened by longing and a grain more fear. I pass two killed on the road, their beautiful bodies mangled, matted soft fur bloodied. Each day ends without a single sign of even one hare having survived not only the mechanical monsters that sweep across each acre harvesting wheat and maize and every small creature in its path in autumn but, also, this winter rainfall which devastated even their usual safe slopes, has left land more like marshland and bog. Until Wednesday morning… when I turn at the bend in the road. He is sitting there in the warmth of early morning sunshine, preening whiskers and behind his ears, as if waiting for this precise moment, on this precise day to say ‘well hey you, I’ve been waiting for you, how are you this fine morning? And I, with watery eyes, reply ‘well it’s a little frisky out here but I am so very happy to see you again!’ At last… at last…

• On a day not long after I read, “but the Hopi mark for the crane’s foot became the world’s peace symbol. The crane’s foot—pie de grue—became that genealogist’s mark of branching descent, pedigree.”—Richard Powers ‘The Echo Maker’—two grues cindrées appear out of thin clouds above the house calling into the distance like serendipitous ghosts. When I research the possibility of seeing cranes in the Aveyron—because I never have—I learn that the department is indeed on the flight path to their breeding grounds in Northern Europe. Cranes migrate by the thousand, can travel hundreds of miles a day cleverly using thermals and fly at heights unimaginable to most other birds and although, on further reading I discover this part of the Aveyron does not lay directly on their flight path. It may be possible to catch sight or hear straggles of small groups but ordinarily they pass further north, over the mountainous area that sweeps in to form the Massif CentraI. This does not stop me spending hopeful hours peering up into the sky at every possible moment just in case.

• I have now finished both the back and the front of the smallest item I could think of to knit that wouldn’t feel like a guilty pleasure—it might be useful during spring clemency. By the end of this weekend I may, although probably won’t have a new, very untrendy tank-top knitted from oddments of wool I have been meaning to make use of during all the winter months for the last ten years.

Narcisuss and Pussy Willow buds from my garden.

• This evening sunbeams will once again pour through the sitting room windows of my home, a fact that will cause me great excitement being that it is the only room in the house where I may sit in complete silence and cannot through all the months of winter without fleeing rigid with cold to the warmth and noise of the kitchen again. The simple joy of one hours difference in time.

• For twenty-one years I have lived on this hill. For the first five of those years red squirrels scuttled across the lane from March through to autumn doing their squirrel work, they were numerous, adorable creatures I watched endlessly and tirelessly. At some point during the sixth year, they disappeared. There was no barely noticeable slow decline in their numbers, they simply vanished. Yesterday evening, picking my way carefully over the troughs left by errant cattle through the woodland, on a fallen ash bough just a few metres ahead of me, sat one red squirrel. Hope…

“I know you’re tired but come, this is the way.” ― Jalalu’l-din Rumi

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In the eternal hope of unknowing some of that which I do and knowing more of that which I don’t, that the embodiment of this will never dull aeipathy, with love…

Something I loved this week;

Becky Allen finished her hope filled essay with words I loved as much as the relief she felt;

There was this longtime-sober guy in AA who said at every meeting, “if no one has told you today that they love you, I do.” And I do.

When the map and the terrain don't match

1. In light of all else happening today and all the too numerous days prior, I do very soon realise it isn’t!