Within hushed moments

Bare feet on hot earth, walking in the pale blue of wild chicory mornings...

Hello dear ones, from my now tinder-dry hill I welcome you with sunburnt arms and a perhaps overly warm hug. I am delighted you are here!

Long balmy weeks of endless halcyon days stretch ahead—I am so very privileged to have them, I know, I know! I am suspended in the feeling of ‘there is no rush’ then floating off constantly on the bliss of time to Be.

And, oh my goodness, there is panic and excitement all of sudden… in an hour, I leave for Toulouse. From there, tomorrow, with my beautiful-kind-thoughtful and adored daughter Rosie, I will take a flight to Portugal. I will be the petrified passenger clinging to the seat, eyes closed, knuckles white as we fly over the Pyrenees, she holding me in her arms while we continue across the top of Spain, veering slightly south-west to Porto. This is my surprise birthday gift, I had not even the faintest whisper of a clue about, from her to me. Rosie I love you to the moon and back again on repeat, we will walk and walk with our feet splashing in the cold, salty vastness of the Atlantic Ocean. It has been too long, I cannot wait!

Much important pa(ni)cking has been accomplished this morning so here, a little breathless I send you but a few short vignettes from the first week of holiday so quickly passed… with love always.

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“And now here is my secret, a very simple secret: It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.” ― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry,

One day, in the absolute hush of dawn, in the few tender moments before the shape of the world is clear, before the violation of the unspeakable truths of cruelty, heartbreak, hunger and loss of life return to this unwilling keeper of unnecessary grief, before I have padded over soft oak boards to prepare ginger tea, before, even my eyes have time to focus on the hour, I hear them. I hear how they begin their day, the softest of sounds caressing dawn air, an almost hiss that slithers in on the warm breeze through my open window, through the half sliver of light. Then, as my eyes adjust, as my sleepiness uncurls from dreams tangled in cotton, they begin their high pitched hungry screeches and I know their downy soft feathers are ruffled as their tiny necks are reaching up from the nest, each of their hungry beaks vying for whatever morsels of breakfast are brought to them by devoted parents. I cannot see them. Not even if I lean precariously—dangerously—from the window. I guess, only through spying each evening tiny feathered clues on close branches, that they are a family of ¹Coal Tits. After all, those tiny black and white badger faces can belong to no other passerine bird… can they?

Mother Kestrel carrying supper for her brood on a different evening, no vole or mouse this time, only a crunchy Bush Cricket.

On another day, this time evening heat glows, radiating from my glistening skin. Across distant hills, the sun, a streak of tangerine light beyond is beginning to seep into the indigo of dusk, the landscape shimmering in acceptance, is silent, only the hoppers sing their summer songs. An owl swoops past, disinterested in the day almost passed, its languid wings seek only night. Just beyond the kitchen window is a commotion, the lingering hush of late evening erupts into a different sound, sharp and shrill, it shatters the deep silence. A squabble between two much larger siblings as both mother and father arrive with their beaks filled with small offerings. No doubt a natural genocide has taken place, no doubt a whole family of voles or mice have perished in order to feed this family today. Nevertheless, malice was not a forethought, this is no cruelty—though it looks gruesome—this is simply survival. The raucous bickering lasts but a few breathless seconds and though tears prick my eyes at the thought of decapitated mice I cannot condemn these beautiful acrobatic ballerinas of the sky, fiercely predator as they are, they do after all, have hungry mouths to feed. With a final skrytch-skrytch kestrel screech, both parents take flight to hunt the next meal. Their day will not end until the last scrap of tangerine light fades to black. I wipe away ridiculous tears, for I cannot admonish that which is natural, that which is fundamental to keeping a family alive.

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Walking in the pale blue of wild chicory mornings...

BRIEFLY - There is a haze of blue across certain fields in July, lasting only as long as the hushed, fresh sigh of the morning. This is the blue of ²wild chicory, the blue of high summer, swallow filled skies. Blue on blue. One could almost swim in such a colour.

Twice this week I have heard toads singing in the valley. Ordinarily it is a sign of rainfall to come. Ordinarily a sign of fresher weather. Though not a drop of rain has arrived…. But then, I tell myself, these are not ordinary days.

On an evening, when the sun is low and the heat lower, a pine marten streaks across the lane ahead of me leaping into an old plum tree. Even before I catch sight of her sleek stealth, her sweet musky scent hangs in the still air of the evenings’ sultriness, quietly—and strangely—faintly alluring. I halt in my wandering and wondering, try to be silent, though hushing my excitable companion into voiceless submission when the chance of a game with such an enticing aroma just might be this evenings most joy filled moment is not to be. I smile, he cannot help his ancestral Canis lupus nature anymore than she can help hers. Little does he know she is sharper of wit and of tooth, faster on the turn, that she can climb trees like a squirrel and hold her muscles in statue like stillness. She is from the order Carnivora after all and he is fortunate to be on the ground looking up at her.

“Hidden in the glorious wildness like unmined gold.”— John Muir

Wild oats line the edges of the stubble fields. When they lean over the hedges and edges blowing daintily in the wind I know they are singing to the earth, blowing kisses filled with goodness to overworked soil. Pray tell me, why oats are not raised gently from our poor depleted land instead of cattle when they give so much more back? How have we become so far removed from the necessity to understand what is harmful to our beloved planet?

Summer has woven gold through every green meadow. The hill, a faded, dusty patchwork is now stitched in place only by each line of trees separating the land. These trees, whether by their deep-rooted stubbornness of age or sheer juvenile resilience, oblivious of dust, of drought, of heat, storm or mechanical monsters are the unvanquished heroes who stand like sentries unwilling to leave their posts. Others, those that were too old or too weak, whose roots found rock instead of soil, lay broken like sedentary soldiers of untold stories beaten and slain by the wild wind. They are many. Too many. For each of them I feel another heart string torn from its moorings, as irreparable as every bark enclosed ancient soul hidden within them.³

In the light of the suns last smudged kiss…

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Excitedly and with love from heady summer days

Something I have loved this week;

Every word and whisper of light and dark from the exquisite soul that is Kim.

I do not glide. I move as though the floor remembers something I once buried there. My eyes do not scan—they settle, circle, touch. I search for what is trembling just out of sight. Not the brilliance. The fracture. The indigo that bruises. The crimson that confesses. I walk like a daughter returning to a mother who never said her name aloud.

1. Coal Tits are the smallest of the Tit family Paridae, more often found in forests of conifers but gradually spreading to more domesticated lands too. They make their nests in shallow hollows in trees and old walls. This family is nesting in the ruins of the building next to my home.

2. A field of wild chicory is a sign of unhealthy soil, as is wild carrot. As beautiful as they look it is also a sign of over worked land.

3. I have walked every slope, every woodland path and lane, every meadow during the first week of my holiday, I counted over three-hundred trees ripped from their roots or simply snapped in two during the tornado. They are mourned by all that lived by or within them.