I pulled the Nine of Swords Tarot card this morning (for my daily card pull). Typically this card is about anxiety and nightmares. I thought actually for once I’m not feeling anxious. My ears have finally unblocked after three weeks from an infection and yesterday I had a whole day, the first, of feeling ok since I got COVID nearly seven weeks ago. But now, sitting in the garden, I am looking at my neighbour’s huge Ash tree and I can see a big branch is pressing down on the telephone wires. Unfortunately this neighbour is not happy about being responsible for his overhanging trees so this will not be easy to resolve.
Fortunately a Song Thrush lands in the tree and I focus on the speckles and the short, dull sounding call he or she is making. A second Song Thrush arrives. I have no idea if they are a pair, they look the same to me and usually males and females of birds look different, or so I thought. My favourites (along with sparrows and wrens) Woodies I find hard to differentiate. I will check in my bird book after [it turns out that male and female song thrushes are indeed very similar, and I also just learnt blackbirds are thrushes!]. I love other nature but I am not a naturalist, a botanist or a biologist. In fact I hated Biology at school. Factual details don’t grab me and now, with a misfunctioning brain, I struggle to remember or concentrate anyway. Instead I just absorb by sight and sound.
The sunshine today has brought out lots of birdsong, even above the gusty winds. It would be the perfect soundscape except for the odd car sound breaking the beauty.
[Please note adverts on this site are randomly selected by WordPress and do not reflect any endorsement by me]
I set the timer for the observation today for five minutes, rather than just sit, as I’m behind schedule, and oh it went so quickly. My mind is preoccupied with anxiety whenever I sit quietly at the moment, so it took a lot of harnessing and lassoing to come back to the present moment. But how much better I felt when I did.
It is raining again. My walk was a soggy, head down, quick paced one, so I’m back in my untidy shed. I’ve had a quick rearrange. When I have more energy I will do a proper sort out and clean – then from I can have a view more of the trees than the neighbours beyond.
The breeze is shuffling branches. The Apple tree is quivering. The now obligatory leaf scoots diagonally passed. I can see one single white rose, it’s blurred, crinkly, making me think of a fluffy snowball or that artificial air-can induced whipped cream on a hot chocolate. Rose nods occasionally from my neighbour’s garden.
On the walk this morning I had another horse encounter. This one was like a young Shire horse or Shetland. Chocolate brown and white with very fluffy feet. He was all alone with no shelter. I felt lonely looking at him. He stopped munching to watch me from a far distance, so I stopped too, and gradually he plodded closer. At one point, half-way nearly, I said ‘You remind me of Bobby with your fluffy paws and tail’ and immediately he kicked and bucked, arcing around in an excited leap. Bobby used to do something similar.
When Horse got closer, we took a few moments to establish mutually agreed contact. I noticed the head of a Teasel hanging form his mane and again, thought, Bobby used to be forever getting burrs and things stuck in his long hair. I wanted to pull it out but also didn’t want to risk a bite – can you tell I’ve done a lot of hair pulling in my time? Slowly nose stroke, stop, slowly left hand towards Teasel, stop. Eventually Horse turned his head far enough around for me to get hold of the Teasel and ever watchful, I gradually teased the Teasel out. I don’t know if he felt better but I did. He went back to grazing and I moved off, with a couple of looks back at each other.
[Please note all ads on this site are randomly selected by WordPress and do not represent an endorsement by me]
I am letting the garden re-wild itself with just some gentle deer-like intervention for the plum tree saplings, nettles and brambles, who would take over completely given the chance. So I sit here looking at the unruliness of neglect and try to coax my civilised brain into appreciating its beauty. I fear it’s going to take a while not to feel anxious about what has not been done, and this despite the fact that I was already a haphazard, messy, and wildlife-friendly gardener, partly by choice and partly enforced by health limitations. If I find it hard, I wonder how much hope there is for the regular mowers, the leaf clearers, the perfectionist pruners and the neat-in-a-row planters.
Today I have noticed, from the shelter of the shed (it is not raining but there is a cold wind), how much the Apple tree leans towards the sun. At what point did it decide to break free of the stake and go its own way? The stake is still there, with a gap between it and the tree, and leaning even move than the bottom half of the tree trunk. In fact the stake is in line with the second half of the trunk which I presume felt the weight of the branches reaching for the chemical furnace that resides in the sky. The tree does not seem to suffer from its bent-ness, whereas I do. But then mine is due to being leant towards computers, phone and book, which in truth, are nowhere near as important a source of life as the sun.
[Please note all ads on this site are randomly selected by WordPress and do not represent an endorsement by me]
Phew, well in my usual silly optimist way I completely underestimated how hard it would be to cut a branch off a plum tree that was resting on telephone wires. Thankfully my neighbour was able to help as I didn’t think through what would happen if the branch didn’t fall away from the wires, which of course it didn’t. Two hours later. Not the sensible thing to do post-Covid recovery either, but a sign though that I am finally (six weeks on) starting to feel much better. And it was good after all these weeks of being sick on sick (as Toni Bernhard describes being sick on top of being chronically ill) to be out in the sun and the wind doing something really physical.
It’s amazing the tenacity of the branch. Holding on and holding on. Plum trees grow so quickly and vigorously I don’t think they are really meant for small gardens. I play ‘whack-a-mole’ with the saplings in the lawn, resigning myself to having to dig them up. It’s either that or we have to take out the parent trees which seems a sad thing to do.
A crow just landed on the lawn and helped himself to a chip I had left out the other day. It’s been wet the last two days so presumably he was less inclined to forage then.
Time to go inside now and rest and let the world be. When my energy improves I just want to get everything done, like flowers in summer blooming hard, but I don’t have the luxury of going to seed and being reborn, or lying dormant in hibernation, though that is in fact what I should do.
[Please note all ads on this site are randomly selected by WordPress and do not represent an endorsement by me]
Hi, I’m Alison! This blog is where I post my daily writings, what I’ve been reading and anything else that feels it wants to be here. The focus is on writing to do with being part of nature, in particular from a Vegan perspective. That means that I am especially interested in exploring relationships with other species in a way that respects their autonomy and right to life. Years ago I discovered Ecopsychology and this underpins how I choose to interact with life other than human, seeking to bring the concerns around how we treat the rest of nature and the impact of that, together with an understanding of how I (we) are impacted psychologically by that relationship. As a result, although I put this blog in the realm of nature writing, it is very much from a nature memoir perspective, rather than a more scientific approach. My daily writing practice, based on a process I learnt during the Encounters With Kin course with Roselle Angwin, involves a short period of mindful observation followed by free writing that brings the observations together with my innermost thoughts and experiences. One thing you will notice comes up regularly is mention of my best pal, Bobby. He was a Tibetan Terrier, my first dog, and died in December 2021 fairly quickly and unexpectedly aged 10. He taught me so much about myself, about the emotional lives of other species, and about how humans try to control so much. The grief in the year following his death has been huge, not least because I am partially housebound due to Fibromyalgia (likely Chronic Lyme Disease) and so for 10 years Bobby was my sofa pal, my constant companion. You’ll see photographs of him as well as references in my writing.
Now for a few facts about me:
I live in a village in Bedfordshire with my hubby, and was born in Southampton but only lived there for 6 months. I spent a short period of my babyhood living in a caravan in a field in Staffordshire as my parents’ house sale fell through. There we discovered I suffered from hayfever. Age 5 we moved from a village in Staffordshire to the village of Port Carlisle in Cumbria, on the Solway Firth. I consider this my true home. We lived across from the marsh and I used to see curlews. Age 11 we went to live in Carlisle, which I was not happy about. I moved down south after university in Bradford and have been homesick for mountains and waterfalls and ‘proper’ countryside ever since.
I used to work in HR and L&D in a big international law firm in London. I went freelance as a trainer/coach/facilitator and among my clients were two government agencies under Defra so I got to learn about all sorts of interesting things to do with the protection, or problems, of England & Wales’ nature.
In around 1992 my chronic health issues became so bad that I had to give up work. In the last few years however, I set up and ran (as a volunteer) for two years a pig rehoming service helping pigs in need across the country, and since October 2021 I have been doing a few hours admin work with a poetry consultancy. I’d like to say I get to read lots of poetry and learn a lot from the feedback but of course I don’t. I also do a little Tarot Coaching www.tarottohealtheworld.co.uk using tarot cards to help people connect with their intuition for their own development and to help them contribute more effe
I am a constant (some would say addicted) learner and have done numerous courses. Everything from car maintenance for women through to an MSc in Organizational Behaviour.
My writing career peaked at primary school when one year I won the annual creative writing competition, the Christmas story writing competition (I got my name on two award shields!), and a valentine’s poetry writing competition in the local newspaper. I have never reached those heady heights again.
Meeting a Vietnamese Pot-Bellied Pig age 16 at Appleby Castle turned me Vegetarian. It took me far too long to become Vegan though, not until my forties.
Randomly: I once applied to be a Fingerprint expert (I failed); Yarncrafts have helped save my sanity both in my teens and in the last 10 years; I’ve only ever entered two Karaoke competitions, as part of a group, and won both; if I could save all the dogs and pigs in the world I would, oh and the wombats.
[Please note any ads on this blog are randomly selected by WordPress and do not represent endorsement by me]
And Then There Were Stories 