It might have been a squirrel. I did see the handsome muntjac buck who lives at Christies' Copse. He walked to withing about 15 feet of me then thought better of it and slinked away. One of my Sentinel trees, an ash with dieback, dropped a bit of a branch. It was hollow and must have been a nice home when still on the tree. I sat with Chronos having noticed that both the Happy Oak and Minerva have outstretched low branches resting on hawthorns. The former is interesting as th

That on the front page is a picture of the ground. So is this. Strangely alluring. Anyway, today I choose to share a quote from Tolkien and some from Édouard Glissant. Tolkien first. … it is not our part to master all the tides of the world, but to do what is in us for the succour of those years wherein we are set, uprooting the evil in the fields that we know, so that those who live after may have clean earth to till. What weather they shall have is not ours to rule. - Ganda

...though that may be a rook. I did a tarot spread, in fact, I did two, with the crow cards and got the LLM to do the reading. I think this is pretty good! We’ve now got two spreads in front of us: 1. The first spread, **Shadow and Light**, explored the dynamic between mental control and loosening into patience, underscoring the interplay between over-intellectualization (King of Swords, Shadow), the strength of grounded patience (3 of Wands, reversed as Light), and a gentle,

That's a really bad reference to Miss Smilla's Feeling for Snow . A good book, I seem to recall. Anyway, I went to the Reserve to take some pictures. I hadn't realised how much ice was on the reservoir. I ended up watching the birds from a hide for half an hour. This video is LONG... treat it as a meditation!

There's a tendency to use the word as a synonym for interconnected, but that's not quite right. Interconnected suggests that two things which could be or were separate are or are now twined together. In entanglement, the connection is always and already the condition. Either way, the upshot is that, as John Muir said, “When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe." I have just come across the completion of that passage, whi

Garden Robin's dream is the dream of perfect possession. Next Door Robin is the nightmare reality... sneaking in when Garden Robin's back is turned. I'm reading Robert Romanyshyn 's Technology as Symptom and Dream which is so thought provoking... I have to read it in small bursts, but I truly recommend it. Here is the blurb: This book, which has been reprinted four times since its publication, is a cultural-historical exploration of the origins of the technological attitude t

...or rather, after the Listening to the Land day. I was a volunteer at the event and in the afternoon, it was my job to stand outside the doors and try to police people. My inner officiousness had its time in the sun. The day was wonderful: the talks were all about people's connection to the earth. There were speakers from the America, Africa and New Zealand as well as various parts of the British Isles. The Welsh and the Irish seem to have maintained their indigenous connec

After a long day volunteering, all I am offering is a video... but here's the self-indulgence: three and a half minutes of robins. There were definitely three. Two whom I swear were courting - one chased another carrying food! And then a third rushed in for food when these two were chasing each other!

Dog walking for my lovely neighbours. Chilli still isn't full grown but she is so much bigger than when I first looked after her. She has a coat but I figured that with that fur and the running she would be fine. It's tricky to feed the crows with her and I am not sure that any of them got very much, but I tried. Chilli had a run around with a Cockapoo called Buddy. The person walking Buddy was also doing a favour for a neighbour. And I met a woman with dogs called Hera and I

Forgive the lack of words and instead enjoy the sights and sounds! Oh, and this flew over the garden as well! It landed in the Rec.

So, I've been reading... or trying to read... or reading with the help of ChatGPT... Poetics of Relation by Edward Glissant . Now I like it because he talks about opacity. He asserts that the Other is always opaque. You do not have the right to "understand", in the sense of "grasping". Instead he uses the French term donner-avec , which is translated as gives-on-and-with... he means something like how a tree "gives" in the wind... it stresses a generosity of perception rathe

A big walk. Not because of the length or the time, but because of what came to me... It started with watching the cormorants fly to the roosts on the opposite shore. And hearing and seeing the other birds finding their places. Then the swans, blue in the half light. I walked on and heard a moorhen calling. I thought that was strange and went to explore. Along a path I don't usually take. WOW!!! A hare exploded from almost under my feet. I put my hand in its form and the grass

A friend directed me to this excellent piece by Eileen Crist. I think there might have been a suggestion pertinent to my current Chat-Fad... And it did reinforce my conviction that good use of large language models requires some handling. But not the same handling as social media. Social media encourages certain negative traits (self-aggrandisement, narcissism, competitive selfhood, silo-thinking), does certain things (courts attention, distracts) and though it can encourage

Well, not so bright when the sun goes down... maybe that should have said 'cold and clear' or 'cold and mostly clear'. I've been trying to keep up the AI hours and as there are sometimes pauses, I have been doing this before I head out. Given the sleep issues, late mornings and extravagantly long periods spent squatting in the garden watching the birds, that means there is not much daylight left by the time I head out. There was frost still on the ground this afternoon, but i

I mentioned the robin book? Well, my sister also gave me two hare books. One was the one I have read (I didn't tell her). But I did tell my brother and sister-in-law a few days later when I received from then another copy of Raising Hare ! I need to do some re-gifting. No photos of hares, so don't worry that you couldn't see one on that front-page image. And it's not a hare's form either - it's a muntjac's scrape. Nor is there a hare here. Instead, my (cold) picnic by Kairos.

Well, that's one way to do it. The blackbirds do this too: but then they scratch and kick the food up behind them. It's very sweet to watch. What with that and their chucking they do bear some resemblance to chickens. Actually, that's not completely stupid. Chickens were 'jungle fowl', were they not? Yes, indeed . Blackbirds don't like to fly very high, though they fly well, and they like scratching about in woodlands. I am guessing that both birds were dealing with the const

There are some things about winter that I appreciate. Well, maybe one thing. The light. It really does add a magical lustre to the world. I had just gone for a walk, not even pretending to trot, and there was nothing much to report apart from feeling chilly and being struck by the sense of being in some sort of wonderland, just because of the angle of the sun and the particular colour of the light. It feels more and more important to hold on to the sense of delight in ordinar

When I came home from work on Christmas Eve, I went out into the garden to leave the fox food. And there was the robin. He stayed right by me, just perching on a twig of the hazel. I squatted down, not minding the cold, although it was very chilly and I didn't have a coat on. I was thinking, what do you have to say to me? But sometimes the meaning of a moment just is that moment. To seek the beyond is to negate the value of what is manifest in flesh and feathers and friendshi

On Christmas Day, with a migraine, I returned to the Reserve, hoping fresh and trees would help with the head. They did somewhat. I walked my usual route and when I reached the Goddess, I saw the the crystal was no longer in her omphalos. I figured that a curious squirrel of corvid must have dislodged it. So I rooted around in the leaf-litter at the base of the tree. It took a little time, but i found it. Now you might think I'd say that I put it back, or that I felt tthe rit