You might remember that the poplar was meant to be butterfly magic? Guiding transformation? I have not transformed. I am still a crone and not a witch.
The tree, as far as transformation goes, is transforming into a dead tree. She has only a dozen or so little shoots. I sat at her base for half an hour listening to the birds. So many. I could have curled up and stayed forever.
Earlier, where I saw that butterfly, I had followed the official route of the public footpath which no one uses. There was dirty water seeping rather that flowing. It bubbled. Or was it a frog surfacing? I stared at the water for I don’t know how long. Nothing. Nothing at all. But I realised something. Here I am at my crone age doing just what I did as a kid. Squatting on scruffy land staring at mud and scratching at where I have been stung by nettles. The same curiosity. The same blank mind willing to be inscribed with anything, however ordinary.
And I'm not alone.
Other children have made dens of these leftover spaces.
Imagination makes a life less ordinary.
So does love.
Sure: as I looked at the deer prints, convinced some really were roe not muntjac, I thought how lovely it would be to see red deer rutting in the Cairngorms. Sure: as I saw a fat rabbit bounce away I thought how cool it would be to watch the otters - and they’re only thirty miles away.
But this is my place, or as close to my place as anywhere that isn’t home, by which I mean Devon, Dartmoor. And I like what is here.
What can be better than to hear the little birds, robins, wrens, larks and linnets? I heard a linnet by the poplar. The song was beautiful. I could wish the chiffchaffs would find a new tune. But ah I was glad to hear they’d returned. I don’t need macaws and flamingos and puffins. I don’t even need to see them. To hear is enough. And to feed them.
This was what I was feeling as I watched the squirrels run off with the food for the Unbraves and the pigeons land in grey flutterings on the grass. Then I heard a motorcycle backfire and the animals fled. All of them. I remembered the two teenage boys in balaclavas I'd seen riding their scaled down quads and motorcycles in the park and how it had seemed a sacrilege. And as I recalled that, a boy on the bike turned in off the road and onto the track through the park. I stood in front of him. Maybe twenty yards. Me. Middle aged and holding a carrier bag leaking peanuts, cat food and suet pellets. I stood there, feeling nothing but curiosity, in the middle of the track, twenty yards from a balaclava and hoodie wearing boy on a motorbike that roared in the silence left by the birds. And he stopped. He stopped the bike and turned around and went back onto the road. Above my head the singing was suddenly raucous and exultant. I was haloed by birds.
Not Morrigan: that day I manifested Gaia.
And the Unbraves came back.
Though Four did not deign to speak.
I should have edited this one - but, well, never mind.
Your return to Kid-Hood is inspiring. That's an arresting Gaia story and how you were "haloed by birds". Good to be at the park with the crows. Good post. Lots of energy -- it must be spring.