Hawthorn strangeness

After receiving an email suggesting a hawthorn meditation, I decided to run to the copse where I knew an old hawthorn lives by the dying poplars. As you can see, my poplar is on her last roots. As it were. [Indeed... - Ed.]

The suggestion was to ask about your soul's greatest desire. I asked for something like confidence or belief in myself. What came to me was this: the blossoms just hanging there on the branches. They do not go anywhere.... No, not that. They are available. That's it. They are available for pollen and nectar feeders. Just being themselves and being there is enough. It also helps, the hawthorn told me, to have good strong wood and be able to heal after wounds. And wounds are inevitable.

This was helpful.

I had been sitting between an ash and a field maple, listening to the birds while I meditated and I wanted to share the sight and sound of the place, so a walked to the hawthorn to film. As I stood there, something strange happened. I heard a rustling in the long grass and it was like a wake being left by a ship, but in the movement of the long grass stems as something scuttled through the tunnels under the dead stems of last year. It came toward me with a chittering and then, seemingly right at my feet, barked - if you can imagine the bark of something small enough to scuttle completely hidden in a tunnel of grass.

I was transfixed. What could it be? What makes that noise? It couldn't be a mouse, shrew, vole or rat. Far as I know they don't chitter or bark. So I thought it must be a weasel or a stoat - surely the former as I'd see a stoat.

I stood there waiting to see if the sound and sight would return. Then I said to myself, I wouldn't come back if I were a weasel. Immediately, I heard chittering as if from a group of them, to my right and then the grass moved and there was a sound on my left... this is in the middle section of the video, though I wasn't recording at the start so missed the pack-chitter.

The hawthorn said, Clearly you are not a weasel and know little of the habits of weasels. I had to admit to the truth of that.

I stood and heard another sound, started recording - the third section of the video - but it was a bird telling me off. Briefly, I'd thought the weasel was up in the tree.

The whole experience was decidedly odd.