Healing

After the migraine, seeing Tane and visiting the crows, I went for a walk as I knew fresh air would help, but running seemed beyond me.

On the way I took some photos of a sick birch. I don't think it has the new threat of birch borer bugs, but rather was wounded as a sapling and so battles to maintain a decent canopy.

It must have been squirrels eating the bark as this tree is in town and it could not have been deer damage.

The resilience of trees is always remarkable, however - even if the escalating pressure of invasive pests and climate change will inevitably test them to breaking point. But there is something in that stolid refusal to give in that I find also in this image.

It is not Christianity per se that I see as surviving, but instead something about the spirit of a rural England... something about a humanity embedded in place and embraced by place. Yes, the spire reaches above the trees, but only as the birds do, not as an urban skyline does. And the church is not an island in wild nature, but a clearing, as it were - and clearings are something made by all large creatures. The old church has a belonging that is not about dogma or hierarchy but from a kind or organic efflorescence... if that makes any sense at all. I am probably romanticising.

Finally, from my walk, this...

The tree was felled because it was sick, I think - it's on a busy road. I like how they left the stump. But that tag, sure - a person's name - but it seems redolent with a nostalgia for all that has been.