My runs are lumbering things, slow and ponderous with pauses for looking, listening, photographing. There’s something meditative about the process- being there and being aware. But the other day, I felt… I don’t know… unsettled.
As I left the house to get in the car, I saw a magpie watching me. Once it was sure I was leaving, it flew over the roof and into my garden. A pigeon followed. The animals don’t want me around.
When I was in the fields, I saw a kestrel and realised that the raptor in the park is definitely a kestrel. This country cousin of the townie bird made the identification easy by hovering. I watched the wings… they looked like silk blown into ripples by a gusting wind. More fluid that muscle, bone and feather should ever be. How many mice does it take to fuel the effort of defying gravity and momentum?
Heading down the ploughed field, a murder of crows was wheeling above a copse, the small copse of native trees on the cover page, as though they knew something dead was within and awaited their opportunity to scavenge.
Another group were feeding close together on a patch of stubble. So close together it was unusual for wild crows. They were here.
And then I saw the big bales where the farmer had cut the set aside land around my poplar copse. That round bale in the middle will contain what remains of the only young poplars that had sprouted from the root system of the dying trees.
I continued on and went in to the copse on the far corner from this picture. Something happened and I ran to the tree, my tree, put my arms around it and wept. I don’t know what’s wrong. Tiredness. Some sense of the futility of things. The battles that all those which are not human have to fight, because of us, in addition to the eternal battle for survival. A feeling of my own conflicted state. My uncertainty. My efforts and struggles to find a way to believe in something and fight for it. My failures and my ultimate ever present but mostly ignored soul-loneliness. I am the bear on the floating berg lost in a cold and acidified sea, roaring in anger and grief and trying to tear the very fabric of the sky. Futile. Foolish. I am Lear, blow winds and crack your cheeks! I am Oedipus blinded by my own efforts to see.
As I wept I saw the light memories of my rods and cones, a central star of red in black encircled by spiraling galaxies of sparkling white. And I said to the tree, what does this mean? And the tree gave me solace but no solutions.
At last, I stepped back. Saw that someone else has loved this tree. Left droppings below…
Perched high above.
And at the base, a colony of ants, whose day my footsteps may have disturbed.
Evidence of an ambush.
(There were a lot more feathers scattered around the copse.)
Homes and food in the dead remains of the fallen ash.
And in the soil below.
Life goes on. It goes on. Even after death. Even, perhaps, after the death of dreams.
A moving post x