This perfectly positioned shadowplay gave me cause to smile this morning.
That was a brief respite from the rain.
I had planned to go for a run, involving some trespassed ancient woodland foraying, followed by coffee under a sycamore tree.
The run was very wet and the woodland at least offered some shelter. I ducked in and had a scout about. This is marked as Ancient and it was nice - but there were areas that had definitely been planted - oaks in rows and places where conifers were growing in lines. Not exactly unadulterated. Inside though I heard a bird call I had never heard before - the Merlin app couldn't get it because the rain noise was too loud. It was like winding up a toy, crick-crick-crick-crick-crick-creak. I wish I knew what it was.
I kept on thinking I could hear a 4x4 coming along the tracks in the wood and thought I'd have to thrown myself to the floor - wet and nettles notwithstanding. It was just the wind and the rain - and what was I so scared of anyway? They wouldn't shoot me. Each time I realised that I was mistaken, I felt huge relief and as the rain fell I came upon an oak in the centre of a load of conifers - a majestic mature tree - and I thought, rain dripping off me, "Ah, yes, I am alive!"

That cheered me somewhat and when I got out of the wood, the rain stopped and the sun came out and I started to dry off.
I went back to the car and then across a field to sit and have my coffee. I watched swallows and martins foraging. I watched a white-tailed bee dry herself off. I though, "Why not consider that the bee is happy?"
As I was leaving, something called me to look over a gateway. As I did I saw the russet shape of a hare disappearing into the wood opposite. I had seen two hares - or one twice - in the wood I had visited. Fleeting glimpses, but that made me happy. Then I realised there was another large hare still in the field. She sat up on her hind legs and stroked at her ears with both front paws before, perhaps because she had sensed me, crouching down, basilisk still and becoming part of the soil at the field edge - the same colour and just as motionless. I almost felt she had been a vision. I was waiting for her to move when, in my peripheral vision, I saw another hare foraging and then a third. Red brown in the green. I could only see them when they moved as, still, they looked like clods of earth. the two stood, one lolloped toward the other, who moved away, then turned around - they both sat up and I hoped to see something. But they both ducked down, becoming clay. They must have sensed me.
I left a field with three lumps of red brown earth among the greenery. Nothing more.
Had I seen only the shadow-things of my desires?
Is that a big oak in the big photo? So regal! ... I like imagining the (probably) happy bee drying herself off. I like the visions of hares or (perhaps) lumps of earth. That shadow video of the bird is artful.