Swanning around

Another trip to feed the birdies and I was able to get up close and personal to a swan who told me with an impatient huff when I was close enough for his liking, thank you very much indeed.

I sat with the Wayfarer Oak who was talking about time and the right way to die.

What is time?

https://youtu.be/5qejhCFSngc

Time is many things. The cycle of seasons; the arrow of growth; the story of bark; the calculability of rings. I am most interested in the story of bark. Bark is the end of the inside and the start of the outside; or the start of the inside and the end of the outside, depending on where you are. Bark is protection and porous passage. Bark is the record of life, of scars and survival. Bark is where life meets death and where imagination meets reality. Bark is time turned into wood and made wondrous.

How do you die well?

https://youtu.be/6ZF6Su6bcfk

If living is a reaching out, dying is a reaching in – and yet it is also a hollowing out. This hollowness, this inner letting go, is a letting go of all that does not serve, all you have moved away from. Let go all that you have left behind in the process of growing, all that central stuff that you thought you depended upon only to realise that what supports you is the life you have made through your actions. Let go of the ambitious reaching for the skies and stretching out across space. What is retained, until the final hour, is a thin living layer, and what is retained even after death, for a time, is the bark. This bark is the proof of a unique life lived with all its mistakes, all its resilience, all its striving, all its growth, all its creative and intelligent adaptability. Death is to return the gift of life to the earth and the community of beings. Death is a final act of grace and generosity to this place that has been home. Death is the final act of a life spent making the earth liveable, a life spent helping to keep the earth alive.

Bark seems so often to be the answer.

And here, holes/homes.