Where I planned to do yoga

This is the... what... industrial park? where I do much of my work. I'm usually inside a building, obviously. But when I have to stay down here during a tournament, I can wander around the landscaped areas.

This was a flattish patch of sunny grass that I thought might make a good outdoor yoga studio. As it had been claimed by a duck and her maturing ducklings, I backed off and went elsewhere.

Canada geese sleep on the grass; gulls, coots, and moorhens paddle around on the water. I see magpies, hear wrens, robins, blackbirds and occasionally parakeets.

They have been hotels and log piles - I think the wildlife focus is part of their mitigation strategy and I appreciate it. Makes this a nicer place to be.

I've just finished reading Beastly - which I truly thought excellent - and have started The Oak Papers. In the latter, the guy - a lecturer at the University of Essex - spends time with an 800-year-old oak, the Honywood Oak. I'm rather jealous. There's no tree of this age with whom I could spend so much time. That lovely one at Cottesbrooke is too far off piste to visit regularly and the old ones on other estates are private. Bloody feudalism.

The writer of that book, James Canton, has, however, provided a useful list of places where one could visit old oaks. Makes me feel rather sad to be trapped in an office for the next week or so.

But, just thinking about the trees was enough to inspire a little poem:

I am the oak maiden.

Though maiden I am not.

Nor does maiden do justice to my age,

or my... sagacity, perhaps.

Sagacity I like to think is apt.

You may not.

For my wisdom is not yours.

Nor is age the same to me.

I’ll begin again.

I am from an acorn grown,

breaking through its brittle shell

with the tenderest of tendrils.

(Can you do that?)

I am rooted by my seeking.

It’s my quest that grounds my being.

(Can you make sense of that?)

In the market for minerals,

I exchange.

In support of travails,

I provide.

In achieving largeness,

I achieve largesse.

(You claim this true of you:

it is not.)

In age, I change,

growing back and reaching down,

hunkering in and hollowing,

Always finding new forms to express

what I am -

the open heart of life’s becoming.