Wytham

I had only been, I think, to Wytham in autumn and winter. It is wonderful in late spring. The bluebells, though past their best, were glorious hazes of skies in between the trees.

On the other hand, the ashes all seem to be dying. Great tracts of dead and dying trees.

I sat by a lightning-struck oak and asked about the Morrigan, about aging, about moving toward death. And the tree expressed, as I sensed at Epping, the way in which age sees us hollow out, let go of the centre - and indeed of the unused or unuseful peripheries - and open out to receive the world. To become home and food. To start to become other. To start, in life, the work of the Great Toad!

And the tree said that with age humans can (should?) learn to think-with the transformation into becoming other. It is, indeed, about thought at the edges that are becoming not-me.

As I sat, a wren appeared. So tiny, so vital. The thought again of the wren's sacrifice in old lore. The thought of the tiny alongside the great tree.

I saw one of the setts- this wood is where seminal research into badgers was carried out. The sett, alongside which I saw the skull of a baby badger and the egg of a blackbird (I hope this one was vacated by a hatchling). Bird and death. So terribly close to each other.

At the end, I sat under a huge beech, where kids had created a "hut". Here I was accompanied by a mouse. Tiny and vital. The wren of the mammals.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mm3zVP8ViXM