We can't keep asking questions forever. At some point we have to start living our way into our answers. Just over a week ago, before the storms arrived, I was prompted to make that start.
It was the kind of day when all plans were quickly ignored, because there’s sun in the sky and frost on the ground and if I was up before I was wise then a good dose of cold air would do me good.
I’d got up into the cold darkness of a late winter morning, unslept and feeling… well, to be honest, feeling a little bit better than I looked. Tired, but not wrecked. I looked pretty wrecked. I stepped outside the front door, with a view to journalling outside in the light of the rising sun. Very romantic. Very much not happening. I reached for the camera to do my best to capture the dip-dyed sky behind the trees, then retreated to a boiling kettle and socks and journal-writing by a barely waking radiator.
Then I was hungry, and there was last night’s washing up to do, while this morning’s bacon grilled. I rejuvenated the half-cup of tea that had gone cold while I wrote dawn ramblings – which are never as interesting as dawn rambles. I won’t give up the former but should do more of the latter. I love the idea of being up and out as the sun rises, right up to the moment when it actually involves being up, and also out.
Even so, I was out the door and walking while the frost still held.
It was the kind of day when you feel sorry for the crocus, all tightly wrapped and frosted and wishing they’d stayed in bed – but happy for the last of last year’s fallen leaves whose icing gives them a white swansong of ‘look-at-me-ness’.
It was the kind of day when dogs frolicking is just annoying, and I’d wished they’d go away.
The kind of day when I’d wander off along maybe-paths clambering over fallen branches, trampling an occasional bramble stem that would whip me in reply. The kind of day I’d come home with mud in unexpected places, and find blood dried beneath my unprotective leggings. A day, for scrambling down to hidden pools to catch the light and listen to the birds.
It was the kind of day when the lake begs you to be still, to simply stand, and look and listen; a day when words fail; where you try to filter out the background drone of aircon units and generators from the campus, and the thump thump-thump of the pile driver on a hidden building site. The kind of day, when across the water, a grey heron shows you how its done. Patience personified.
I offer up the new word “heronism” – that ability to simply stand still at the waters edge and watch. Nothing more. Just stand and watch. For hours if need be. Calm, patient, alertness, un-forced focus…all of that combined, I suggest, is the essence of Heron.
Meanwhile, the gulls and cormorants take turns to practice long-lake water-skimming, keeping wingtips just above the surface, chasing their own reflection or shadow-hunting fish, landing with a water-ski flourish of spray, and settle, and a slow meander back.
The cormorants then aim for the high branches, where they can hang their wings out to dry in the sun. One mis-judges its landing and has to circle round for another approach.
The path that was flooded two weeks back is now passable with care, and stout shoes. The mud is churned up already, and I find myself hunting out still-frozen spots as being the less-slippery. In some places a full-leg swing and reliance on momentum is needed to cross the treacherous gullies. They may be small but could easily result in a dunking best avoided.
An egret forages in the river. A pair of swans drift calmly by. On the path a robin with a worm in its beak, scurries out of the way. I salute the solitary magpie as custom demands. Blackbirds in pairs, and blue-tits flocking. A single grebe.
The hawthorn (or is it blackthorn?) is beginning to flower.
In other words, it was the kind of day when I was reminded how little I know about my local patch. Quite possibly it will turn out to have been not just the kind of day, but the actual day, when I realised that my tenuous hold on the county had shifted. I’d been talking about being adrift for the best part of two years and only now was I beginning to understand what I needed to do to change that. I needed to get outside and pay attention. I needed to look and to learn.
It’s ironic that this is taking hold just when I’m feeling the wanderlust again, wanting to go away, but also wanting to stake my claim here.
