Some Garden Moments

Monday

I just squidged up a small patch of mud with my foot as I sat on the grass, even though I thought the ground was dry and warm.

Immediately two small bugs fill it.  Not ants: too grassy dry brown looking.  Funny things, I wonder what they are??  I wonder when I will feel at peace with ants.  With most bugs.  I don’t want to lie down on the grass because of bugs.  I love the outside and nature.  But I have a definite problem with a lot of bugs.  Is it an order thing?  A marring my idea of perfection thing?  An invasion, they are everywhere thing? I’m not sure.

My friend Good Hatted Poet Man put a snatch of a poem by someone else on his FB page the other day: ‘the bird leaps beyond birdsong’.  That’s how being out here sounds.  Sharp birdsong.  Surround sound, different heights.  So intense and so clear.  Fluting, buzzing, twizzling, streaming.

It’s cold on the ground even through my heavy coat.  Where’s that warmth gone?  The sky is filled now with grey clouds, moving fast. Sun coming and going over my head.  Wind rising and falling.  Swaying the cherry tree which pours petals and flowers.  They roll on the ground.  The birdsong saturates, the wind lifts my hair. So lovely out here feeling wind so sharp in my face.  Not stuck in my head for once: real and alive and out here.

My shadow is cast against the grass, standing out while the sun shines so bright on the back of my head. “The darkest shadows are cast by the brightest lights”, I read this morning.  I liked that.  Without light there could be no dark.  What would it be without light to define itself against??

Children from the school screech in the distance.  When the wind is right you can hear it clearly.  The sounds of the jungle.

Next door’s fountain has been turned on – a sure sign it’s finally spring – and is bubbling peacefully.  I love that sound.  Chickens from the next road over diagonally caw.

A really tall ant scales a long blade of grass in front of me.  Trees wait behind him.  The birdsong almost yells.  

My hands and nose are cold now.  I put my hands in my pockets and watch the sky start to streak over with blue, clouds now frothy and white.  So fast…

Wednesday

Dude.  This is so not a poem or haiku in any way, as it’s scanned and syllabled all wrong.

Slant of sunshine.

Rain of pinked blossoms.

Chill of sudden wind.

I just really did want to say that though, with the spacing.  Not very good, is it?  Tsk.  See, this is why I stick to prose.  Damn its cold out here today, even through that sun.  Ooo, kettles boiled, off I go.

Thursday

The branches of the cherry blossom tree hang so low this year.  If I walk underneath, the blossoms brush my face with cool or wet, depending on the weather.  (Also, of course, with those tiny bugs that I discovered the day I got all romantic and brought some in to sit with my statue of Herne; and then they all started marching towards me, a little bit like the Tom and Jerry ants, but much more haphazard.  I think it must be an invasion thing, my fear of some bugs.)  

Today there’s a really chill breeze and slanting rain.  The cherry boughs bob and sway like ships on an unsettled sea.  Exactly like that.  I’m getting that watching motion lull I get sitting on the beach at Eastbourne when I’ve gone to see Fry and I’m running early so have gone for a walk.  See, think of Fry and there – seagulls above.  Must be cold down on the coast, I hear my dad say.  And as soon as I hear the gulls, it’s as if the world gets twice as big.  I just feel…spaciousness, in sky, on land.  The gulls cut up space and add to it.  How do they do that to my ears and affect my eyes?  I get lost in the bright white pink of the densely packed blossoms with their triangular pointy leaves, arrowheads.  I imagine my head filling up with blossom and it pouring out the top, down my face and in my hair, bouncing as they fall down my shoulders to the ground.  A smiley thought.

Friday

The light today is stunning. It’s a semi grey sky, but so bright through the rain. I soak in the light (and accidentally hear Philip Carr-Gomm’s voice in my head, doing the Light Body Meditation Exercise and telling me I am ‘radiant with light’ on the soles of my feet – I actually glance down to check: the soles of my shoes are pink and brown and blossom massacred).

The wind makes a lowing sound.  The holly tree regards me.  So strong and almost unmoving, even in all this wind.  It’s almost a gale; some rubbish blows through from next door, a barbeque briquette bag.  I catch it before it hits me in the face.  The holly tree seems to find this a bit funny, I can tell.  It’s the shape of the leaves, all shiny and self-contained.  There’s some definite sang froid, some schadenfreude going on there, you know.

The grass is sodden and littered with pink petals. Such colour roars, that pink and the spring green grass.  I think the cherry tree must feel happy to make such beauty.  Behind all, the three sisters fir trees sway together in total silence.  Today they don’t talk to me.

I watch them some more, and a fox pokes his head up from the far end of the garden.  He takes one look at me and sinks back, camouflaged behind the wood pile.  A blackbird holds his ground in the centre of the lawn, king of all with his orange beak.