I haven’t yet been outside today. I am laying here after another poor night’s sleep, feeling a little bit wiped, torn over whether a walk or a lay in would be best for me.
A week or so ago I had an op on my arm (or under my arm to be precise), meaning I’ve felt rather immobile for the past while, and making even putting a coat on to go out a mammoth effort. It’s just past spring equinox. The weather is unpredictable, wet, and windy.
But still, the urge to go outside is always there. As I sit up in bed, looking out at the trees standing proud on the hill outside my window, waving their rhythm in the wind and rain, I want to be out there, feeling it in my hair and on my face.
The ups and downs of the past few months have sometimes left me elated, excited, and have at others others left me exhausted, wanting nothing more than to hide. And at those low times I have allowed myself time to do this. To just hide, rest, and repair.
But there will never be a remedy quite like the one that nature offers. I have for my course been reading of ego, soul work, nature therapy, vision quests. And although I can not (on Brownsea at least) go off into the wilderness for a week without seeing a single person, I can immerse myself in nature, hearing, feeling, seeing, breathing and tasting the freedom it can offer.
In the past weeks I have ventured to other wild places, other realms of this wild world we live in. From thousands of lapwing in Norfolk in January, to three quarters of a million starling in the Somerset Levels in March. Nature offers spectacular, breathtaking, humbling displays. But also the tiny, secretive, almost overlooked wonders. Frog spawn in the bomb pond, the first velvet buds of a willow, the unfurling leaves of hornbeam. A bumblebee casting itself from sun patch to sun patch, a peacock butterfly grabbing some warmth on a gravel track.
If we look, and I mean really look. If we let ourselves be still. If we stop, put down our screens, our stresses, our rules. Get dirty knees crawling in the grass to watch some ants. Get grubby hands rooting under falling leaves for woodlice. Smell the soil. Touch the feathery seed heads of reed. Breathe the rich, coconut smell of gorse.
Awe and wonder, seeing things anew. This has been my aim for these weeks. To experience hedonic pleasure in the more than human world around me. To grasp sensations and feelings with a wild, excited joy. The familiar becomes fresh, the well-known becomes amazing. And it’s not like it wasn’t. It was always so. It’s just up to us to relearn to see it that way.
Stones and Feathers 