2 hours ago
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A pair of ravens, barking mad, perform their shuttling flight in glorious sunshine above Old Racecourse Common. A charm of chaffinches flash white wing-bars through the shadows of mossy willows around the pond. A queen red-tailed bumblebee orbits a hedgebank boundary stone, then buzzes off to feed on gorse flowers or prospect for possible colony chambers below.
A lesser-spotted woodpecker hammers out rapid bursts of drumbeats from a stand of beech across the misty distances of the hills. Chiffchaffs find their rhythm in the oaks. These constantly repeated two-note phrases are not what they seem when you hear the writer and musician Mark E Smith say of his own work: “It’s not repetition, it’s discipline.” A chiffchaff flies out from tree cover, across the open common, an apparition so slight compared with the powerful, hidden voice, to resume their[pls don’t change to “its” – PF] discipline in further oaks.
A tree stump, once carved into a small throne, its heartwood now rotted by fungi into crumbling fragments, reminds me of an eighth-century Chinese poem by Meng Chiao: a woodcutter went into the mountains and met two boys playing chess; they gave him something to eat and when their game was over, told him his axe handle had rotted. When the woodcutter returned home, he was 100 years old. Time is not always as we remember it.
This is springtime. After a century of cold, wet darkness, everything is flying into the equinox. Whoever sat on the tree stump throne to watch the play of seasons has rotted away into a ghost in the newness of the light. Meanwhile, down in the allotments in town, little trenches are being dug to warm the ground for taters. Small tortoiseshell and peacock butterflies have shaken loose from the diapause sheds, to dance, to taste freshly turned soil and yellow flowers such as daffs and dandelions. Traditional cultivation rituals for another growing season are repeated; the discipline is honed.
This game of life and light, its shared discipline of seasonal labours and joys, is where we return to from the time that rots us, when our attention is stolen by the terrible suffering of the world. We return, briefly, to the wonders around us.
