The Tawny Owl ...and finding a way into my own skin.

Breakfast after my walk this morning. 

The gift of a honey mango - nectar sweet - from a dear friend, and raspberries from a local allotment. I eat it crossed legged on the teak bench outside the kitchen. It's already hot at 8am. I'm in heaven. This is the kind of African temperature that wakes me up in my skin.

7am

Cobnut shells discarded by the squirrels scattered in the middle of the road. 

This narrow road that runs past my house is the old stage coach route to Tiverton. I always walk it imagining the horses and the coach and its passengers lurching up the hill - probably rutted mud in those days. 

Me and my shadow in the bars of the field gate.

Another field in sunlight and lone cow parsley bordering the steepest part of the hill.

I always have my camera ready along this stretch of the lane now. 

 A few days ago a large brown shape floated down from this tree canopy, utterly silent, swooping towards me -  the arch of its eyebrows, the round black beads of its eyes, unmistakable  - as it disappeared over my head, over a gap in the hedge and into the field beyond. 

A tawny owl. 

My first sight ever of an owl in the wild. It felt like being touched by an angel feather.

I saw it again the next day, in the same place but flying from behind me, high over my head and it landed on the branch of  an oak tree directly in front of me.  Its soft curved pyramid shape was camouflaged by the leaves, and by the time I'd focused the camera on it, it was gone on silent brown wings into the sky.

Today I scanned the deep leaf and branch canopy above me for ages but it wasn't there.

Maybe you can't repeat the joy... the surprise.... of the unexpected. I don't have a photo, which of course I want desperately, but I have an indelible print in my memory of that iconic round face sweeping out of the sky on wide specked brown wings, oblivious to the gift of wonder it was giving to  a woman on the path below.

Lone white cloud.

 The view of the village stretched out below me.

This evening the church bells ring across the village and land in my house with all its windows and doors wide open to any passing sounds - the rooks,  the doves, the bees, the flies, the tractors on their way home.

Summer sheep pastures.

Every few steps along the farm track leading into the village are wonderful arching old oaks.

This is the one on my land.

 Only 40 years old. Planted into the bank on the far side of the stream. 

Since my session with the lovely Shaman on Dartmoor, who said I must choose a tree and talk to it, every morning when I return from my walk I cut a flower and take it as an offering to the tree, tucking it under the ivy leaves creeping up its bark. 

 I sit on the damp earth under the shelter of its branches, dropping like a green umbrella to the grass, the stream running below my feet, and say my thanks, offer my prayers.

This morning I add a nasturtium to the lavender spear and spiky yellow succulent that I took yesterday and the day before.

Sometimes I forget to pray and  I let all the worries in my mind distract me, or I think about what lies ahead in my day, or I watch the scurrying of the blackbird, picking out worms in the lawn. Or sometimes the tears just flow, my sadness leaks out of me and I lay my hand onto the rough mossy bark of the tree beside me and imagine I'm as steadfast, rooted and wise as an oak.

Then I get up and enter the forever unfinished tapestry of things to do, threading into the day in front of me.

Tomorrow I  will start taking a homeopathic remedy for the long deep roots of my grief and the restlessness which haunts my days and my nights. 

But I'm also trusting that walking by the fields of corn ....and along the tangled green paths, touched by this nature, this beauty around me ....sitting with the oak tree...will start to ground me into the fabric of my life as it is now....help me to find a way into my own skin, my own nature, without Robin's presence, his love, to give me identity and purpose.

PS  Thanks for your lovely comments B. I find I can't even write a reply on my own blog. So there is something wrong at my end not yours. Sorry.