I keep walking ....day by day....a balm of beauty

I oversleep this morning.... and wake in the undertow of anxious  dreams...I walk later than I usually do but still the sky is a glorious sweep of white and blue... 

with a long bank of gossamer mist resting over the far hills.

My first surprise is seeing  a running and pecking  male pheasant in the newly green, previous barley field..

I haven't seen one up here before.

Nor this farm vehicle on field horizon ...not sure what it is doing...looks like that field needs cutting too.

I surprise this pussy cat  crouched under the border hedge between two fields..

he streaks off ...indignant.

Only the big white horse  - which I now know is a male not a female - is wearing a coat this morning ...maybe he feels the cold more than his loving companions. Like I do.

I halt in my tracks under this ginormous oak tree..hoping to see the woodpecker that I can hear tap tap tapping somewhere high in the canopy above me.

I wait a long time ..scanning the branches for a flash of red,white, black...but it's like a dense green jungle up there..and I know it's an unlikely ambition. And my neck starts to ache.

My second surprise is finding this fallen green acorn at my feet emerging from some unusual carapace claws embracing its familiar knobbly egg cup. I've never seen one like it before.

Back home while I'm sitting under the safe shelter of my oak tree 

I notice this crinkly growth at the end of a branch, like a double walnut,  and realise it is the 

same thing that is covering the green acorn .....only at an earlier stage of its development.

I also notice this round brown ball at the end of another branch,

and this one too...maybe an even younger acorn.

It brings home to me my ignorance/only partial knowledge of all natural things...how much there this to discover and wonder at...

and how come in all my 60 odd years I've never seen this stage of the life cycle of an oak tree. It has taken till now...now I have the time...and the desire to notice.

After a long absence the little birds are back at the feeders in my garden.....sparrows, blue tits, great tits, dunnocks and my favourites  - the long tailed tits -

 with their miniature badger faces  

and little round bodies...this one fluffing its feathers...

and flighty shyness.

I had a Skype  session with lovely homeopath this morning ...she is treating me for deep grief.

And now she is prescribing a remedy for what she calls my restlessness... my  urgent need to get stuff done.. the DO IT NOW drive ( which I don't always follow of course and so feel bad)...my relentless busyness which is beyond normal daily domestic tasks we all need to do.

 My body's response to the deep grief.

I did have a  nap this afternoon after a long morning at my desk with little breaks for walks in bare feet on the cold dew-soaked grass in the garden.

Luckily I woke myself up after 20 minutes by the sound of my snoring.

This is what Robert Holden advises -

Slow down a while, cease to hurry a moment, and let the inner happiness bubble up."

I know why I don't stop. When I do stop what bubbles up is the raw underground lake of grief.

And then I'm lost to the soreness in my heart.

 This afternoon it was worse when I started to read 'The Secret Life of Cows '- I was in tears by the second page  - the cruelty of our intensive farming industry - and had to abandon it by the fourth page...the pain cutting into me like a docked tail.

So for now I keep busy.....and keep walking day by day... which is a kind of slowing down...a calming down...a balm of beauty for my restless mind and leaking heart.