The Buzzard....walking alone and free.....I've stolen someone else's grief.

Yesterday  morning following the kwee kwee call of a buzzard in a bank of trees way on the other side

of the steep hill I'm walking up,

I'm rewarded with full sight of him perched on a branch in an ash tree...still calling his kwee kwee into the sky.

And this is him as I walk backwards higher up the hill...my camera trained on the spot ...and I get a different view of him.  It's magical ...his great span of wings, the lines and dots and scalloped pattern of his feathers, the size of him,

 his sleek proud head...the surprise gift of him, captured in my lens, accompanies me all day like a smooth pebble in my pocket that I can touch and remember. 

A few minutes after seeing the buzzard I'm so sad to find this dead female blackbird on the road...her eyes pecked out. I lay her gently on the grass bank out of the path of cars. It's not the first time I've seen a  flattened blackbird on my walk.

The  early light  flooding the fields is wonderful ... sparkling clean and clear. 

I'm so grateful for the footpath that takes me into the marvel of this landscape

every day.

A few hours later I'm in the company of shreiking peacocks, and my great nephew and his  grandmother, visiting Wildwood at Escot park near Honiton,  a wonderful country park with great things for children to do.

Including minting a Saxon Penny

in the replica of a Saxon village complete with a smithy, round house and young man in a rough white Saxon tunic who is very informative about the history of the Angles, the Jutes and Saxons. I  am very impressed with how my 8 year old great nephew knows all the answers to his questions, like where the names of the week originate  from, while they sit by the fire, minting the penny, bashing it out 

with  a mallet.

The playful speedy antics of the otters are a lovely entertainment.

 We watch a display of birds of prey... which of course have to be caged as well...

Bengal owl...

falcon...

vulture...

red kite...

I feel very lucky to have seen the buzzard flying free in my woodland neighbourhood that morning.

TODAY

There is a thick duvet of mist lying over the valley this morning.

 The air is unbelievably still and warm and soft. 

The sky belongs to the sound of birds.

 On the road I'm treated to bright flash of green and cream and red - a green woodpecker sweeps out of tree above my head.....like this one which visited the garden briefly a few weeks ago. The first and only time I've seen it. Another sight to treasure. 

When I stop to take a photo of my favourite Belgian Blue, the one who always comes to the gate first to say hello, two runners come panting up the farm track and also stop to say hello and catch their breath. It's rare for me to encounter anyone else on my walks. It feels like an amazing privilege to walk alone and free in all this peaceful beauty ....as if it belongs just to me.

On the way home I stop in the village to buy bunches of bronze and cream  incurved chrysanthemums from allotment man...and  my fruit box from Riverford Organics has been delivered ...plums, cape gooseberries, bananas, pears, apples.

While I'm standing at the open back door in the heat of the sun, biting into a plum I suddenly notice that two tiny, suede brown, speckled, stubby-tailed wrens are hopping around my soaked walking boots which I've put out to dry on the coir mat...just by my feet...taking no notice of me...

I feel like I've been visited by a pair of miniature angels. 

It lifts me out of the shadow of the dream I had last night...

I'm driving...I see an upturned bicycle at the side of the road, a child lying beside it...I stop and run to him...fearful I don't know how to do mouth to mouth.....then someone else it there....they are doing it...I hold the boy's hand...it's warm.

 Then the resuscitator  looks at me and shakes his head...I look to the sky and shriek and scream and wail....and then it turns out that it's Robin who has died...for the second time...and I have to tell my mother...and I don't know how I will...and then she says she knows....

and all Robin's tall men friends and my tall nephews are holding me ...hugging me .. and one of them says "Let go, don't hold back".....but my knees buckle beneath me....and I'm only half crying...I can't cry properly ....and I feel like a fraud...because I know it's the second time Robin has died...and  their sympathy shouldn't be for me..... 

 it's like I've stolen someone else's grief. 

  

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.