Time to stand and stare

These weeks of rain, followed by a weekend of warmth and sunshine, have done their work. Over night it seems, our garden has changed. It is no longer bare and brown with just a few smudges of spring colour here and there; now the spidery branches are once more thickly covered with leaves, the creeping clematis is beginning to poke shyly through the hedge, and the lawn is dappled with fallen apple blossom.

In the mornings I make buckwheat porridge for breakfast, and now and then I will pause in the midst of my culinary hustle and bustle to look out of the window over the garden. Most days it is just being its ordinary self, but sometimes I see something special - maybe the greater spotted woodpecker tapping away at the peanut feeder; or a thrush standing quite still in the middle of the lawn; or a sparrow hawk resting on the hedge. And then I take a moment to stop, and stare...

"What is this life if full of care,
   We have no time to stand and stare?
 No time to stand beneath the boughs
   And stare as long as sheep, or cows.
 No time to see, when woods we pass,
   Where squirrels hide their nuts in grass.
 No time to see, in broad daylight,
   Streams full of stars, like skies at night.
 No time to turn at Beauty's glance,
   And watch her feet, how they can dance.
No time to wait till her mouth can
   Enrich that smile her eyes began.
A poor life this, if full of care,
  We have no time to stand and stare."
                                   - William Henry Davies

Rotten trees and wild posies

Where the tree was...

Even before I look out of my window in the morning, the difference in the quality of light tells me that the tree isn't there.

Rotten on the inside.

I feel a little as though I have suddenly lost a close friend in a car crash. Every morning when I wake, the tree isn't there; and in the evening when I go to bed, the tree is not there. When I walk out of the front door I see in the empty expanse of sky that she is missing; and when I come home, she is still not there.
But she was a sick tree; and though it's possible that she might have lasted many years yet, it is also possible that the next storm would have brought her crashing down, and if that happened it would have been a miracle if no one (or no house) was harmed...

But life goes on, as my mother tells me. And though my tall, graceful sycamore has gone (and the red kites keep swooping over, with nowhere to land), the wild flowers are beginning to bloom in the hedgerows and verges. I went out yesterday and picked myself a posy, and tied it with a piece of grass.

"To see a World in a Grain of Sand,

  And a Heaven in a Wild Flower..."

  - William Blake

Black edging...

Dogmatix can't bear trees being pulled down

Black edging... That's what this post should have. You see, they are cutting down the great sycamore that stands opposite, and I don't think I can bear it. I feel sick in my stomach, as though a piece of me has been ripped out. I know the tree is rotten and dead inside, but that doesn't make it any easier. One doesn't refrain from mourning a loved one simply because their body was riddled with some awful disease.

The worst thing is being here while it's actually happening; every grind and roar of the electric saw as each branch is chopped off and thrown to the ground cuts me to the heart. I can almost feel it moan and cry.

My beautiful tree...

I think that I shall never see

A poem lovely as a tree.

A tree whose hungry mouth is prest

Against the earth's sweet flowing breast;

A tree that looks at God all day,

And lifts her leafy arms to pray;

A tree that may in summer wear

A nest of robins in her hair;

Upon whose bosom snow has lain;

Who intimately lives with rain.

Poems are made by fools like me,

But only God can make a tree.

                                     - Joyce Kilmer