Taking it slow.

The media tells us to exercise, meditate, bake, clean, detox, declutter, buy stuff, make a noise, tree bathe, twerk, be our best selves, post it, like it, share it.
This Roman snail says its raining, I shall move inaudibly from under this stone.
That’s it.

Goodbye to the Ice Saints.

Yesterday was cold Sofia, the last of the ice saints day. May 15th is the fest day of Saint Sofia and traditionally the last really cold night of spring.
In this part of the world mid May is often surprizingly cold and no one who understands anything would put out a tender plant before that date for fear that frost would kill it. We have had hot February and March, warm April, but the first half of May has been true to the folk calendar: cold and wet!
The grass and the potatoes are loving this weather and the spring flowers have lasted spectacularly well, but I am watching the moon which seems full tonight. Full moon always heralds a change in the weather. The ice saints have had their season, Pixie the cat watched them go and now the warm weather can begin!

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Telling Time.

I have half an hour before the chicken needs carving, in which to contemplate time.

I understand that there is clock time and internal time. The clocks stuck on church towers and round our wrists were made imperative by the invention of trains and the necessity of time being the same everywhere and tracks being cleared and so we slice up our life into internationally recognisable fragments, so that now the planes can fly and the computers can whir. The time in our heads works on a more complex level, where the present is composed of memory and potential future and moves to the rhythm of the thinker.

And then there is seasonal time: never the same, always the same, always the future.
The year progresses at its own pace, different in each village, different in each shadow that cools the flower or delays the germinating seed. You need to know a place well to compare the seasons. This year the celandines were late, but the ravens bred early. This year swifts were late, but the cuckoos(who had been absent for two years ) returned and called over and over from the hedgerow.

This morning we watched the young ravens,already fledged and learning to fly, tumbling over the cool, tall pilling clouds. White throats are singing their territories, storks are walking on improbably long legs through the buttercups, spearing slugs to feed their nestlings. The house martins have just arrived.

Ahh ! I can smell that the chicken is cooked!

Spring snow.

Slip slushing snow whomping and whispering from the green leaves.
The stems are plump with life, turgid with sap. This white weight of winter is a foolish incumbrance to be shrugged away.
Hours of heavy snow bowed down the saplings and the tall nettles, it filled in the open tulips and blurred the gooseberries ripening on the prickle fringed bushes.
But enough is enough.
Spring slept under the heavy cold wet blanket for a night , a long night, of fatuous fretting about peonies and potatoes.
In the morning, spring time slowly stretched her arms, straightened the birch sapling bowed down to the wet ground and flung the unseasonable nonesense of snow off out into a surprised May morning!