Hedgerow Hedonism

Spring is springing, on and off - actually for the last few days it's been very much off, we had frost, snow,  and hail yesterday.  In the short interlude when spring was definitely springing there was much activity in the hedgerows hereabouts.

Some have simply being practising their gymnastics, others engaging in activities more typically associated with spring.... and there were SO MANY OF THEM! Literally everywhere you looked in the hedges hereabouts there were Bloody Nosed Beatles making merry.

They are called 'Bloody Nosed Beetles' because if they feel themselves to be in danger they exude droplets of what looks like blood in order to deter predators. The hemolymph is apparently bitter tasting (I wonder which scientist tried it!) and is a deterrent to birds who like their pray live, as it makes the beetle look as if it's been squashed.

These beetles are flightless so you can often see them walking across the lanes or in the grass in fields. I've never seen so many on one day before, but I suspect that's because I haven't been paying attention. Having seen beetle sex in one hedge on one morning I'm now seeing it everywhere!

Beetle society is clearly quite broad-minded!

All the other indicators of a slowly unfolding spring are here too, I caught foxy waiting by the hedge for whatever pickings might come his way.

The Robins are having their usual battles for territory. This one plumping himself up, I think to show his opponent how impressive he is, but he might just have been cold.

Here is his singularly unimpressed opponent. They had a lengthy scuffle over ownership of our chicken run earlier, a prized territory as it gets daily sprinkled with lovely organic mixed corns.

The byways, fields and moors are slowly greening, even in howling wind and sleet they are inexorably coming back to life.

And as usual, Daisy is turning whatever happens to be in front of her into a good thing! There are many things I can learn from this dog (you may remember the lesson in blackberry picking) and simply making the most of everything that is right here, right now, is definitely one of them.

Spring Singing with Birds

“Hope is the thing with feathers That perches in the soul And sings the tune without the words And never stops at all.” ― Emily Dickinson

My heart leaps with joy at every sunshine filled morning; the last ecstatic warbles and trills of the returning dawn chorus are drifting through my tightly closed curtains and then, as I realise that once again the sun is shining, suddenly I'm SO HAPPY to be awake! This is in stark contrast to winter mornings, where all things considered, I prefer to be asleep. Spring is springing, hurrah!

If you look among the trees you can see the first small signs arrive as Hawthorn calls forth the green.

Everyone is busy already. I've always wondered what the tapping was in the trees along our lane, It's definitely not a woodpecker, their drumming, hammering peck is much faster than this and far, far louder. They live in the valley below us and two of them are making sweet woodpecker music this spring pretty much non-stop. I digress - I knew it was a small bird repeatedly pecking or banging something but I didn't know what.

I'm pretty sure he's a Nuthatch and what he's banging is a hazel nut.

There are secret words, sacred words, full of love and honouring that I feel on my tongue when the sun comes out, they fill up my mouth and burst out in a morning song of happiness that joins the birds in praising the morning. It had rained so relentlessly for so interminably long that I had forgotten that the sun could ever come out. I had forgotten to remember spring, to hope for spring. This morning it felt as though even the trees were opening their mouths to pour out ecstatic song.

They seemed to be mimicking birds in other ways too... can you see that? It was even more beak and eye like in the flesh.

The Spring Equinox approaches, the year is uncoiling, unwinding itself from the last drips of a wet winter's sleep towards the day when day and night are or equal length and spring, unleashed, gallops forwards towards summer.  We stand in the place between the dark half and the light half of the year, between down and up, between snowdrops and daffodils, the place of both.

Much of the yellow is already out; there have been primroses lifting their delicate yellow faces to the sky since late December, Daffodils and Lesser Celandine since February (not so unusual) and I saw a dandelion today!

Happy Spring Equinox, may your uncoiling and unwinding bring you joy.

A Gift - Not for Vegetarians.

I was gifted a day...

A day in the company of lovely women and magical birds, or even lovely birds and magical women. Thank you Elen Sentier (above with a Tawny Owl) for the gift and Danielle Earp (below) for being so generous with bird sharing. We were at Dartmoor Hawking, just down the road from here, with Martin Whitely who trains and flies the birds. 

The Hawk above is Agravaine, He's an adult Harris Hawk. The Hawk below is Dave, he's also a Harris Hawk but a young one, hence the stripy feathers. He'll go brown over the coming months. Hawks trained for hawking are raised from a chick in captivity, they are imprinted on their keeper and seem to identify with humans generally as tribe and to like their company. These hawks also include Martin's three dogs in this notion of tribe, as the dogs do them. Enormous pointers bound up to small but potentially vicious birds and snuffle at them in a friendly, waggy sort of a way and leave unscarred. It was incredibly beautiful spending a day with three such disparate species all co-operating happily together. Well, sort of co-operating... 

I happened to mention to Dave that whilst I like Rabbit well enough I really, really like Duck. So dear Dave went after one for me and accidentally fell in the water. Hawks are not designed for swimming. 

When Martin fished him off his soggy perch on a stone by the side of the river he was shivering and miserable. As we started for home it began to snow and he shivered and shook even more, so I opened my jacket and sheltered him inside it, in the warmth of me. He put his head down and snuggled in and I distinctly heard him say that he liked me. I like him too. In fact he's the nicest (only) Hawk I've ever really met. Apparently Elen and Danielle spent much of the day poking each other and laughing at me as I gazed at Dave in blatant adoration. I didn't even notice. 

When we got back to the barn he was blow dried. I missed the photo where his entire expression clearly said 'I luurve being blow dried'. Who wouldn't; when you've fallen in the water on a snowy March day on Dartmoor and you can't change your clothes! 

The rest of the day unfolded in similar vein. Dave saw plenty of Rabbits, he definitely looked straight at them and seemed to say to himself "oh look, there's a rabbit. How dull." Eventually the dogs decided that this was too frustrating for words and killed one themselves. Even when the rabbit was put directly under Dave's beak he couldn't find it interesting. It was incredibly funny for me, but I suspect supremely frustrating for Martin who is trying to train young Dave to be the hunter he was born to be but clearly doesn't need to be as he is fed bits of chicken by passing women who want him to sit on their wrist. 

Rabbit for dinner was delicious, gratitude for all that was in the pot. 

We Are The World

The only relationship of real power we will ever have is our relationship to the Earth. We are her, she is us, literally and metaphorically. Everything is made up of the same stuff, Shamanic Elders have been telling us this for thousands of years and Quantum Theorists agree; we are microcosm of the macrocosm and all that we are is writ large in our world.

We ARE the Earth expressing herself, imagining herself, experiencing herself, knowing herself.
So consider this - how are you today? How is your mind, your body, your spirit? How are you taking care of that world?

Which songs are you singing?

What do you love?

What have you given birth to?

How is your inner world?

Whose air do you breath?

Who are your neighbours?

Do you know the tidal ebb and flow of the moon in your body?

What are you connected to?

Who are you and what are you here to do?

The way you do something is the way you do everything - so if you are taking care of the world that is you (harmoniously, organically, carefully, lovingly) then you are both directly and indirectly taking care of the world that is all of us.

Imbolc - 1st February

Imbolc; the word has so much love in it for me. Partly because of the beautiful family ceremony that we do on this day (I wrote about this last year, you can read it here) and partly because however much I like reading and painting and things-you-can-do-indoors with any spare moments that I happen to be blessed with, best of all I love being outside and with Imbolc tends to come the first whisperings of that outside time of year.

This year it's particularly outsidey as spring appears to have sprung. Most of the yellow flowers that you would associate with April are already here, as (rather confusingly) are some blackberry flowers! It's tempting to get all doom-sayerish and talk about how our disregard for it is sending our environment haywire, but I don't actually think that helps.

This is Daisy Dog's paw amongst the daisies.

Thoughts have power, words have power. If we put our attention on the doom and gloom then doom and gloom is what our experience of being alive will be. I am full of anger and grief for what I see as atrocities being meeted out on a daily basis to everything and everyone - but I don't want to live in a constant state of anger and grief. I don't advocate putting your head in the sand, that's not going to help; I believe that we need to do what we can to change the world on every level. So attend anti-fracking rallies where you can. Sign petitions, all that stuff (as I did in Exeter on Sunday. There were pitifully few of us.)

I believe it's incredibly important to acknowledge our grief about the state of our world and our fears for the future, grief and fear are both part of becoming motivated to act for change - but if you stay in grief and fear then ultimately I believe that they are immobilising, so we have to feel them AND - believe in Love. Be love. Know that everything is made up of the same stuff; we are part of the wholeness of creation, part of The Goddess and she is part of us. So, if we 'will' that it be so, if we WILL with every bit of our Breath, our Will and our Imagination that the world is a place that will support the life and health of all things, then it will be so (as long as there are enough of us wanting that). And that little bit in the brackets.... that's the crux of it! There have to be enough of us. So it seems to me that the most useful, the most political, the most revolutionary act is the dissemination of information about our world and what's being done to it. If  Sunday's anti-fracking rally showed me anything at all, it's that far too many people out there simply have no idea what's going on. Some of them genuinely can't see any further than the end of their noses and don't care to, but far more just haven't noticed.

The lambs are still being born, right on cue - some say that Imbolc means 'Ewe's milk'.

This year my Imbolc ceremony will focus itself not on what I want for me but on what I want for my land; the place of my roots, that without which I am nothing, have nowhere to live and nothing to love.

Christina Rosetti wrote

At Last 
Many have sung of love a root of bane:

       While to my mind a root of balm it is,

For love at length breeds love; sufficient bliss

For life and death and rising up again.

Surely when light of Heaven makes all things plain,

    Love will grow plain with all its mysteries;

    Nor shall we need to fetch from over seas

Wisdom or wealth or pleasure safe from pain.

Love in our borders, love within our heart,

    Love all in all, we then shall bide at rest,

    Ended for ever life’s unending quest,

         Ended for ever effort, change and fear:

Love all in all; —no more that better part

         Purchased, but at the cost of all things here

Don't Worry, Be Happy

"Though free to think and act, we are held together like the stars in the firmament, with ties inseparable: these ties cannot be seen, but we can feel them." Nikola Tesla

Dear old science; if you believe a quick trawl through the inter-web it's becoming more and more of a hippy as it gets older, certainly it's catching up with the truths that ancient wisdom traditions have been stating since before it existed... that everything is made of the same stuff and that there is a consciousness throughout the constantly moving web of energy flashing in and out of existence that informs 'what is'.

On one level it blows my Newtonian educated mind on a daily basis, and on another I know it to be true with every fibre of my being and every second of my experience.

So the question is, what difference does it make? Why does it matter that we live in a world made up entirely of vibrating energy?

It matters because it's entirely made up of vibrating energy. Everything is made up of the same stuff. The land, the water, the trees, the birds, the air, you, me, even two-faced politicians and fracking executives. We are all part of a shared energy field, a unified living being we call Earth. We share the same breath and we all affect the field.

Oneness is not an idea, it is a reality.  We are the world and therefore we are what is wrong with the world and what is right with it. So BE what you love. Be generous, kind, compassionate, caring, funny, authentic, passionate, nurturing, original, creative, brave, peaceful, joyful, wise and be full of gratitude. Protest the bad stuff, make practical attempts to change what is not serving the good of all, but remember that if we do that from a place of anger and fear then we are creating anger and fear, and if we do it from a place of love and gratitude then the miraculous, seemingly ludicrously unlikely nature of our universe can place us in a world full of just that.

Where do you want the path of you life to lead you?

Become a dreamer, create a beautiful dream, not the nightmare that many of us (human and non-human) are living in.