The wildness has been winning so far this year.
It’s been a season of storms - not nondescript storms without their own identities but storms that assert their character and challenge the somewhat average names we give them. January and February have consumed the alphabet with a speed that promises a dearth of letters in the months ahead. It is fitting that the start of a new month was the first weekend day in a long while that didn’t belong to one of those wild creatures and I was determined to seize it.
I followed a regular track. No matter how many times you walk a path though, it is never the same path and you are never the same walker. Today was a day for boots and puddle stomping. A day for embracing mud. We spend so much time counting and tracking - footsteps, kilometers, minutes, hours. We have rings to fill, times to beat. Maybe we should stop that for a while and just walk. Maybe we don’t need to count something to make it count.
The storms have left the air crystal-clear. I was hoping to see some tracks - I know the badgers are active, the deer are a constant, and sometimes there’s fox spoor or owl pellets to see. The mud was so viscous that it overtook any markings left for my eyes, though. Apart from the tracks humans made. We are heavier than the creatures we share this area with, the marks we leave are deeper, in many ways permanent. The unused exits of an old badger set are already being reclaimed by bramble growth. Our tracks reassert themselves, year after year, until they become the landscape.
The buzzards and kites were flying, buffeted by winds that caught them and sent them spiralling away from me. They aren’t scared of my footsteps. They know I’m earthbound while they own the skies. I try not to take their company for granted - in the little corner of the UK that I live in, they are constant companions. I love the wildness of a bird of prey. They carry themselves with a sense of gravity, equal to their ability to defy it.
I feel that the clouds are lifting today, that the storms are retreating. There are small signs of Spring that remind me I am behind on sowing my seeds for this year’s crop of vegetables. The rhythm and meter of the country year doesn’t pause for anyone. I know that this week, I have to take my place in it if I want to eat from the garden again this year.
For now though, I just concentrate on taking a step forward without worrying about where I’m going.
