“A walk is only a step away from a story, and every path tells.”

~ Robert Macfarlane

I hope you are having a good summer!  Yesterday, here in the UK, we had the hottest day of the year, and the second hottest day ever of recorded temperatures in the UK – a scorching 38.1 degrees. Heaven knows how people in Paris coped with 42 degrees!

For my part, I was helping to lug timbers for my garden cabin from the driveway to the back garden, with my son and the builders. I was feeling like a wilted flower after that…

It’s a short one from me today, as we are travelling in a few hours, but I’ll be back (hopefully rejuvenated and invigorated), after my holiday.

I make it a habit (most days), to take a short walk in and around the mini-meadow and woods near our home after I drop my daughter at school.  It gets my blood flowing, ideas streaming and just sets me up for the day. That quiet time spent in the natural world revitalises my mind, body and spirit, connects me to nature and fills me with gratitude for the beauty on my doorstep.

A recent report has cited the importance of getting at least 2 hours per week in nature to promote health and well-being. It’s important for our microbiome too, being in contact with mud, bark, leaves and all the bacteria that live outdoors that we need for inner diversity.

I’m looking forward to exploring parts of different landscapes with my family in Iceland, the USA and Canada over the next two weeks.

I’m aware I need to practice poetry, it’s not easy for me, but I still enjoy the discipline of expressing my thoughts in that medium when the mood takes me.

The Mini-meadow

Body wanders where spirit directs me,

A mini meadow beckons; green show-stopper,

Crisscrossed by perambulating bees,

Drawn to hypnotic strumming of grasshoppers,

Accompanied by pigeons, softly cooing,

As wild flowers sway in the breeze,

A small, but vibrant oasis blooming,

Butterflies flit from flowers to trees.

Here, in the long grass, energy abounds,

Nature’s summer symphony astounds…

Blackberry buds are preparing to ripen,

Berries cluster, fulsome and shiny,

Mossy stumps are covered in lichen,

Early morn, here, in this magical prairie,

A weary soul escapes to soar,

Up beyond the wood’s silent sentinels,

Their boughs whispering to reassure:

Cherish the canopied path; Earth’s angels.

Insects mate on a pure bed of petals,

Avoiding the prickly purple thistles.

Striding beneath the dappled sunlight,

Soles cushioned on withered acorns,

Roaming like Artemis: a goddesses’ delight

Fills my veins; unbridled freedom born,

Relishing the sensory arousal of wilderness,

The twitching of tails and fleeting glimpses,

Of squirrels darting – spritely grey litheness,

Birds warbling and singing, sonic spritzes.

The woods and mini meadow are my sanctuary,

Urban antidote – a place to linger and tarry.

By Virginia Burges

Walks in the Austrian countryside inspired Beethoven’s evocative and beautifully bucolic 6th symphony. We certainly had a storm like his musical one two nights ago!

In the meantime, I’ll leave you with a true poet of the natural world, Robert Macfarlane, talking about the landscape and the human heart:

“There is no mystery in this association of woods and otherworlds, for as anyone who has walked the woods knows, they are places of correspondence, of call and answer. Visual affinities of colour, relief and texture abound. A fallen branch echoes the deltoid form of a streambed into which it has come to rest. Chrome yellow autumn elm leaves find their colour rhyme in the eye-ring of the blackbird. Different aspects of the forest link unexpectedly with each other, and so it is that within the stories, different times and worlds can be joined.”

~ Robert Macfarlane, The Wild Places