When frost halts nature for a tight embrace, the landscape lays edged into a mirror of icy water and frozen tears, reflecting a cold, cobalt sky, when silver furrows trace rippled tree-bark and dawn casts empty seed-head as sculptures across our fields, the owls sweep low to find their prey. 

Once again, I can see them dancing in the wind.

Snow had lain deep for days in January and hard winds scattered the owls I used to watch for over a year. I kept notes in my massive, leather-clad volume on each of them, about where they live and their habits, but none of these cherished acquaintances seemed to have remained where I knew them to roost. Once the sun came back and the winds stilled I spent days hoping to find them but not a sign. As before, it was the frost that brought them back out. A small white flash between branches or and topping a fence post, a flicker of light on an ivory wing, a shadow passing over the hedge many fields down and a pellet spat out of a tree all point the way. You see them circle in a distance then trace their patterns back to barn and tree until you know their roost. Then you wait and slowly, ever so slowly, find a vantage point which doesn’t disturb them. 

Between Cold Moon and Wolf Moon, we orbit the farthest from the sun. Bitter cold grasps at twig and bone, snow is driven across fells like silk curtains torn, icy rain pommels frozen ground.

And yet, in this harsh weather, we find a harmony of force, of strength that is the root to beauty. Bare wood frames nothing but imagination. A fey pheasant shouts across snow-covered field, his voice loud and clear.

Deer walk on frozen moor, careful of treacherous holes, glad to be granted passage by ice.

And when the light wanes and the owls fly out hunting, they are ghost-like more than ever, blending with gauzy skies as they hunt from dry-stone wall. One second there, then gone, taken by the wind in their fight for food.

With settled airs, the owls still fly, ivory wings and snow-capped moors contrasting against eyes and claws and only at the last moment does light reach under clouds to stroke the fields in deceptive comfort.

When first snow falls, covering the land, layering branch, coating trees, erasing textures, the year is not slowly ending but all is gently renewed. Tracks are limited to the moment, held for a few hours only, a temporary canvas that soon will be no more. Hoof prints lead into dusted woods where brambles form archways into winter. The deer stops and doesn’t flee. Eyes move beyond bracken, soft and warm under steamy breath. Standing put, saving strength, danger neglected, we’re wrapped in elemental quiet, together on our own, each on a crossing path. Sharing stillness in a pause that has naturally come in the flow of the seasons, allowing us to take our time. 

A reprieve that silences all but small birds’ chirp and scatter, their softest wings lit as they cross the forest above. 

There is joy in this remade world, possibilities appear now the vision is simpler. Nature’s detail speaks more clearly in cold air. 

Later, when the sun reappears it feels as if the whole land was smiling. 

As day is leaving, sun’s palette is rinsed and pigments flood sky, water and soil to colour nightly dreams.

As chestnuts fall onto first shed leaves, splitting their shells, a year’s worth of fruition is offered to the ones flitting by. Food for sustenance of body, and food for the soul in what was shaped, formed and moulded during light-filled months.

Ripened berries, scarlet dots of small trouvailles to be picked apart and so passed on to the young to help their growth, to digest and contribute and eventually, sustain. Fanned feathers flit past the last of the seed-heads on meadows starting to disintegrate to add to the soil from which they sprung. The stag’s calls echo above tree crowns and across the moors, making us believe they roam free forever more and no walls and fences could contain them.

Now the woods start telling stories again, no longer distracted by summer’s waltzing and prancing under a late sun’s glow, but there is a call to gather and exchange.

In this time of harvest, the evening skies turn lavender and leaves are daubed in rose. In this bouquet of revelations the owl rests, internalising treasure, drawing our eyes to the core of creation.

Wings flit over meadows, feathers blend with flowers under morning light. Calls pierce the woods, chicks ask their due of parents and life, to be fed, to be aided, to gain their wings and freedom, soon knowing their skills, soon leaving, their voices melting into thick August air.

Grass stands tallest, seed-heads heavy, waiting for the breeze to scatter their crop. Like feathered gnomes, tawny chicks are hopping from mossy branch to branch, learning to hunt as elders watch with dark, marbled eyes. A little less close each day, parents and chicks circle farther. Distant solitary patches of fir beckon, perches of sycamore and beech. Where will the winds take them now? Where will tomorrow’s trees stand tall?

Spring’s work has found its way into the great web of life, spun in toughest thread, strong yet unobtrusive, simply, solidly woven with strands of different ilk, all reaching out for past and future, touched by today’s sun. However far they fly, they once were a note to a tune of forests and fells, someday to return, or forever an echo, framed in woodland wonder.

Now all of life is ours. A summer’s eve tale traced back to ancient times, held in our hands for this moment to spin like a golden orb, followed across the horizon into unknown lands, soon to wake with dewdrop treasure in the morning. A ripening of youth, a revelation of mind, a time of summer’s glory.

There’s a forest clearing where foxglove grow. Petal by flower, twig by seed, adorned to their finest with campion’s grace and sorrel’s filigree sequins this to me, is the centre of the world tonight. Under birches draped branches, the adoration of meadow-grass, foxglove almost touches the barn-owl’s satin wings. Waterfowl chants by the lakeside, deer bark from the woods and here he circles, so quietly, undisturbed, no foreign sound to alter his flight.

As the lowering sunshine slants across branches of mossy stem and porcelain leaf, tall grass, gold-spun, all wave in the breeze under wagtail’s whirring wings. Seed-heads burst like sparks of fire and doe’s dark eyes soften in genteel grace. Wings lit by silken light, returned across a velvet vale. Fields linked by rows of poles; tawny owl’s perch, as silently she waits for sunset. Tonight is celebration, of all that the valley’s fabric can dish, standing tall before the first cut, rich in soil and seed, a culmination of what’s planted, what’s sought, a centre of strength, grown from the core of the world, farther than the waning sunlight, more crystalline than the rising moon. 

In full glory, she arrives from the east, amber and diamond, taking daylight across the dusky dells in a carriage ride across the skies. 

Painted, crafted and formed by the ever turning dials of our universe, our woods are celebrating youth. Darkness dissolves, and like a slow lapping of silver waves, light moves through , reaching and unfurling just like the young ferns, rolling through silken strands of bluebells to tease the dye from strand and strand of forest fabric. 

A woodpecker’s staccato is the only contrasting sound to the soft whisper in the leaves before the smaller birds fluff their feathers and start their soprano chorus of violins and flutes. Humankind’s machinations, charring voices, roads and traffic, hushed in the distance, fading for now. 

In this clearing of age-old sycamore, ash and oak, life is full. A silhouetted antler behind a tree, a cracking of twigs. Stepping out of shyness’ shadow and into the light, dressed in russet, finely spun we watch each other quietly before she calmly passes on. A thrush then follows her passage, hoping and flying from branch to branch. 

One morning a sound rolls through Bowland skies as if an orchestra of flute-playing sprites are sailing over our hills. Curlews have returned. Soon they’re joined by the rolling caw of lapwings and from every nook and cranny hares emerge, lured outside their forms by the ever-increasing strength of the sun that infuses the grass with a most enticing shade of golden green.

Daylight hovers at dusk, as if unwilling to disperse now that our flora starts marbling with the softest pastel hues which come to life under sun’s masterful creations.

Birds are turning our hedgerows into one great nest, proclaiming their projects’ progress to neighbours of every shape and form, meeting over a meal of worms that are shyly poking their heads from soft, churned soil. In the woods, the owl is hunting for their partner sitting on eggs in an old abandoned barn, hoping their home will hold for yet another season so new life has a chance to emerge.

Spring is not for the faint-hearted, but celebrates our potential’s full embrace. With every added breath of daylight, possibilities sprout for all who’re brave enough to dare, by choice or pulled by destiny’s strings, riding the hands on nature’s clock for yet another season, yet another turn of life.

Setting out in darkness with shards of glassy snow crunching below my boots, shed from the starry heavens, daylight soon seeps in sweet rose across a world that’s been iced by a million confectioners.

Robins fly about as tiny rusted feather-balls with dark marble eyes. One sits on the frosted dry-stone wall and starts to chirp, teaching me their song to brighten the morning.

The stags’ breath journeys in long streams above the cracking soil with antlers gleaming silver under a bright, cold sun. The herd huddles together, seeking warmth.

A lone buck joins them from across the dell, his hooves nimble like a dancer’s on an icy rink. We share the open meadow trying to capture some light on our hides as the few crisp dead leaves glow as cuts of shiny metal from steel branches, beautiful but cold.

This is mid-winter. The world is at its coldest, the source of all life withdrawn while all empty shells of old are whipped away under time’s unforgiving broom. And so we wait and gather thought and strength, appreciating each hour’s sunshine and the company we keep. On the lake, the cygnet preens her young costume over a sea of diamonds, in a festive jubilation of innocence and youth, all so fresh and new in her first year when a still cold morning holds nothing but promises in moments yet to unfold. 

Those winter mornings when the land wakes glazed and the landscape is frozen, light reigns supreme. In pastel pinks and wintry blues it starts to paint hills dusted with powder white shards of ice and fields spiked with stiff, hard meadow-grass. On a dry-stone wall, against a warming sky, a silhouetted secret agents goes about his business of hunting. In the woods, shed leaves now crack under our steps and our eyes water in the stinging cold. Birds are hungry and flock together to find food, shedding their shyness in favour of finding seeds where they wouldn’t usually approach. Robins fluff their feathers on top of poles decorated by the season and perched on a silver birch branch sits the tawny owl, framed by frosted twigs in a diamond contraption while ice starts thawing with bell-like sound under the waxing sun.