When the sun stays up late and the flowers reach out to touch the sky, when daddy-longlegs paint the air with notes sung by the bees and the owl watches from her tree in silent benediction of the birds circling her perch, a peculiar magic flows through our meadows and woods, over hill and dale, as we come near Midsummer Night. It’s no great leap of imagination to find the strangest, tiniest creatures dancing above creeks in droplets of reflected light over water rolling past ancient oaks with twisted branches posed for their partner’s embrace. When the light fades westwards, tinting the valleys in pastel hues, the lanes meander from day to night with fancy robed gentlemen strutting along to find a partner for a reel.
When the rain whips around the small boat you’re on, the waves rocking it like a toy, and the mountains mock you in their stoic, giant magnificence high above the loch, when the sea is silver in sunlight but lashed with diamond hail, then Scotland unfolds her velvet and sequinned drapes for you. Out of this elemental fabric’s fold the eagle emerges to stop your breath. Circling below rain-heavy, pewter clouds, golden talons curled to grab fish, focused amber eyes, wing-strokes slow and measured, they have come to claim their price.
On the outcrops of Scotland, where its coast crumbles into the Atlantic, where the last volcanic rocks sprout from the Hebridean Shelf, little clowns have made their weatherbeaten home. In flocks they rise from the ocean to come to their nests, beautiful and small, facing gales and gulls magnificently to raise their chicks where the sea crashes onto cliffs after a thousand miles’ journey. As wild as they are exotic, the Treshnishs are magnetic in charm, alive under a concert of seabirds’ squawks. The skies open to drench you to the skin while the sun laughs from behind clouds to spill her warmth over the glens beyond Mull and you are enslaved forever to the area’s wild beauty.
Svalbard in winter. Frozen fjords, mountains of brightest white with only a few patches of granite freed by the whipping wind. The pastels of dusk and dawn of sweet deception as the temperatures sink when the sun hovers over the horizon. The ice is moving, breaking in sharp cracks and deep sighs, working and shifting in a jagged landscape and where the water is freed, it’s of a menacing blackness. The pristine snow is untouched by all but tracks of animals, swiftly made, swiftly covered. The clouds rolling in deny the vealed mountain-tops their innocence.
Walrus lay on thick ice so bright it hurts the eye against the cerulean backdrop of the Barents Sea. Bearded seals dry their fur in the whisper of sun at mid-day and eider ducks rush across the open water to create the only sounds with their splashing wings and the reindeer drudge through the snow on the headland.
The little fox moves over the landscape like the tip of a clock’s hand, from East to West in a semi-circle mirroring the moon. As the days and nights lose their distinction, time is defined by the tides, the freeze, the melt. This elemental beauty shows our fragility in sharpest contrast under mountains that line up as characters from ancient tales, frightening gods of old, a chorus of shrieking fulmars circling their abode, gliding over the water, their wingtips slicing the surface, mocking our inability to fly from their human-like eyes while the guillemots scramble to flee from the ships bow, a bear but a speck in the distance.
As we sail these Northern waters, predators to this habitat, hunting no more for fur but a need to be healed by the beauty and its honesty, we aren’t humbled as much as reduced to our mortal package of bones, our chance existence. Exposed and fragile, our voice carries farther, without the distractions of the world we corrupted, now that we seek healing by what we once ventured to destroy. The air is hard to breathe, thickened and painful in the lungs. Sea-mist descends, a thick brush wiping across air and water, mixing all into one matter, one living, breathing beast of which we are part, through which we sail. Our circulation slows, the waves flatten, the fog thins and the sun appears over a crystal clear landscape of a new day’s dawn.
The sun sets over the rim of coastal hills near Silverdale in Lancashire and the cloudless sky of an early spring evening glazes over with a cold, bright cerulean blue. A sliver of a waxing moon appears, edged into the firmament, circled like a stage-light as yet unlit. Quiet descends, made more so by the burring call of a bittern in the reeds. The audience is hushed. A few shadows emerge on dusk’s stage, a few cries of revellers escape, slowly assembling, excitement palpable in unseen vibrations. Finally, the curtain rises.
To the sound of an orchestra played in frequencies unheard by human ear, the starlings brush about under the hand of a painter in the elysium of their art. Pirouetting and spiralling from east to west in tens of thousands, the performers listen to the drumbeats of the universe.
Up, down, below, perfectly synchronised as if the whole flock thought and felt as one, bound by magnets and each other’s wing-stroke, in a choreographed show whose composer is the very planet over which they dance.
As one gigantic fan flicked open, the flock disperses into a sea of peppercorns, flooding the skies over the water’s mirror, swarming to their chorus of chattering calls.
And as the sky turns of an Egyptian shade the moon’s white gold is glimpsed beyond the dancers’ troops, aglow for the final crescendo before the fan is shut by the same will that had first released the birds and now commands them to their roost.
Migratory birds draw eyes and hearts with their calls and mesmerising shape-shifting through the fluid colours of dawn and dusk. The birds are pulled by forces we can’t always understand but their passing above us marks a passage of daybreak and night, a separation, through which their freedoms seem multifold to ours as they sail far up in the skies. By witnessing their journeys we remain earthbound in body but never in mind. As the years pass by, season after season, we think we gain or lose, but everything in our universe is present still, gone from here, arrived elsewhere. We’ve always had it all, we never had it at all, but we are always part of it all
Samhain has passed and we’re in the realm of withdrawal into the root, the self, the soil. The hours of sun are reduced, but its rays are like flames of candles lit to recall, remember, to reflect. Out of the calm comes new strength. The other half of the moon is only dark until we step across the threshold and see it lit. We harvest our crops just as we take our imagination’s fruits, weigh them, hold them, serve them. The forest floor is covered by past’s treasure and our steps shift shed leaves so they crackle and dance. We can see a new side to what’s not lost, but changing, adding to the earth, fertilising new seeds that gather strength as we take our time to breathe and dream, never knowing what encounters await us on our ramblings through the woods, what will grow wings and take flight to cruise high above the treetops, calling out across our November fields.
The valley wakes under a duvet of mist. The nights are cooler once more, the air rich with moisture.
The forests change, day by day. Going to sleep under bright, saturated green, where light seems to outlast the days, one wakes to an easing of foliage, a slow shedding summer’s glory and we accept a new wisdom, a ripening, a glimpse of rust, an honesty of branch and twig. All that was once so sure, so bright, soon withdraws from our valleys. The light won’t reach as far into the woods now and dusk stretches her inky arms out, to hold the world closer.
We find a new quiet that has us listen to new voices, softer ones, wiser ones, guiding us into a different world, where the stories are passed in the night, revealing new thoughts and truths, against the dark side of the moon.
The forest’s eyes are opening. It watches our every move as we stumble, light-spoilt, into the underbrush, awkward and humble, until our steps ease into this darker time whose riches we discover, day by day, with the falling of the leaves, until a new bright warmth fills us from within.
Birds dart across the river, chasing midges in the morning sun, while here and there a leaf glides down to land softly on the water, joined by another and another. Kingfishers buzz past, electric blue and copper against the dark jade of the river board, picking up insects and tiny fish before sitting very still on a rock or a branch.
The river is as changeable as the weather, so still at times, like a pool of emerald, only disrupted by the jumping of a fish, but a few yards on it gurgles and chatters away over rocks, spinning its tale, bouncing and jumping like the otter cub, out fishing with the parents on this sunny autumn morning.
Spending time by the river, quiet and still like the birds, opens the senses to this secretive world, until bird and mammal gift you with their oblivion to your intrusion, and you’re a part of it all.
I’ve tried to absorb the sounds and smells of moist leaves, listen to the birds’ chatter in the rushes, and after spending some hours under a weeping willow’s branches that trail the quiet surface of the river like a water nymph’s fingers, two deer traipse across the ford, hoof by careful hoof.
Golden hour – the short time before sunset, when the light glides across our world, setting it aglow, turning it into a celebratory shrine – it’s also one of the times for best wildlife encounters. There’s a place on the edge of the Forest of Bowland, from which the moors roll down towards Morecambe Bay and the few farms dotting the dells and valleys have anchored the landscape with its copses of trees and ridges for centuries past. The rocks are populated by hares and stouts, the dry-stone walls see partridge and snipe strut and prance and the majestic hen harrier still circles down the breeze. When the sun rays stretch out in their magic angle, the colours rise in a whirlwind and the meadows sparkle in gilded dust. The short-eared owl spreads her silver-white wings and hunts across the fields, her golden eyes matching the hour and setting the beauty of the moment alight. Towards sunset, the Bay turns into a sliver of silver and the layers of hills into Cumbria take on a different hue each. Starting with deepest purple closest to the water, they fade into peach and rose until melting into a creamy sky, taking our eyes and yearning hearts into the distance on these long-lasting summer evenings when life seems to last forever.
June: The meadows smell of cut grass, the light is at its brightest. The hares run across the hills before the setting sun.
When the very last daylight strokes the fells with its brush of gold and the sheep’s bleating carries across the valleys, when lady’s lace and buttercup turn into embroidery on the lush meadows and the day’s heat still lingers on the dry-stone wall, when the days never seem to want to end but keep promising new glorious tales with every moment the light lasts, when badgers go out for their strolls before dusk, Midsummer is upon us.
