12 A winged interlude

‘My life had become a world of small things, a story of minute details, of the earth’s growing. I found joy in minute observations. It was about looking, seeing and hearing the sounds of the land.’
Carol Drinkwater

Of birds...

1 Ahead of and above me, about 30 of them brake in mid-air in perfect synchrony, and in a sublimely co-ordinated wave reverse a few metres back together to park as one on an electricity cable, all facing precisely aligned into the southwesterly wind. It’s said that each bird is minutely and perfectly attuned with all of itself to seven birds to each side of it. This really is community mind, acting as one, individuality subsumed in common purpose.

Starlings. Once perfectly common and ordinary birds; now, fewer, but really quite astonishing to the eyes with which I am looking. Each evening, just at wolf-light (or ‘entre chien et loup’ if you prefer), we experience huge murmurations above our heads in the North Field, occasionally breaking into smaller whispers. How I love that sound of hundreds, sometimes thousands, of wings above my head.

Then they settle briefly into one of the oak or chestnut trees here and utter their rivering song as a counterpoint to the now-deep bass notes of what was a brook and is recently a wide stream, almost a river, down below the wooded scarp into which the farmhouse is embedded.

The buzzards and sparrowhawks are out hunting, and rooks strut the corn-stubble. An occasional egret peers at the grass beneath its feet. We’ve had nearly two months’ rain, in which the odd crow has been hunched and disgruntled-looking, poking around like a bored hoodie by the sodden side of a field-become-swamp. In the oaks lining the chemin, so recently topped by tempests, the migrant redwings chitter. They’ve stripped all the holly berries, but there are still plenty of red berries in the Home Meadow.

Locally, the river Aulne (‘Alder’) is slurping at the lawns of a house by a bridge; further on, the Hyère throws smooth sheets of curved bronze over the weir. The alders and poplars by the river are skeletal, so that birds’ and hornets’ nests are visible, as are the great balls of mistletoe, that magical plant of the druids that grows neither on earth nor in the air, yet both.

In the town with the lake, suddenly there are seven swans instead of the usual two or three. I’m delighted at this, and half-expect a fairy tale to unveil itself in the Forest. (Later, I search for a Seven Swans tale online; I have a vague memory of one, and I know there are well-known tales about six swans. I do find a seven-swan story, but I don’t like it, so will have to write one.)

And now the rain has stopped, and the severe cold (that has sealed the pond in thick feather-pattern ice stippled with sleet, and fingered our old bedroom Veluxes) means that the sparrow gangs, robins and tits will keep returning to the peach tree by our back door to check the slaty path for more seed or crumbs.

2 Even when I’ve tried to uncurl its narrow little pewter feet from my fingers to try to transfer it to the peach tree, the bluetit won’t leave my hand, though now it seems alert and fully awake again after its shock of bumping round the kitchen and ending up behind the compost bin, beak agape and eyes half-closed.

From my finger held right up against a small branch, the bluetit keeps looking back at me, round black eyes meeting mine. Eventually it allows itself to be transferred to a twig at my eye-height, just a few inches away, and continues to look over its shoulders, one and then the other, at me. For it to be so unafraid of me it must either still be in shock or it has realised I truly am no threat.

Then it seems that its little round blue-and-lemon body retrieves a memory of its gymnastic skills and it hops sideways onto a vertical narrow stem, and then onto another, where it flips and twirls round sideways, all the time fixing me with its eyes.

I’m reminded once again of how significant these encounters with the non-human Other are, and how privileged, how fortunate, I am that truly my personal concern this morning need be only, at least for this moment, whether a bluetit that flew into my kitchen lives or dies – a moment that is not enough, but is also all I have to offset against the almost inconceivable scale of the tragedies and distress that currently rock the world.

For these small personal moments, these creatures of air and earth (and water, some of them) have given me wings.

I began these Substack posts in late October last year. Gradually, but faster than I expected considering I have yet to let friends & my course & retreat participants know of its existence, I’ve arrived at more than 100 subscribers. If you are one, thank you so much for your support. It’s been a very uplifting experience for me (& I needed that!). Some of you have written to me (or commented below the posts): this means a great deal.

Is there anyone else you can think of who might enjoy reading this?

Go gently into this troubled world of ours, & keep yourself kind, free and a bit wild, my friends.