Words from beneath a shrub...

X marks the spot

I have retreated to the only patch of shade on offer around the cabin, to lie quietly beneath a shrub on a bed of dirt & moss.

A Sparrow busily flits back & forth above my head, tending to its young. It swoops so low on the approach that I feel the air from it's beating wings upon my grateful skin. An air conditioning unit powered by a passing birds wing? Paradise level unlocked.

The Vast Blue Everything brims with Skylarks here, their song - forever my soundtrack of Summer - plays in a lazy, hazy loop above. Everything thing else is utterly silent, lulled into a dream-state held somewhere between song & sun.

In my small vegetable plot, slugs and snails are making a s-l-o-w banquet of the greens, feasting on the cool, damp leaves at record speed. I think I'm meant to mind? But I grow things as much for them as for myself, delighting in their displays of daylight robbery, imagining their contentment.

Birds enjoy the spinach tops & chuggipigs it seems, have a deep devotion to radish. What bliss it is to share. There's nearly always enough to go around & besides, watching a snail eat a lettuce leaf is entirely worth a less salad at the end of the day to my.mind, have you seen them eating? No notes.

The branches above my head, on closer inspection, are high-rise of yet more snails. A kaleidoscope of different coloured spirals rising ever upward in the dappled, leafy shade.

Apparently I was the last one to get the memo about this spot, just a student in the grand scheme of Knowing, humbled by their infinite wisdom, happy to learn & languish in the shade of their lofty gaze.

I watch a line of ants spilling out from a gap between two rocks, disappearing into a patch of long clover. To onward & beyond…

Buzzing insects hang lazily in the air as if pinned in place by time. A moth drinks from a bowl of water, left out in the shade for anyone who needs it. Birds, bugs, a feral cat, insects, dogs & frogs, the tiny oasis is open to all who pass this way.

It's a tinderbox up here, sat high above the sea with no cover for miles. The landscape of gorse & bracken, hedgerow, field & moor glitches in a shimmering, visible film. My wooden home shifts as the sun blazes down, adjusting her coat for a new summer fit. Spiders take advantage of this annual event & small webs spring up in little cracks between planks.

Birds nest under roof tiles & somewhere, deep beneath the cabin floor, Squatter Cat claims the coolest spot of all, far away from the heat of the day, tucked between the cobwebs & the cold, dark ground.

I like to imagine that somewhere here, deep in the moss where I’m lying now, tardigrades go about their business with the sort of bliss I imagine only a tardigrade can know. So many homes within this home, so many lives being lived on this tiny patch of land, less Mine than Ours.

As the sun dips and the skylark-sky shifts to a ballet of bats, I will crawl out from my mossy bed, pick up my tools and go to work in the cool of an evening breeze.

But for now I am Here. X marks the spot.

In the company of snails, beneath the breeze of a birds wing, rich beyond measure.

Jen x