LesleyA

When the rain came

Sun, 31 May 2026 14:14:35 -0700

I have never done this before. I have never before stood out a storm. Oh, I’ve watched them from doorways and through windows; I’ve even been caught out in them, in the woods, in the hills; I’ve held down tents against them on camp sites that had so little soil as to risk washing us away along the lie of the bedrock and on others where we risked sinking into the mire; I remember sitting out one in a cattle-creep under a railway line wondering if the metalwork above me would be a help or a catastrophe in the event of a direct strike; but this was the first time that I deliberately walked out into the rain, under the flashes, between the crashing noise, to stand in the storm.

And to stay there until it passed.

There was no reason. Unless we count the heat of the day.

It had been a HOT day. Even up on the coast, where we might have expected a cold fret or at least a cooling onshore breeze, the mercury had topped 30 degrees C. This is England. This is May. We were complaining about the cold at the beginning of the month, but this was not what we meant when we asked for warmth. We wanted bright sun, light winds, that Goldilocks boundary between warm and cool. We wanted walking weather, not stay-indoors-stifling threat-of-wildfires weather. To even be thinking about the possibility of wildfires in England still feels absurd, to be thinking about them in May makes no sense to someone of my generation. Cast ne’er a clout, ’til May be out was a saying that we could more reliably attribute to the month than the blossom when we were young. No longer.

In the classroom we were persuaded to close the doors and trust to the aircon, until it was clear that the machinery was not up to the job. I was visibly melting and certainly incapable of thought, never mind creativity, before our statutory 7 minutes was up. As subtle as I could manage, I asked if anyone was feeling...Read More

Crexless

Sun, 24 May 2026 13:36:05 -0700

Reading Kathleen Jamie’s piece about the corncrake¹, I realise again how few birds I recognise by their calls.

To be fair, I recognise very few by sight either, but today I am thinking about sounds, I am thinking again that maybe I should download the app that will identify what I’m listening to, and tell me the name of the bird. I am wondering if I will enjoy the song any more for being able to name the singer…

…which naturally leads me on to the flowers that I cannot identify by sight. There’s an app for that too.

Perhaps there is one that will let me transcribe the sounds of waves.

How long before we have one that can tell a butterfly by its scent or the resonance of its wing-beats?

How long – if I go down that road – before I spend all of my time out in the wild hemmed in by trying to tie it down, to trammel it into the so-called smart-phone, to label it? I don’t want to tame the wild, I want to wild myself. I want to live myself into… what, exactly?

Into being. Into breathing. Into swimming and dancing and walking. Into sitting in silence. Into wonder. And surely wonder starts with wondering…with not knowing...with wanting to know...with finding out...but slowly.

Or not ever finding out at all.

I can name very few star constellations, could point you to even fewer of them, but that does not impinge on the awe I feel when I step out under a clear dark sky. Perhaps it even enhances it.

I’m unlikely to ever hear a corncrake. I may one day hear a bittern booming through the reeds. Is my life diminished in ratio to the not hearing of these things? Maybe so, maybe not, in my specific case, but it would be sad beyond measure if no-one got to hear them, because they were no...Read More

The business of nidification

Sun, 17 May 2026 05:28:28 -0700

Nesting. Breeding. Empty nest syndrome. Whenever we use the bird analogy for our desires for home, a place of our own, it falls short. A nest is a temporary abode, one to be abandoned as soon as the young have fledged because by then it has served its purpose of keeping them safe long enough to do so. Birds may return to the same spot year on year, but not in any expectation of finding their old dwelling intact and waiting. They come back to build again, to start all over in the same spot. Are they superstitious? Do they return only to places where they have been successful in the past for the very reason that they were – or to places where they failed, determined to break the curse?

My naturalist friends tell me such notions are anthropomorphic, sentimental, absurd.

I don’t tell them that they cannot know: they are not bird.

I do not claim to know different: I am also not bird.

I simply believe that there is much we do not know, perhaps cannot ever know. Much is perception, theory, deduction, guesswork. The medics cannot tell my very human brother what is happening in his brain, for all the scans and tests, and theories, assumptions, deductions… much is still guesswork, so forgive me for questioning what we think we know about the workings of the minds of swifts or eagles. After all the work of nest-building and young-raising, the birds may be sad to leave. They may resent having to start all over again next year and the next.

Or they may not think about it at all.

Or of course, they may relish the chance to fly freely again, now that the structure or scrape has done its job of shelter, protection or impressing a mate.

It seems to me that some humans feel exactly the same way about...Read More

Tending, not building

Sun, 10 May 2026 04:55:52 -0700

Towards the end of April, I begin to get back out into the garden. I do a bit here and there, but without enthusiasm. It takes the beginning of May and a friend – without whom I could easily sink – coming round to help with one of the jobs I cannot quite manage alone, to reignite my motivation.

There are those friends who find out what you want done, and then do it. And there are those who can somehow, without seeming or maybe even meaning to, talk you into doing what they figure is the better option. The problem with the latter kind is that they know more about some things than you do, so you’re never sure whether they’re right or not.

And to be honest, on this occasion, I have no strong views. Ok. Do that.

In this particular case, I wanted the shrubbery’s height reduced. In the end, we took it back to the ground. That was not my plan. One of the bushes was clearly diseased and struggling though and that one I think probably did need a completely new start. The other? Ach well, it is what it is. I now get to restart that corner of the garden. Rethink it maybe. It needs digging over. There are things to dig out. Maybe I’ll dig it all out. Literally start afresh. It wasn’t what I intended to do, but I remember that the shrubs were not intended to be there either. So I am choosing to look on this as an opportunity to re-shape that corner of the back end.

Or give it a wild chance to do what it wants.

A Saturday in May. The sun is shining. I lose half a day to Walden, one of those books that I feel I ought to have read a long time ago. Now, I have read it and wonder why it is so lauded. It has not earned a place on my shelves. It held my attention for as long as it took to read, but not a page corner was turned down, nothing demanded that I go back and read it again.

In the afternoon, in the hot sun, after dance classes and walking, I lay a table-cloth on a rusting bistro table, pick at cold chicken and naked salad leaves and pickles. In amongst the picnic I am trying to write.

I can hear blue tits, traffic on the Bowthorpe Road, my Turkish neighbours speaking softly in their own idioms. If I look up, I am faced with the bramble hedge that has suddenly rejected its fence support and keeled over towards the lawn, leaving me uncertain as to whether to tie it up, cut it back or leave it be. Holly Blue butterflies dance with some variety of Whites. Sneezes tell me the air is pollinated. Forgotten chives have put on a spurt in the herb bed. The strawberries are looking optimistic. I feel the sun on my skin, the soft breeze. Beneath my feet, the ridged slats of the decking that needs painting again. Under my arms the soft linen cloth and my mother’s stitchwork. The gingko, in full leaf now, sways uncertainly. I must remember to water things tonight.

None of this is what I came to write. I came to write about being at Cley on a windy Spring morning, about walking out along the bank to find the sea in an exuberant catch-chase game with the sunlight. I came to write about the five elements, or the four, or a counting down through three and two elements into a non-duality. I wanted to write about where our definitions of elements begins and where it might end now that we are making them up – inventing them in labs. I wanted to talk about Celtic philosophy and Chinese philosophy and was thrown off course when I found that a...Read More

The Flowering Drive

Sun, 26 Apr 2026 10:20:36 -0700

Picking up where I left off last week, what is there actually growing here, between the things I (had) planted and the things that have just taken up residence, how many of them can I name and how do I relate to them?

Relate is an interesting term when it comes to us (as individuals) and the plants, fungi and other animals we share our space with. We talk a lot about nature-connection as something that we yearn for, need, benefit from, but how much do we talk about our relationship with individuals within that non-human community?

When it comes to people, we know that interpersonal relationships, social, romantic, sexual, familiar, collegiate and wider interactions are beneficial, but we are also very clear that the closer the relationship, the more important it is.

We sometimes do that beyond our own species, if we have companion animals for example, or even working animals. We may even have a particular tree that we tell our secrets to. Or a river that we trust with our anger or our sorrow. But on the whole, we don’t tend to think about our relationship with the non-human as a relationship with individuals, in the way that we do with people. We might use the word connection – as I have done for decades – without realising that
you cannot have connection without relationship.

I’m beginning to think that this might be important.

If I want to care about humanity – then it seems that I first need to care about specific individuals, those I am in direct relationship with – and only then I can expand that outwards.

Relationship – specific and personal exchange – would seem to precede a sense of wider connection with community, and beyond. It seems to me, today, as I figure my way through this on the page, that when we talk about connecting with nature we assume that is a one-way...Read More

We are not separate

Sun, 19 Apr 2026 07:21:35 -0700

“In a busy, suburban place in lowland Britain, one of the most nature-depleted countries on the planet…” ^[i] is where I was when I started reading the anthology that I have decided to respond to in whatever way comes up, page by page. This may take quite some time, it is not a short collection (the editor dissembles when he calls it modest), so I will wander off at times and talk about other things, but my hope is that I will keep coming back to the book and allowing it to make me think. My hope is that I will keep thinking enough to come back to the page and share what I come up with.

My hope is that I will learn something along the way.

My hope is that what I share will have some kind of meaning.

Because it strikes me that ‘hope’ is what it is all about. All of our search for spirit, for connection, for love, for wisdom, for whatever else it is that we might think we’re looking for, it is really all just, only, simply, about hope.

The thing I haven’t worked out (yet) is where the boundary is between hope and faith. Or if there even is a difference.

Questions for another time. For now I’m delving deeply into an anthology of writing that is grounded in the nature of the planet upon which we live and the other life we share it with. More specifically it is writing about the British Isles and Ireland.

I immediately connected with that notion of a busy suburban place in lowland Britain because I live in the same one that the book's editor, Patrick Barkham, lived in a few years back. Literally a few streets away from where he and his young ones were, I walked the same cemetery paths at...Read More

Still April

Sun, 12 Apr 2026 07:44:21 -0700

It is still April and I am still looking for magic and miracles, still looking to see the month’s kinder, gentler sides…and finding some of them.

I'm reading The Wild Isles, Patrick Barkham’s personal selection of the best of British & Irish nature writing, a borrow book that I’m going to have to buy, because there is no point turning down corners if you’re going to have to take it back to the library, and I have corners to turn down, because I have things to respond to, and authors that I need to follow up on, books whose extracts have me thirsting for more.

That there is always more to be had is its own kind of delight.

Meanwhile, that – I have decided – is the mark of nature writing that does its job. It is not in the oh yes – it is in the yes, but… and also the yes, and… Simple agreement (or, I suppose, disagreement) gets us nowhere. The best nature writing is that which makes us want to pick up our own pen and throw in our own two-pennorth, despite having no training, no long committed foraging and self-teaching, even if we are late-comers to finding our connection to the earth, to the inter-galactic-ness of it all. The best writing encourages to say what we think in response to it. It also demands of us that we read more – more of this or that argument, more of the counters, more of the story-telling that wouldn’t work if the backdrop weren’t so finely captured.

The Wild Isles made it too easy to grasp my disconnect from nature, too easy to think that if we cannot emulate these people, the writers with their scientific degrees and their adventures in far away places and their decisions to give up the ‘real world’ to live on the edges of it, watching and
writing, living and painting, off-grid, growing their own food, swimming with orcas and seals, traversing the deserts, or even trying to...Read More

Dateline: England, April 2026

Sun, 05 Apr 2026 08:04:17 -0700

The poets couldn’t agree about April. From abroad Browning wrote, Oh to be in England, now that April’s here. Eliot wasn’t as convinced, April is the cruellest month, he said. I remember April cruelties, all the losses down the years that seemed to congregate around the springtime, which means they linger in all those anniversaries. The goddess of taking was kinder this year, she got in early with her sorrows, scattered them through March. None the easier for the shifting of date, but also…maybe a reason to celebrate this April in more Browningian mode.

My calendar is full of platitudes about every day being a good day and how the simplest of things are the ones that matter. My journal is (not full, but) scattered with yes, buts to all of that. The truth is that even those of us who are fundamentally, confirmedly, committedly focussed on the good stuff, don’t always see it. Or we see it and don’t feel it.

In my better moments I know that this is just a matter of not taking enough time with it.

Speaking of two people and their impact on my life, a friend said that one had crashed into my life and the other had simply flowed into all the spaces. I love that analogy – not least because it is absolutely spot on, but also because the crash caused damage that had to be cleared up afterwards while the flow changes with the seasons but flows on still. There’s another piece to write about that another time, for now the relevance is that the same applies to the negative and the positive in my life in a more general way. The negative crashes in and has to be managed, dealt with, tidied up afterwards, processed, repaired etc. The positive flows through, often so quietly that I forget to notice, forget to harvest, forget to capture and release, forget to spend the time and energy immersing myself in it.

Hello! sorry Les just. Useing. Sam’s. Pad not good at it sorry to tell you sam died day be for her birthday. 20 Feb I’m just getting round to doing this.

There is a shock when we lose someone suddenly. There is the disbelief, the whole agony of how could this happen? It is different when we lose them slowly, when we know there is an ending sooner rather than later. It is different again, when we find out only later that we missed the ending. When a husband has to respond to a flippant email about fairies and flowers and memories, to tell you that the smiles you hoped she still had no longer light up the rooms you sat in together.

I was already missing Sam, cliché as that is, because we’d already agreed that my staying in the Garden Room was no longer possible for logistical and financial reasons…and because I hadn’t spent much time recently in town. I was there yesterday, between a train and a bus, killing time wandering, window shopping, thinking I’d go for a coffee and deciding not to. Remembering other days, I thought about whether I should go knock on the door, see if anyone was home, if she was well enough for five minutes…I did not do so.

Maybe Mal saw me; maybe that prompted the message. Or maybe he had literally, purely coincidentally, just gotten around to it.

He’s one of the few people I’ve never corrected from shortening my name. I don’t like it, but the family have...Read More