Upper North Tyne Valley,
Northumberland.
(Written May 21st 2022)
I didn’t notice the grasses growing so tall. Recent rain, and long days of grey skies and coolness have drawn them upwards, clambering towards midsummer. I look out across the field daily, but somehow still, its life creeps up on me, if I don’t stop to look and see what is happening before my eyes.
I saw new willow saplings springing up in the ditch, the presence of bees on clover, and the growing chorus of buttercup and pignut, dotting the field with colour. But the grasses, the very backbone of the field, all its structure and fullness of becoming, remained blurred from my attention until one morning, I suddenly saw the fox tails stirring in the barometer of the breeze. They had come, a waving sea of feathery heads, rising up on high wires beyond the window, a congregation gathered and praising the air, moving back and forth between them.
I’m not sure why I hadn’t seen what the rain was bringing on, the gradual ascent of growth that comes with these long hours of light. Perhaps simply inattention, not taking enough time to pause and savour the life of the field, and appreciate its changing trajectory. I had fallen behind the arc of lushness and delicacy that slowly billows out and upwards in understated, yet unthwarted abundance. And now there was this mass of stems, a whole stirring body of movement, tilting and bowing, brushing the morning stillness, shining green, and nodding. All that had been raised up from the ashes of winter to live again and receive the pouring light of midsummer.
