Northumberland.
(Written 7th February 2016)
The arrival of a clear, sunny day, after so many days of grey, wind and wet, and I feel as if I’m waking from a long, muddled dream. As if a switch has been turned on, and everything catapulted into a world of possibility. There is bounce in the light, the way it is playing with air, polishing the grasses and lifting the sky to the palest blue. I can hear the bees, slowly foraging the first snowdrops beneath the trees. Such tentative forays of exploration, the shine of their hum breaks through the winter silence with a new language.
Going out to refill a log basket, I notice some terracotta pots at the back of the woodshed have blown over in recent wind. Some have been shattered by frost, others lie more protected in a tide of leaf mould. Turning one over, I find a fistful of purple iris have started to bloom again, taking advantage of their upturned confines to put on renewed growth and begin a hidden flowering. The flowers spill out of the pot wildly and sideways, their deep-veined, velvet robes adding a rash and spontaneous elegance to the morning. It is almost a shock to discover them. They jump out at me, so startling in their intensity and readily formed beauty.
Normally I will watch their pale green spears slowly poke through the gravel in pots that I have carefully lined up by the front door, my gestures of autumn forward planning, anchoring hopefulness to the dark winter months. Trusting the light will return and that colour will erupt in the garden once again. And so that I can enjoy following their emerging journey, however slowly, a daily swelling upwards, to swords hinting of purple promise. But here they have already broken open, in secretive glory.
I clean off the excess soil and put the pot by the front door where it can be enjoyed fully, amongst other pots that are not showing such advanced signs of life. And so I can be sure to receive its presence as I go about my routines, and benefit from its early revolution in the front yard.
Such a small thing, yet it changes everything. Simply because it is here and that it is as it is. An unexpected joy, spilling out with all its perfection and urgent vitality from an upturned pile. Not just contributing to the uplift of the day, the promise that seems so resonant in everything, but heralding all the unseen movements rippling out from here that are sure to be following in its wake.
The least I can do is give it my full attention while I can, placing it upright in the sun, amongst the shelter of other dormant pots. Somewhere protected where its curved pendants streaked with mysterious gold will flap open with ease, a tripod of nectar and pollen held high on robust stems for early bumblebees and pollinators to come and drink from its cup, and with exuberance, as I am doing now, letting the sunlight and night sky of its petals tumble through me so there is nothing but iris, and all that has been tipped out with it flowing into my day, and out beyond through gates of waiting abundance.
