It’s raining again. Pretty much everyday. The pasture is waterlogged, in places puddling. The hut wheels sit in water filled ruts. Always the sound of rain on the metal roof, then the drip-drip off the roof onto the tarp sheltering firewood and the plastic water container beside the hut.
Mostly the sky is grey. Sometimes grey blanket clouds. Sometimes low grey fog blanking out everything beyond the pasture. Sometimes hurrying big clouds, dark and light mottled. But pretty much always grey.
Just twice it has felt like spring has come. An evening a couple of days ago, after a day of grey. Blue skies, racing white cumulus and birdsong the strongest I’ve heard since I arrived three weeks ago. And yesterday again, once the morning fog lifted, a glorious day of blue, and white, and green. And again the birds. Great tits joined by blackbirds, robins and a warbler in the hazels over the fence.
I check daily in anticipation of some snow, a blanket of white, the beautiful crispness of frozen air. But no, just rain.
But this evening I realised that this is it. The sitting waiting, listening, watching is to learn, but to learn with the body and the emotions, not the rapid mind that longs for action and completion and a tidy story.
This is February, on this farm, by this river, next to this wood. To settle into it, to adjust myself to its steady mood and its minor undulations, is to dwell with it, in it. Yes spring time, and snow time, and storm time are it too. But this continual water, this continual grey, the quietness, the uneventfulness, are the very things to settle into and find a rhythm in.
They are the living land here, now, in this.
