Birdsong

The days were growing longer. The excitement of Christmas and New Year was starting to fade. Outside the light seemed different, there was still the chill of winter but it was no longer dark mornings hurrying quickly towards darker nights, the tunnel had a light. The boy did not notice such things, did not comment, did not feel. It was just the way it was, just the way it had ever been. He walked down to the village shop with his mother on a Saturday morning where he found it hard to curb his excitement. The essentials would be bought and amongst them was his weekly comic, ‘The Robin’ and there on the front of every copy was the logo of the Robin Redbreast. As he grew older there would be ‘Dan Dare’ in the ‘Eagle’, ‘Desperate Dan’ with his lantern jaw in the “Beano”, eventually ‘The Tough of the Track’ in the ‘Victor’. Then at Christmas time there would be the beautiful, hard backed annuals with all his favourites but more and longer stories, the most longed for Christmas present. That was what mattered to him not a bird on a branch, nor a snowdrop on a bank.

The wind whistled through the fir plantation at the back of the house. Lower down the bare branches of the rowan, the oak and the horse chestnut had the beginnings of new growth. And the winter wind was fighting its losing battle, bitterly unhappy with the buds on the branches, wrestling with the greens which would become primroses, crocus and daffodils as the warmth crept across the land. But the boy only noticed the longer daylight, the anticipation of getting down to the sparse woodland, the heather braes by the river. There were his pals and his hours of freedom. Sometimes playing war games in the woods, sometimes lolling on the bank and looking into the river in hopes of seeing a salmon, his time outside to play was gradually becoming longer. Soon would appear the bluebells, the lavender, the foxgloves, the berries on the rowan tree. And there was the joy of the songbirds as they welcomed the new air, the warmer days, the building of nests, the possibilities of young, the cycle of life, a renewal. And yet, and yet, these things were subliminal, they were unnoticed, they were the dawn and the gloaming, every day’s birth and death. All taken for granted.

A decade passed and the manor house which was the quarters of the boarding house where he lived with 79 other boys entailed a morning walk along a long driveway, yet again wooded, yet again budding, yet again nesting. And still he did not notice.

As an adult, the student life, the working life, the stresses and strains of making a living, the busyness of parenthood, the ‘world being too much with him late and soon’, little opportunity to step back and come up for air, all removed him to a place where that which was and is most important was but a side show.

Then a revelation. On a retreat and a path and alone he found himself in a wood and doing his best not to trample over a sea of flowering bluebells. He was moving briskly through the area trying to get somewhere else, hurrying to reach a destination. Suddenly he was through the copse, past the flowers and just as suddenly he was stopped in his tracks. Something was playing on his mind. He turned and went back to the flower clad bank, the whispering silver birches. He found a sunlit upland, lifted off his pack and lay on his back staring up at the blue, watching the branches gently brush the breeze aside, seeing and hearing as if for the first time. Against all his instincts he forced himself to stay where he was, he set aside his joy of movement and was still, was quiet, was at peace. It was as if he was alone in the world. It was as if, for the first time, he was a part of a natural world which had been so distant a background and was now, suddenly, a palpable presence. He heard the buzz of bees, the twitter of birds, the tinkling of the stream, the creak of the trees. It was the first time in his life that he felt he was not encroaching on a private world, not imposing on an alien scene. He was accepting that this was his world and, he now realised, that it was accepting of him. It had always been thus. Now he could move away but he knew that there had been a sea change, and that at last he had come to know what was important and where it was to be found. Now, when times became busy and hard, he would take time and step aside from the business of febrile living and seek out the real world of nature, the cycle of life and ignore for a while that world which humankind had created.  Strangely that moment transported him back to his boyhood and to the world that surrounded him then. It was something that was always there, an horizon of sorts but reachable, touchable, subliminal, suborned by the self-centredness of youth, cast aside in the excitement and curiosity of every new day. The dots were now being joined, the circle was becoming full and middle age was enabling him to see what he had always seen but seemed to be understanding for the first time.

“At the still point of the turning world, neither flesh nor fleshless; neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is.”    T.S. Eliot

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