Nature as antidote

Pictorial notes on England, summer 2022

Under the great birch. “Nothing is holier, nothing is more exemplary than a beautiful, strong tree.” Hermann Hesse.

I like to think of the fox currently inhabiting my garden as the great-great-great-great-great-great-cub of the fox I part-reared ten years ago. He’s busy at night and has just dismantled my solar lantern and nipped the peg bag off the washing line.

My London garden always has a robin or two, but in July they disappear to moult. Twice, this one flew in and lay down in a sunny spot nearby. Here’s the scientific hypothesis as to why they sunbathe. You can see he’s keeping a beady eye on me as I take this shot.

The forest folk had finished their feast by the time I passed this cloth of moss. The moss people are a class of fairy who are particularly attached to trees.

This is the door to Christian’s van-home. Now in his seventies, he’s been on the road for thirty years, working at festivals and otherwise living off “what nature provides”. He told me a cool way of cooking potatoes, mushrooms and beans by stacking plates on top of each other.

Barrel-shaped cones on the cedar in the village churchyard where I grew up. (I grew up in the village, not the churchyard.) Like the oak, cedars fruit only every other year.

I’ve heard it said that nature is being particularly abundant this year as a reminder that she *can* provide should some of our clever technologies fail …

… could it be true?

Pre-made coffee in supermarkets - new to me, to after a year and a half away from Britain - is part of The Dote for which we need the anti. Starbucks and Sainsbury’s, what are you doing? We can’t go on like this.

Also new to me is the sight of British dogs wearing snout boxes as protection against canine flu.

L'absence de déjeuner sur le linge

Kudos to anyone who can guess what I’m reading in this field: “I became increasingly aware how the picture of the physical world, tangible to the senses, related to what I saw spiritually.”