Doing Well

Sitting in the comfortable chair in my study, feet up on the footstool, book open on my lap. I am calm and quiet, reflecting on life as is and life as was. With the single exception of missing Beloved, then as now, I am content. There is no help for it, as Carson McCullers put it so movingly:

“the way I need you is a loneliness I can’t bear and there is nobody who can fill that loneliness except for the one who is no longer here”,

but bear it I must. Being alive brings the obligation to embrace unpleasant things as well as the pleasant ones. Even the most determined 'look on the bright side’, and all the insistence on 'positive thinking’ doesn't provide us with a constant diet of flowers, sunsets and cute kittens. Accepting that ‘life is hard and then you die’ is a clarion call to living life, warts and all.

So, I am content. The patter of soft rain on the window tells me that doing outdoor work is not advisable for now, whereas a spot of meditation is. Yesterday, I spent many hours outside gardening, doing hard and dirty work, like mulching, potting up, cutting ivy, carrying heavy loads until I could barely drag myself to the bench in my ‘woodland garden’ (a small patch of beeches and hollies and yews. I sat there, not moving, doing nothing much at all except taking in the sounds of nature, birdsong, the murmur of unseen small creatures, the soft rustling of beech leaves in the gentle breeze.

Autumn cyclamen are appearing in all parts of the garden, a welcome sight particularly in areas which are otherwise just green, like the view from the compost heap towards the leaf mould enclosure. Everybody who comes to help in the garden admires my compost. “Did you make this all yourself ?” , asked WW (Wiry and Willing - who is fast becoming a worthy successor to "Old Gardener”);  he sunk his hands deep into the heap, rubbed the compost between them and smelled it. “It doesn’t stink at all”, he said. “Lovely”. If I am remembered for nothing else but my compost when my end comes I am satisfied. Others leave great deeds behind, works of art, pearls of wisdom, empires and the destruction of empires. Leaf mould and compost are like me: practical and useful and given to long periods of rest and just being.

For me gardening is therapy, it fulfils my need for outdoor creativity, the result is pleasant to the eye and beneficial for health and wellbeing. I am currently reading a book by Sue Stuart-Smith “The Well Gardened Mind” sub-titled 'Rediscovering Nature in the Modern World’;  she says:

“Like a suspension in time, the protected space of a garden allows our inner world and the outer world to co exist free from the pressures of everyday life........
there can be no garden without a gardener. a garden is always the expression of someone’s mind and the outcome of someone’s care.”

For now the world within my hedges and walls is my castaway haven and this morning, looking out of the kitchen window while putting on the kettle for my morning brew I saw movement round the foot of the bird table. My blackbird fledglings are back, dad had brought two of them and they were all three picking busily at the ground. I call them ‘my’ fledglings although they may be another family entirely, but it feels good to believe that I have done my modest little best to help them survive during their most vulnerable time. I sincerely hope mum and dad call an end to breeding now, this must have been their second clutch for this year’s summer; in a good long summer garden birds with a ready supply of food and clement weather can have three sets of young.

The rain has stopped, should I cook my dinner or go outside ? Yesterday evening I was so tired I couldn’t bear the thought of cooking,  so all I had was a bowl of rice crispies. Perhaps I had better prepare a meal before I go out.