An afternoon stroll…

It’s there all around us. It’s just that sometimes it’s too easy to forget or to simply stop looking - the worries and squabbles of the stupid day-to-day taking away the sight, lost in the cause and effect patterns we wrap ourselves in - hiding the important and making consequences from the inconsequential.

I guess that some might look for the bigger picture in religion, others in love. I glimpse it sometimes in the ordered randomness of the natural world.

We went for a walk on Saturday afternoon. Not a long one, only a few miles. Along our lane, across the crossroads at the top, up the hill to the sky, then back again. I’ll be telling you all about it over the next few posts, starting with the Monet painting I happened upon at Pooh-Stick bridge. That's it above, he hasn't signed it but I can see his hand in the composition.

Five minutes stroll from the cottage, along the bursting hedge bank lined dapple of the single track road, through the shade, then down the dip to the stream, is Pooh-Stick Bridge.

Pooh-Stick Bridge. The old stone bridge where we used to race sticks when Holly was a girl. We’d drop the sticks one side of the bridge, then race across to the other to see whose stick would come out first, watching them race as they tumbled their way along and through the water. We’d have to do it again and again till one of us got bored. These days when we cross the bridge in the car, Holly and Gaynor still say ‘Pooh Stick Bridge’ for luck. I gave up a few years ago when I realised that nothing was going to change the way my luck was running.

The bridge must have been there for hundreds of years, the stream hundreds, maybe thousands more. I stood looking down into the shallow water, watching the play of the sunshine on the water’s surface, the gentle framing of this lush June’s growth of green, the rich mud of the stream bed and the bubbles bubbling their way to the sea a mile or so to the west. It was beautiful. Nature’s painting as clear as any Monet, as intricate as a Breugel, as puzzling as a Dali.

I watched the ever changing canvas, looking then looking and seeing more, until I became a part of the picture, at one with whatever it was and is. All thoughts of squabble and problems and worries gone - lost in the water and the sunshine for a few minutes.

Peace.

‘If only it could always be like this.’ I found myself wishing.

We tried to play Pooh-Sticks, Gaynor and me, but the water was too shallow and the current too weak, so we carried on with our walk, climbing the rise towards the crossroads and on towards the sky.