Happy Easter to you all. A new beginning, the chance to change direction, to question old thinks, spouted from mouths a generation or two old, and definitely dead because times change, and situations alter facts and circumstances. Thing is to notice all this, and to adapt as best we can, no, better. Let’s be honest here. Nobody has an easy stroll through life, even if we imagine there are those who do. They don’t. It just looks like it.

It isn’t easy to make a change, not one that appears huge and as far away as another planet. However, it is possible to stop, notice, think, assess and then initiate a first brave step. I don’t like this place, person, dynamic, circumstance, let’s say. I can already hear the fall down all those steps of expectation. Clunk, ouch, clunk, big ouch, and so on. Ok, there might be a clunk or two, or three, maybe four, but if we refuse to accept whatever control is controlling, we will find strength. I promise that. It hurts for a while, but once the light comes in, it really comes in.

In the wild, nature has a dynamic shift and shrift. I see it every day I walk in the woods, along the basalt and granite coastline, I see the way those who have landed in a place which no longer suits them change things. Wild flowers that lined the track, which, in the interests of wide-vehicled vehicles, were dug out and discarded, now appear further back on the bank, or, even between the stones of a drystone wall. I actually laugh out loud on seeing them, my smile wide as a banana, and I crouch down to welcome them, their tenacity, their sneaky over-winter move beneath the cold ground. They refuse to be less than they were, than they are. You will not take us out, they say. It thinks me, a lot, as I walk on.

This afternoon after a lovely uplifting church service with people and singing and words, I decide to chop some wood. It isn’t all that dry, to be honest, and needs chopping into notquitesplinters. I’m game. I check the stack, notice the twists, the tricky bits, the very wet collars around the fallen trees, because these measured logs formed big trees once, hosting bird nests, sheltering humans in rainfall, protecting mosses and wildflowers from sunburn. Respect. I select a log, fix it on my block, so old, so scarred, such a friend. Anyway, moving on. I position, raise my axe, whack it down. Ah, I know that sound. This is not going anywhere, but my whack, even now, is dynamic, ferocious, driven, and, unfortunately stuck. My efforts to separate axe from wood is a right battle. I had to employ a metal wedge and a mell.

This is not the point, although I did free all of us from this tricksy mix. What I noticed after was the twist and lean, the reach and the change of direction in this tree. You had no light. You noticed that. You decided to change direction. You wound your way up, so slow, so long waiting, so hopeful for change, so trusting in it.

You marvel me.