Monday the 7th December

Jo's pony in the far field, wandering out into the sunshine yesterday

Well the weather has done its worst in Cumbria and scotland, flooding towns and one's heart aches for all those people that have had their homes ruined.  The rivers ran furiously overtopping the new defences, and there is disbelief that such flooding could have happened again from the last time a few years ago. Perhaps all that rain should have been snow, perhaps we will wake up to the fact that climate change is indeed happening in the world but it will not help these people at this moment in time.  Even now as I write someone has broken down on the radio, such a bitter blow before Xmas.

We have escaped those terrible rain storms, only the wind battering like an angry sea against the house and roaring through the trees for two days, so that when I stood beneath them I feared their downfall.

The birds have been absent, yesterday one of our resident graveyard pheasants sat on the wall, looking tired and needing respite from the pounding of the weather.

I notice the following poem is making it's round on Facebook, I think peace is far away from us at the moment but Wendell Berry is always a comfort and I shall find his books later on.

The Peace of Wild Things

 by Wendell Berry

When despair for the world grows in me

and I wake in the night at the least sound

in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,

I go and lie down where the wood drake

rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.

I come into the peace of wild things

who do not tax their lives with forethought

of grief. I come into the presence of still water.

And I feel above me the day-blind stars

waiting with their light. For a time

I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

And exciting times; Mike Pitts Digging Deeper

Not forgetting; Stonehenge may have been first erected in Wales, 'amazing' finds suggest