16th February 2024

Our first love was nature

Lets not forget our first love.

I have just watched a very moving film on Norway-Songs of the Earth and its inspiring landscape.  It was on Storyville on the BBC Iplayer.  A loving tribute by Margrethe Olin to her parents and their home.  It is a meditation of course; the mountains rear up, the glaciers melt, all the way through the film there is the sound of running water - it is perhaps a homage to Nature.  Her father is 84 years old, still walking the mountainside up to the great spruce his grandfather planted, high up on the slopes of the mountain.  People in this beautiful valley have felt the forces of nature, the mountain breaking up killing whole families but there is true marriage to the land here.  Something we have all forgotten as we move around.  You can find it on the BBC of course and it is a long hour.  But you come out of watching feeling refreshed and being happy that there is a corner of the world that is peaceful.

What else my anti-surge socket is on the way, only ordered it this morning, but I suspect Amazon got the whips out.  I was just saying last night to the window cleaner as he collected his money, that I feel so sorry for the drivers rushing around delivering stuff like slave labour, sometimes wrongly. As an aside you should hear the people of Tod get really upset if their parcel doesn't turn up.  Photos of doorsteps show up and boy are some doorsteps scruffy! But I am just as bad ordering stuff as well.

Also caught our post lady trying to push a flimsy parcel through the letterbox this morning.  She is new and I told her just to pop the parcel inside the door.  It was my patchwork stuff, dark colourful materials, Kaffe Fassett and Brandon Mably materials that need a bit of planning.  I shall make some lengths of things to put on the settee because Mollie occasionally has a throwing up fit.

Then lastly I am beginning to see more of Mary Oliver's poems going through, the following has a little twist at the end about Keats which took my fancy.

I know, you never intended to be in this world.

But you’re in it all the same.

So why not get started immediately.

I mean, belonging to it.

There is so much to admire, to weep over.

And to write music or poems about.

Bless the feet that take you to and fro.

Bless the eyes and the listening ears.

Bless the tongue, the marvel of taste.

Bless touching.

You could live a hundred years, it’s happened.

Or not.

I am speaking from the fortunate platform

of many years,

none of which, I think, I ever wasted.

Do you need a prod?

Do you need a little darkness to get you going?

Let me be as urgent as a knife, then,

and remind you of Keats,

so single of purpose and thinking, for a while,

he had a lifetime. ~Mary Oliver