February Filldyke
Taking a lesson from the season
The month is certainly living up to its name. The ditches are full to the brim and the sound of running water is the soundtrack to my walk this afternoon. The ground is heavy underfoot and slippy so I am glad of my trusty hazel stick. Yet amid the mud and water there are signs of Spring. A robin is singing in a hawthorn bush and doesn’t stop when I pass close by. And as I leave the footpath and start along the side of the field back towards my house, a sky lark breaks from the ground and as it rises the song, which always lifts my heart, falls around me. I have to stop and watch the bird, wings beating upward through the air as it sings. This is one of the many signs of hope the land gives me, the ground nesting bird surviving another year and filling the grey February sky with liquid song.
I love walks on days like this, when the fields are still brown or just beginning to show the soft green fuzz of the new wheat. The horizons are wider and the skies an ever-changing picture. I stop and slowly rotate on the spot. Not a building or a person breaks the bowl of the horizon. There is a black bank of cloud over High Burnham, elsewhere strips of blue showing through the cloud. Never the same sky twice. As I am never the same person twice, walking these fields. Today I have a mixture of hope and excitement and fear as I finally begin to see a way to find more time for creativity, for telling the stories of this land. A small, delicate hope, like the first song of the lark and the first green tips of the wheat. But hope, nonetheless.
There is always a balance to be struck – between caution and risk, trust and doubt, longing and fear. For so long I have erred on the side of caution and fear, afraid to take the step into the unknown and to give full rein to my creative practice. My 55th birthday two days ago is another reminder that time is short, there are a limited number of days and I get to choose how to spend them.
My head and my heart are full of stories and telling them, letting them out onto the page gives me the greatest joy and sense of completeness. But still I spend so many days doing a job I have never loved and feeling my creativity being locked away, unable to breathe. I know I need to give myself the gift of time to walk and think and create and really to see what comes of it. Maybe it will be nothing. Maybe it will be something.
The lark is still singing, over the fields and the daffodils are coming out in the orchard. They take a risk every Spring, just to exist in this world. Maybe it time I took a risk too.