Two kinds of crying : 15th February 2024

Leaving the road for the slick, clay-swallowed gravel of the footpath, newly scalped of its sodden, rot smelling dark brown felt of last year's fallen leaves, is to let go of firm footing and unnatural striving for expectation. Immediately,  the air feels cleaner. Wild garlic shoots prickle the path's banks with fresh green. In immersion of birdsong I attempt the short steep slope up onto the grassy path; sleek surface eroded by previous ascents, mine and others, a few delicate-seeming, yet strong-clinging roots from an ivy-twined, moss-mottled young birch tree are the only stay to sliding back down. I try not to need to grab onto an ash sapling, but just to curl my fingers round its supple, olive green stem is enough to bring back balance and I make it past the risk of claggy ignominy. 

I like to walk every day, if I can, take photos of the beautiful things I see in the woods - there is a freedom there, from my mistakes, from the mistakes of the world. I thought it would be too dark for photos, today, when the rain stopped, so left my camera behind, but now wish I had brought it.

A billion trillion raindrops cling, shimmering to dark grey tracery of beech twigs, each tipped in a fine fawn point, holding the plans for a furl of zingy  green to emerge in April and set the woods afizz.

As if the faint late afternoon light was squeezed between the soft grey lid of low cloud and cold earth, space is luminous here, concentrated into an essence of clear purity.

The only warm colour is  young beech trees glowing bronze as trumpet fanfares, leaves defiantly holding on long after older trees have been blown bare by winds from far away. But vibrant greens are all around - glittering moss fronds curl softly yet acid bright, and others like miniature forests  hummock and climb, in constant urge of their own thriving to surge over all evidence of storm and decay while some swathe rocks and trunks and tapering branches in a breathing deep-pile hug.

Everything is breathing. Rain refreshed, lichen's blue green hues burst out from encrustations on beech and oak trees. Liverworts fuzz rounded boulders in the laughing streams.

Again and again my gaze is drawn  to gatherings of radiant drips' trembling scintillation, a   symmetry too complex for our minds to hold, slight, delicious coolness making mockery of grand chandeliers' stilted glittering in dead aired rooms where the powerful meet.

Dusk is thickening as I near the footpath's straight line back. Sometimes here, I see a young deer by the flounces of a large rhododendron, and look around, catch a gash of white in the leaf litter, a strange shape. 

It is half a small skeleton, one hoof left intact, perfect as a beech twig's bud. Spring will not unfurl for her. Bones picked clean by ravens, buzzard, foxes... She died in the place that made her, and they go into this new year stronger. This is a bleak time for deer,, roots and tough fern leaves all that's left till the new grass grows.

On the footpath, a spaniel frolicks with their walker

In air lustrous with robin and blackbird song I follow them. Trying to forget what I have seen, an old black and white photo on facebook last night comes to my mind, titled Pulse of Palestine, people going about their business, long ago.

Get home, turn on the radio while making tea, and news is of the raid on Nasser Hospital in Gaza. People shot at on the "safe route out", bulldozers and tanks