Oh, How Little I Know

There is a bird.

Far off, in the distance. Way beyond the blackberries promised to sweet, sharp crumbles.

It is not a kite. Nor a buzzard. And it doesn’t quite match the right shape for a raven. No black cross. No diamond-wedged tail.

I squint my already tired eyes at it, watch as it rises and lifts above the allotments, past the neatly drawn rows of houses. The flat light rendering it featureless. A conundrum creature; obscured by mist and distance. And there is no wrapping my head around its strange spluttering flight, like a cold old car engine that can’t quite start. I let it go. Leave it to the horizon, to disperse into an afterthought. An ever-nagging, yet never-answered question.

Hidden in the wayward wild beyond the fence, a robin summons rain with its song; unseen alchemy cast well within the thicket. A familiar, sweet sound, its notes as well-known as a worn-in pair of shoes, or a well-thumbed book. It is tempting to linger on it, in a comforting place, but that unidentified figure of a bird, now well out of sight beyond the horizon, pulls me to sit with the unknowing instead. As the mist sinks into the vale, masking roads and hedgerows, footpaths and villages, the scratchy woollen-jumper feeling of uncertainty wraps around me.

Jackdaws jink along roofs of houses containing whole families of lives that will live out unknown to all but their own web. I may, by chance, meet the friend of a friend of a cousin, of a neighbour of someone who once brushed shoulders with me in a crowded supermarket isle. But the intricacy of our lives will go unnoticed by the next. Same for the people passing in the steady stream of cars that make up the bee-drone of traffic lingering beneath the robin song. And, that’s just in this hilltop town. Zooming out and up in my minds eye, soaring above it all with a buzzard’s eye view, thermal riding, my mind spins with the enormity of it all.

The odd drop of rain centres me for a second. My toes, open to the elements in sandals because I didn’t know what shoes to wear on this not-quite-autumnal September day, wriggle like expectant earthworms. I’m momentarily grounded by the promise of precipitation, but the relief doesn’t last long.

This time it is the breeze that sends me whirring. It catches in the thin silver hoops that hug my ear lobes giving voice to this unseen being. In hollow moans and soft whispers, it spills its secrets to me. Secrets I am unable to decipher. A knowing, not for human consumption. The crow that crowns the rising ash knows them though, with wild ears she hears of lifts and shifts, rises and falls. She cocks her head, ruffles her feathers, tentatively tests the air with a wing. Not yet, it tells her, rest a while longer.

Below us all, past the houses and the traffic, there will be more secrets. Desire lines carved by badgers, run through by deer and foxes, all driven by an animal desire we can never truly understand. Lives lived based on scent, slight sound, and the stirring of muscles controlled as if by sixth senses. How does the owl map the woods? What does the snail feel as its scrapes across gravel? Can the kestrel feel each breath of breeze bend its feathers as it masters the wind?

There are whole worlds happening around us, whole lives lived without our knowing.

I’m certain there was a time when I would be frustrated by that idea. That I would have strained after that black shape of a bird for as long as possible. It would have played on my mind as I trawled through bird guides and online forums for some kind of answer. And I do want to know. I want to know all these things, all the names, all the lives of these creatures. I want to know them better, their struggles, their hardships, as well as the solutions they need. I aim to strive for as much knowledge as possible.

But, stood here in my sandals staring at a mist that won’t lift, I settle into the idea that not all things are for us. There is a certain kind of magic in not knowing. As crow lifts from her perch and aims for the space beyond the horizon, something shifts in me. A reassurance, perhaps. A definite feeling: oh, how little I know, and how much I love it.

The May King

I think it was the rain that kept us concealed from each other for so long. Thick drops that bounced off leaf and bark and stone. They fell so heavily, in a wall of early-summer sound, that it must have covered the crunch of my boots on the track and stole the swish of my once-waterproof jacket. No, I don’t think you heard me coming. If you had I am certain you would have slipped off into the woods long before you did. And if I had seen you sooner, I’m certain I would have stopped; held in awe at your form as you emerged like a Will-o’-the-Wisp from the cow parsley and campion flanking the old road’s edges. But, as it happened, on that day drenched in rain and low-lying clouds, I didn’t stumble upon you until the very last moment. When we both drew in a breath, locked gazes, and you, adorned in your summer crown, stared back at the human unearthing you from the hedgerow.

I have seen plenty of roe bucks before, especially along this stretch of the drove, where they skirt the field edges ready to disappear into the treeline like they were never there; or heads poking out from crop cover, eyes wide and antlers gnarled as though carved from oak. But I have not been this close. Close enough to see the individual clumps of old winter coat falling doggedly as a new one, the colour of fresh rust, emerges. Close enough to see the rise and fall of a chest, and the tinge of lithe muscle in the back legs. Close enough to witness the breath before a body springs into action; the hair-trigger pull of a split-second decision played out less than an arm’s length in front me.

A young buck, not quite yet three points on your crown, but a true May King none the less dissolving back into a wild realm where I could not follow.

You left me there up on the old drove road, the rain a little lighter, but its drumming just as steady. I had spooked you from an afternoon’s rest, couched up amongst the cow parsley. The tangled cleavers and red-dead nettle now bent by your body; the only sign you’d ever been here at all. I suppose I could pick that apart, peel back the fronds of soon to be faded greenery in search of meaning. I could harp on about the fleetingness of things: how the hawthorn blossom will pass and leave the sweet sickly scent of decay, or the sun will soon replace the rain and leave dry brittle heat in its wake, and the green will turn to gold. I could dwell on how we should live solely in the moment because all too soon it will be gone. But I won’t. There’s no need. We all know that already. Even the May King knows he can’t outrun the turning of the wheel.

I placed my hand where you had been and felt the warmth press against my palm. A faint animal scent, mixing in with the unseasonably chilled air and the flourishing greenery. I wanted to sit in it, to curl up and take your place, just for a minute soaking in a deer’s eye view of the landscape. But I didn’t. A walker was approaching with a waddling Labrador following closely to heel and I wasn’t really in the mood to answer any awkward questions about why I was led out covered in cleavers. And, selfishly, in that moment I didn’t really want to share my experience: to tell this unknown person that I had held court, for just a few seconds, with the May King. Instead I carried on walking, offering a brief nod to the man and his dog. All the way onwards one eye on the track, the other watching the woods for another fleeting glimpse of you.