Tag: Big Green

Guarding falls into place

Guarding falls into place

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Since 2019, with a few short reprieves, my varied health issues kept me from my usual adventurous explorations.

NHS interventions have freed me from my armchair since the start of 2025 after months of recovery. I am so grateful for the treatment and care the NHS continue to provide.

I was “laid up”, though not laid low. Safety in the cocoon of home leads to “guarding”. I guard against making sudden movements that might cause pain, up to the point that I get to guard against moving out of the house.

I guard against thoughts of breaking free to go cycling and see the sea. I guard against the urge to roam at will, smell fresh air, discover new places, meet myself in the faces of new acquaintances.

Gradual steady improvements prompt me to book a July Green Immersion far to the south west. The call of the green wild represents freedom for me. Solitary walks in swishing green grasses, under trees where I look upwards, glimpses of far horizons, the flitting of insects, birds and the calls of birds.

My red heart continues to call out for the heart of the Big Green, till one morning I get up, go out with my good old walking staff and find myself ready to climb the big hill of our local nature reserve called Hengistbury Head.

I’m walking so very slowly. I stop every few paces to look and to take photos. there’s so much happening, so much to see and photograph. I’m surprised to be free of discomfort, and I’m listening to the song of my heart.

In the summer heat, I am stopping to drink from my water bottle. My slow pace, frequent stops and the rhythm of my breath combine. And so, I am receiving newness from all the growing things.

What is growing has its roots in centuries’ old rock and earth. My old thoughts are clothed in new emotions. Emotions are those old familiar half-forgotten streams of consciousness reinvigorated by this slow solitary progress along the sandy stony tracks in this delightful greenscape.

I rediscover the most extraordinary ponds high up on the north flank of this hill. The dragonflies time of mating is come. They whirr over the green leaf pads of water lilies in full flower. Lilies cream, carmine and white lilies. This is not at all a scene which is intended for me, who came walking this way in the heat of summer. Rather, it is the same scene of fertility and lush abundance that has been repeated over hundreds and hundreds of thousands of similar cycles, and I, a joyful Pixel of Humanity, am grateful to arrive fully present and able to drink in this elixir.

I make my way down to catch the hourly bus, and I decide to cancel my long-awaited and longed for holiday. Why undertake the travails of travel, when all the Green I could ever wish for is here on my doorstep!

I will soon return to this land next to the sea with its age-old landscapes. It offers me at age 79 so many opportunities for renewal, refreshment, and even rejuvenation.

In the name of the Big Green,

Love is present EveryNow

Joys of instant recall

Banded Demoiselle by the River Avon at Christchurch

A bejewelled Banded Demoiselle, aka Damselfly, pauses by the Avon riverside. This flash assisted shot is an ambition at long last realised 📸

I am proud to have taken this close-up of the Mayfly. Most of the photos I take out in the open, in the Big Green, I carry home together with a small cloud of instant recall. This is one of the main reasons I go “pic-nicking” in the first place.

For most photos, I can recapture my location, the sensations of weather, lighting and skies, my position facing the subject and the flavour and soundscape of my immediate surroundings.

More than these, I can often clearly recall, very many years later, my emotions and thoughts at the time of pressing the shutter. If I see and hear the “crackle of place” in my photo, and sometimes even enjoy the scent of the place, these are not gifts to be taken for granted.

The word Camera originally means Room. It’s a Time Machine for my wanderings. As “Doctor Who” says about the Tardis, “It’s bigger on the inside than in the outside”.

When I am at worship of the natural world, I am part of an ever deepening mystical experience, and I love to share far and wide. No picture of mine belongs to me after I share it. Anyone can share it for themselves.

The act of taking a photo of beauty brings me into Love’s Presence EveryNow

🟢A clamour of green intimacy🟢

Photo by J. Phillip Panton 2016

🟢A clamour of green intimacy🟢

Here and there grows a noisiness, a rowdiness, a clamour of intimacy when rambling along such country footpaths.

So much is going on, it’s like I’m straying onto a major sports arena in full cry, or a merry musical gathering of the clans.

Along the verdant corridors of spring and summer, smells, sounds, sunlight and shadow build the atmosphere into a fairground, like a local village fair.

I slow down, I stroll through. I am an animal, welcome to enter their vegetable world.

I animal, and they vegetable, we are engaged in crunching numbers, each in our way arriving at new results by recombinant synergies.

The insects I know are here, I cannot quite see. They are sweetly intent on survival.

Two paces in front of me, something in the way giant me disturbs the air around their tiny selves compels them into instant propulsion.

Zero-to-Cheerio in less than the blink of my eye. Gone. Undiscoverable except to their own kind!

When the busy enclosed path opens out at last, the sounds of silence simply reappear, I and my awareness are thrown back to bump up against each other again, a Great Bell Chant leading me from my heart.

My feet take up the beat and the starship of my body is alone again in the vast unknown mysterious reaches of the Big Green

~ Love’s presence EveryNow

Bliss, my red Heart!

The germ of the idea of the magic bathing to be found outside in the Big Green came to me in 1978.

Bliss-in-the-Green

I had just begun going into the Surrey Hills for planned solo rambles, rucksack, map, water bottle, camera and all.

After about half an hour, I’d stop grumbling about the effort, and I noticed a falling away of mind chatter.

Then my senses of sight and sound received a perfectly bionic boost.

Walking on in this state, the blindingly ordinary reveals itself stark naked, and the silences of the Big Green all a-growing explain to me at unambiguous extreme high volume not that they have nothing whatsoever to tell me that I didn’t know, but that before I let my red-red heart off its leash to roam free, I didn’t remember I had forgot what I had always known forever. 

Bliss, my red Heart!

Bliss-in-the-Green!

~ Love is present E v e r yN o w 

The charms on the chains of life

🍃The charms on the chains of life🕸️

I’m deeply attracted to those remaining places where insect life reigns.

These noisy, twigling, wriggly, knee-high places remind me of me in the early 1950s.

Where grassy meadows do richly teem with countless varieties of colourful insects, winged and not winged.

Long-legged. Short legged. Antennae that wave so thoughtfully.

Huge wings spread out of small wing cases with dizzy quickness.

Compound eyes saturated with alien intelligence.

Knobbly impossibly miniaturised knees. Prehistoric fang-spikes set on dry thighs. Body hair for defence, not warmth.

Respect for the tiny weapons that can hurt small children so much.

I’m a little boy again. I am fascinated to discover and observe brightly coloured, fleshy caterpillars, and moths with rich decorative symmetrical patternings, like colour illustrations from the pages of my Jules Vernes science fantasy book.

Camouflaged crickets with military markings. Crackly green grasshoppers crawling and jumping out away from me, everywhere I walk.

I see these populations using their brains to absorb what their senses say to them. The blood red ones cluster on white cowparsley flowers to feast on tiny nectar pots. Some pause, and are distracted to mount one another.

The stench of cowpats, not repellant to me, sometimes attracts horseflies. I soon learn they can deliver a sting far more powerful than stinging nettles.

Pollen smokes off the grass panickles. The loud cawing of rooks around the crown of the giant elm tree. Is it hunger? Fright? I am curious about their recognition of stimuli whose inflows are invisible and unknowable to giant little me.

In response to their needs, insect innards compel them like lightning into unprovoked instant propulsion.

Zero-to-Cheerio in less than the blink of my eye. Gone. Undiscoverable except to their own kind!

See them all today. They are in perpetual motionlessness.

See them exposed in thin rows and rectangular ranks. They are pinned to white boards under sheets of glass in the reference shelves of natural history museums.

How long ago was this great gleaning? Not long after me, a little boy, utterly lost to wonder, had gone away to be schooled.

Not a long time later, almost all would be disappearing. Insufficient numbers for a quorum, let alone for a tapestry carpet of rowdy noise.

Imperial Chemical Industries and others began to send swarms of besuited salesmen out into the countryside.

They rode their cars through puddled single track lanes to offer the farmers guaranteed yield increases and government approved blandishments impossible to ignore.

I do so love insects, specially insects in huge gatherings in long grasses together.

Their noisy and visible presence are blessings on us humans.

They signal to us by their sounds, by their intermittent reveals from out of hiding, and by their flashes of semaphore sightings that theirs is the dance of fecundity in the Big Green – the precious green space we all of us share and completely depend on – the natural ecology

~ Love is present EveryNow