We don’t often get snow here on the coastal fringes of the Southwest, we get sleety rain and lots of it. The footpaths have turned into rivers of mud and the ditches are full of water. And yet in this rain-sodden landscape there is a magical complementarity with the lush verdance of May, when the bluebells and ransoms star the woods with their ethereal flowers and the beech leaves vibrate with a green no painter can replicate. Without this wet, we would not have this degree of blossom and fecundity in Spring that so stirs our souls. We cannot have one without the other, so perhaps it is time for us to revel in the rain, knowing it will bring a spectacle of flowers in its wake. It reminds me of a stanza from the discerning poem, Inversnaid, by Gerard Manley Hopkins:
What would the world be, once bereft
Of wet and of wildness? Let them be left,
O let them be left, Wildness and wet;
Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet.
And on my morning walk in the rain, I couldn’t help but notice another of Nature’s complementarities: how the rain has polished the ivy leaves to a shining deep green heart-shaped magnificence, setting the white bells of the snowdrops off to a tee, especially with clumps of ferns in the background. It would be hard even for the most expert gardener to replicate such exquisite placement of leaf and flower. Everything was growing in exactly the right place to create such splendour, and it got me thinking – perhaps that’s the same with us humans? As we too are part of Nature, maybe we are all in the exact place we are meant to be, in order to learn and grow and thrive? I think we are, if only we have eyes to see it.
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